5 posts tagged “teaching reading”

Some ideas after being assigned to read an article by David O'Brien: 

     The traditional meaning of “literate” is situated in print based texts.  Students who struggle with print based text are perceived as “at-risk” or in need of “remediation,” regardless of their competence with other kinds of texts. O’Brien argues that we should “reframe the way students usually positioned as incompetent modify their identities of competence—their abilities to tackle challenging tasks, and to persevere in engaging in future similar tasks.” In other words, if a kid has a lot of confidence in his ability to succeed in Zelda, can that student’s feeling of competence, self-efficacy, help-seeking behavior, (etc., etc.) be transferred from participating in video game text to print based text? O’Brien says yes.  Furthermore, he argues that the literate world is moving in a digital or hybridized direction anyway, so inevitably, we’re going to have to merge our understanding of print and digital literacy.  Why not start now with the Zelda kid?
    Motivation research shows that kids’ views of their own competence relate to the value they place upon tasks in our classrooms.  If they don’t think they can do it, it’s a dumb assignment. O’Brien says this is about attribution—“to what does one attribute personal success or failure?”  In O’Brien’s construct of attribution, there are four possible answers.

• Ability.  Struggling readers attribute failure to lack of ability, which they think won’t change.  However, ability in the context of digital literacy is viewed as competence with authoring software, which is changeable, rehearsable, and within students’ control.
• Effort.  While struggling readers seem to think their effort doesn’t have anything to do with success or failure on standards based tasks (like reaching a new grade level on a reading assessment), they perceive their levels of effort as leading to success or failure in mastery-oriented tasks (like learning new software to create a media project). Believing that trying harder will lead to success increases the likelihood of students engaging in activities and seeking help.
• Task Difficulty.  Tasks are viewed as stable and outside of students’ control.  Students attribute failure this way:  it’s just too hard for me.  If students can construct a “doable” task, they can “view success as attributable to effort”—meaning if the task is their own idea they have the perception that they can do it and will be more motivated to try it.
• Strategies. Since text and ability are perceived as unchangeable, struggling readers are unlikely to know about or use reading strategies. As a task, authoring media texts is perceived as flexible and complex, occurring in stages that lend themselves to strategies—mode switching, hyperlinking, using tools within an application, revising aesthetically and recursively during drafting and composing.

Content area teachers, or even language arts and reading teachers, are often bound by time, inexperience and budget to assign textbook reading to students.  Textbooks, however, can be limited in possibilities for differentiation in readability, student interest, and timeliness.  Primary teachers have long solved this problem by offering students structured choices among what some researchers call "twin texts" or "paired texts" of fiction or nonfiction trade books. (For further information, see this article- 2765688.pdf -from The Reading Teacher 53(4) retrieved from EBSCO).

Secondary teachers are using this strategy as well, but from my vantage point, not as often as our primary peers.  I've seen Sophie's World used as a complementary text in an AP European History course and An Ordinary Man in a world studies course.   I'd love to see Ishmael on a biology syllabus. That a trade book is offered at all in a content course is good news, but contemporary researchers  are telling us that choice in texts is a crucial motivator for secondary readers.  Handing out the same book to each student may be a motivation defeating practice.

How trade books are used may be as important as which books are used. Rebecca Olness has a new book out about using literature in the content areas (its first chapter is available free from the International Reading Association).  Although her target audience includes K-5 teachers, she offers a rationale for using trade books in the content classroom as well as suggestions for how to use them--reasoning and advice that seems applicable to secondary classrooms.

While secondary students may consider themselves too sophisticated for children's picturebooks, Olness encourages us not to count them out.  (I use them for scaffolding all the time.) But at the secondary level, most of us feel comfortable including websites, films (and other video text), art, music, and news articles to complement word based text.  However, I notice that these content supplements are not being treated as twin texts; rather they are illustrations of content.  To stimulate higher order thinking, they ought to be treated as meaninful texts and read using literacy strategies.  Otherwise, as mere illustrations, they may be judged redundant by students.

Our course text offers a variety of book lists for content area teachers.  These resources are important, but so is extending sound literacy practices to the complementary texts already in use.

