As noted in Adolescent Literacy: A Policy Brief Research Report (NCTE, 2007), literacy in all classrooms, not just Language Arts or English, is a cause for concern. Interpreting texts, whether magazine article, YouTube video, or academic journal, is essential in making sense of the world inside and outside of the classroom. For this reason, teachers in all subjects should focus on developing their students’ literacy skills.
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| UIC Writing Center |
Over the last 3 years that I have tutored at the UIC Writing Center, I have worked with high schoolers, undergraduates, and graduate students from a variety of departments and subject areas. While every tutoring session was different, the common theme among them was this: the ability to read text, comprehend it, and express ideas about it was integral to success. Sometimes it was frustrating as a tutor because every so often a student would come in to work on an assignment and try to “wing it” without understanding text or sources. In these situations, thesis statements, claims, and evidence quickly fell apart because they were building papers without establishing a foundation of comprehension. Despite their efforts to take shortcuts, I would call them out and have them talk through their reasoning, sometimes even go through text with them so that they were obliged to see the importance of reading.
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| Homer Simpson demonstrating how many students feel when copying notes in class. |
I completely understand the frustration you felt tutoring in the Writing Center! I was shocked my first year teaching, specifically with my freshmen English class. When the students started to outline their thoughts for their first analysis paper, it became clear to me that although they were able to recite all the points we made in class, they did not have their own deep understanding of the text. Part of this was my fault; I did not promote metacognition while they were reading. I gave them all the information that I thought was crucial, but did not let them fully interact with the text so they could ask their own questions or identify the problems they came across while reading. After teaching for a few years, I could not imagine teaching without incorporating "metacognition checks" within my lessons and assignments. Like you pointed out, many students think that just by copying down what the teacher says, a high quality paper will magically be produced without them using metacognition skills.
ReplyDeleteI also understand the frustration of working with students who have not read material before asking for help. However, I was not perfect myself when I first started college; I, on multiple occasions, went to ask professors questions without reading the material first. I learned reading first and then asking professors for help works better after taking a history class where we had to write a final paper based on a primary text. It is very difficult to write a paper in history without reading about the facts first, as I found out. Now, looking forward to becoming the teacher, I have to find methods for engaging students not only in the material but also reading that material. As most may guess, science texts are dry and usually unappealing as a late night read. So the challenge I face is having students engage in reading texts in the discipline. After reading about metacognition, the ideas put forth in this reading are great skills and methods for helping students understand what they read. This will be helpful in working with students to understand the material and also teach them these skills so they can working with the material on their own and hopefully come to read science texts on their own. I will have to admit even for myself science texts were not light reads, however, I learned to work with these texts in my own way. Until class on Wednesday, I did not realize I was using some of the techniques discussed in our readings to my own reading ability and skill. A perfect example was the use of multiple fix-up strategies as I worked through the abstract. It was a neat activity and interesting to discover how I read and this information will be very helpful for students.
ReplyDeleteI was definitely one of those students that hoped to gain information from the teacher in class in order to avoid reading. During my undergrad I was majoring in Psychology, and I had to read a lot about things that were pretty boring to me. I would just skim through the readings, or mindlessly read the material, hoping to get the information the following day in class from taking notes. Even then I would still not fully understand it, but I never learned. Eventually, about my junior year, I started to build strategies on how to understand material and take notes. It may not have been the best way to do it but it worked for me. Surprisingly a few things we have learned in class were what I would do, and still do now. Reading a loud, Fix-up, and Making Connections strategies were huge for me, so it was nice to see them in the first week of class. It made me feel like I did something right during my undergrad.
ReplyDeleteAll these strategies will be helpful in teaching my spanish students not only to read the text but understand the text. My prior experience will also be helpful, because I can show them what not to do and let them know exactly how lost I was in do that.
You had a really great point, that even skilled readers fall into the habit of mindless reader, and forget to actually connect and engage with the reading. When I catch myself rereading a sentence over and over, thats when I tell myself to take a break. However, young readers who are new science (or other subjects), may not realize that mindless reading isn't effective, and they will continue to do so unless they are showed a new method. This is way I believe it is important for teachers to model literacy skills and discuss what metacognition is. I know that students can be easily deterred by science text, graphs, data, etc., which is why I plan to model how to tackle each of these texts. Teachers should model before scaffolding, like in the "juggling" demonstration in class, when it comes to new content literacy skills. I believe that providing students with opportunities to learn and practice how to interpret a graph/diagram, would provide endless longterm benefits.
ReplyDeleteAs many of my peers have pointed out above about relaying too much on the teacher’s lectures rather than using that to fill in the gaps from the reading, I too am guilty of this. It all stems from habits learned early on when books were on spark notes and other sites that you can get quick chapter summaries and even some analysis of the themes and other literary analysis key words. I thought this would never come back and bite me in the rear. Sure enough as we all know once we got to our undergraduate classes especially my core classes reading the text is expected and failing to do so hurt my GPA the first semester I tried to pass it off.
ReplyDeleteI found an article from American Public Media (linked below) that talks about flipping the classroom and a way to make students read the text before class. Each student is responsible for a reading and presents the text to their group. This result in the greatest motivation for students, don’t piss off your peers by letting them down. This type of teaching allows for the teacher to get the class to discover the material and be there to answer any questions regarding the text instead of simply high lighting certain portions.
forgot to link the article http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/rethinking-teaching.html
DeleteThanks for the link, Paul! I like how the article highlighted the ineffectiveness of passively trying to absorb information.
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