Lisa Delpit, in her article "Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction:  What Should Teachers Do?", reminds us that language learning is different than reading comprehension.  If an answer comes our way in nonstandard English, but accurately represents literal facts and plausible inferences from a classroom text, is the answer correct or incorrect?  According to Delpit, to call the answer incorrect "will only confuse the child, leading her away from those intuitive understandings about language that will promote reading development, and toward a school career of resistance and a lifetime of avoiding reading."

Instead of contstantly interrupting learning to correct nonstandard English, Delpit advocates encouraging students to take on roles with different voices than their own.  Intuitively, then, it isn't their language that is a problem.  They begin to learn to code switch.  Delpit concludes, "All we can do is provide students with access to additional language forms. Inevitably, each speaker will make his or her own decision about what to say in any context."

The authors of our course text suggest that this can be true generationally as well, or even regionally--any juxtaposition of dialects will do.

   A bidialectical dictionary could be generated to

• enhance role playing activities
• activate prior knowledge
• teach content specific vocabulary
• complement a classroom word wall
• underscore the relationship of language-purpose-audience
• shift the group into critical literacy

Table

WebQuest or Internet Busy Work?

Bernie Dodge from San Diego State University is widely credited with having created the concept of WebQuests in 1995.  In the past decade or so, educators have generated criteria that differentiate an authentic WebQuest from other uses of the Internet. A WebQuest

• focuses on a relevant, interesting, real world task
• is a scaffolded learning experience
• requires higher-order thinking
• makes good use of Internet resources
• inspires confidence in achieving success

Tom March (mentored by Bernie Dodge) claims that such criteria may be too simplistic because they overlook the Webquest's underlying pedagogy of transformative learning. In addressing the question what are webquests really?, March writes that "The main critical attribute of a WebQuest is to facilitate this transformation of information into a newly constructed, assimilated understanding."  webquests_tom_march.pdf

As literacy lessons, well-designed WebQuests offer opptortunities for guided and independent online reading and writing.

Locating or Creating WebQuests 

Various websites offer rubrics for evaluation of WebQuests, resources for creating WebQuests, templates for WebQuests, and sample WebQuests for professional development.

SDSU maintains a searchable database of WebQuests created for a variety of content areas, as does Zunal.com. (Never having designed an authentic webquest before, I would choose to follow zWebQuest's procedures to draft my own WebQuest rather than adapt an existing one.)

Browsing though online samples, most WebQuests seem to include these sections (as links in a sidebar):

I'm not ashamed to admit I have purposefully taught inanities such as "topic sentences," or "the 17 rules of comma usage."  Oh, the certainty of writing -1 in the margin of an essay. How adult I felt, smoking Camel Lights and drinking iced coffee over piles of student work at Urban Bean, "correcting" papers.  We all have to start somewhere.

Never mind that none of what I was teaching seemed natural or even slightly useful in the practice of writing, or reading for that matter. 

Bibbity, boppity, boo, a decade passes, I actually start paying attention to student work as an appreciative reader.  I do the Minnesota Writing Project a couple of summers, I finish my MFA, have some babies and watch the older one learn to read and write.  I'm sort of getting it. 

Another five years with more intuition and less red ink, and the epiphany finally shakes loose and surfaces: I have to teach my students to love what they can do with language and think like writers if I want them to learn to read and write.

Duh.  This is one of those epiphanies that seems so common-sensical now, but that wouldn't make any kind of sense before it happens to you--if someone tries to explain it years before you're ready to hear it--like "there's more to the good life than happy hour appetizers" or "even though you gave birth to them, you might not always like your children."

And science teachers should teach their students to think like scientists and math teachers mathematicians, art teachers like artists, etc., etc. 

I learned this week that this profound shift in my professional practice has a name;  one could even refer to it as an epistemology.  It's called cognitive apprenticeship and was apparently popularized in the 1980s (Brown, Collins, &Newman, 1986; Collins, 1988; Brown, Collins, Duguid, 1989; Brown, Collins, Holum, 1991).  For a while today, I felt so important, so insightful, so correct.  I had stumbled upon an actual pedagogy.  It has a name and citations.  It probably has a collective and a following of robust researchers.  And I was doing it!  All by myself!

Tonight, I searched cognitive apprenticeship on Google Scholar--33,000 hits!  Another 95,000 on plain old Google.  A Wikipedia page...

Huh. 

So 120,000 people thought about this before I did. 

I'm not feeling so much correct as corrected.