Houston: We've got a problem

This term I've been wishing that I'd remembered to try a strategy from the Dallas League for Innovation conference in March - having students confront the failure of their schema to solve the central problem of the course, right at the beginning of Week 2.

A Canadian script-writing professor from Humber College recommended aligning each course with the plot structure of a Hollywood comedy. He pointed out that in a Hollywood comedy the audience learns of the central problem within minutes of the start, and then the plot unfolds to resolve this problem or conflict.

In a typical course, though, students don't realize they have a problem until late in the term - typically Week 7 or later - when they try to do a final project or they face the most challenging material. This professor suggested that Week 1 be spent creating a safe space to make mistakes, and then early in Week 2 giving students the challenge that the course would help them overcome, so that they could then move on to learning.

In the context of a script-writing class, this meant assigning students to write a script and share it so that the group could identify the problems with the attempt. In my context, it would be reading a difficult text and failing to comprehend it. A lot like a pre-test, which has always worried me as a Week 1 activity, because I like the focus to be on community building. What I'm thinking now is that if Week 1 is community building, then early Week 2 could be the dramatic revelation that students' schema is not up to the task of comprehending college text.

Maybe by the time students come to me they have taken so many tests that I don't need to give another! Maybe all I need to do is give students the time and support they need to compare their test results with the results they would need to move ahead - that might be the evidence they need to see that their schema is not enough.

Why is it so hard for students to adopt new reading strategies?

Take any group of emerging readers, and you'll find people who are stubbornly clinging to a few minimally effective reading strategies, such as:

• reading from the first word to the last word without thinking or stopping
• taking notes only after reading the entire text
• highlighting everything that seems significant
• if you didn't understand it, reading it again, and again
• if you didn't understand it, reading on to see if the meaning comes to you later
• if you didn't know a word, looking it up in the dictionary 
• if you didn't know a word, asking someone what it means 

Why is it so difficult for emerging readers to try new strategies?

• active reading seems to take more time, even if it's more efficient
• active reading has more steps
• they've never heard of active reading
• if this were so effective, some K12 teacher would have taught it to them
• they're following the advice of a former K12 teacher, probably someone they respect
• writing in a book is forbidden in K12 (because it would require owning texts = $$$$)
• stopping and starting while you read aloud means failing at reading in K12 - it's not fluent!
• saying something out loud that might be "wrong" is a sure way to get humiliated in K12
• talking to yourself is something crazy people do
• they "understand" the text, they just can't remember what they read
• sharing your thoughts out loud is "touchy feely"
• if they were just better at "comprehension," the way they learned it would work

Choosing inquiry over a leveled text

Here's why I leaped into the unknown zone of inquiries a few weeks ago:

I had been assigning students articles to read in a leveled text called Well Read 3. As reading texts go it's not too bad - each chapter has a content theme with a few interesting readings and also highlights a strategy or two, with limited opportunities to practice on the texts.

After I taught my students to preview, though, I found they could retell the articles with solid accuracy after previewing and putting the text aside, and they could also answer all of the multiple choice comprehension questions accurately before close reading.

Since the text builds in difficulty I could have skipped to later chapters, but the sequence of strategies attached to the reading makes it hard to jump ahead.

Mostly the text just seemed too easy.

I have had almost zero success convincing emerging readers to learn and use new strategies if they can manage without them. In fact, now that I think on it, even when the text is hard I find emerging readers loathe to replace their schema for reading.

So into inquiry we went.

My original goals went something like this:

• identify a topic for inquiry that would engage students in my afternoon class
• identify a question or inquiry prompt that would require students to hunt for answers
• identify a limited set of "data" or readings for students to use in the hunt
• include varied texts in order to support a variety of strategy lessons, for example texts of different complexity, charts, articles, source material, etc.
• see how this approach does or doesn't work in this context, for me as a teacher
• find out what students think of this approach after they have experienced it

Think alouds

Thursday's experiment: I used a think aloud in my Fundamental Reading class so that students could learn how to make connections and ask questions while they read. It seemed effective but I made several mistakes I'd like to correct next time...

Learning outcomes: In a group discussion the students reported that they found the method helpful and thought it would boost comprehension. They answered the reading comprehension questions in the text accurately. However the text questions are multiple choice and test only the lowest level of understanding, so many students can answer them after previewing! Argh. I need to create a better assessment tool.

Learning objectives: 

1. Make connections to the text while reading.
2. Ask questions about the text while reading.

 ABSE Learning Standards (Read with Understanding): 

• Select and use reading strategies appropriate to the purpose
• Analyze the content and reflect on the underlying meaning
• Integrate the content with prior knowledge to address the reading purpose

 Lesson steps:

• Wednesday's pre-lesson: students identified their reading purpose (analysis) and then previewed a non-fiction article in the text:
• worked in pairs, alternating reading the 1st sentence of each paragraph aloud
• closed the book
• wrote down everything they could remember about the article (silence)
• stood up and shared their retells orally with the class - one person starts, others add what they caught that hasn't been said yet

• Thursday's lesson:
•  introduced think aloud:
• explained the problem with teaching them reading: reading is invisible, they can't see what I'm thinking (doing) while I'm reading
• need to pretend I've sliced the top off my brain so they can "see" my reading
• to make this happen I'm going to say aloud everything I'm thinking while reading
• ask them to try it after I show it
• not a permanent technique (they won't be babbling in the college library)
• on the way to writing notes in their texts while reading
• demo thinking aloud about one paragraph
• read the words aloud
• every time a thought came into my brain, said that aloud
• asked questions about the material (why is this guy hiking with no coat?)
• made connections (I hiked in UT and I was scared of the flash floods...)
• noted my reactions (I'm getting the idea this is going to end badly)
• put students in pairs to try it
• asked one person to do a think aloud of one paragraph, other to listen, then switch
• circulated to listen
• redirected students to push pair to make connections, ask questions, give reactions
• redirected students not to wait for end of sentence to jump in - go with any chunk of content
• students completed comprehension questions in the text, solo
• students checked their answers with the pair
• brought pairs back for whole class discussion
•  meta-cognition: what did it feel like? what do you think of this?
•  content: discussion of the article

 Patterns of student difficulty:

• Students tended to read along without commenting
• Students seemed to want to read a whole sentence before stopping to comment
• At least on the first try, it seemed like the pair was needed to prompt the student to stop and think, make a connection, analyze, etc.

 Student workaround:

• One student thrust a pencil under the other students' chin like a sports interviewer with a mic
• Tell me, Ms. _____: 
• What questions do you have at this time? 
• What is your reaction to this? 
• What connections can you make?
  

Successes:

• students tried to do the think aloud with good heart
• a student returned from meeting with an advisor and other students showed her how to do it
• student connections, questions and reactions were interesting and on point
• in the meta cognitive discussion students said this technique will boost comprehension
• students were able to answer text questions about the article correctly

Errors to learn from:

• intro took too long
• use two sentences only:
• I'm going to show you how...(clearly announce the purpose)
• While I'm doing this try to notice how I am doing this...
• need an inquiry! random text selections are not reason enough to learn and use strategies
• use college-level text - this text is so easy it's hard to find ways to dig deeper and it's hard to demonstrate the strategies
• build a more meaningful assessment - the multiple choice questions are too easy
• try isolating a single strategy for each demo?
• be more clear about the technique(s) I'm demonstrating, in the intro
• avoid reteaching instructions by having students identify them 
• tell them to notice while I demo
•  have them pair and share or share in whole class
• build instructions for the technique I am demonstrating on the board

Prezi with steps I need to follow for future think aloud experiments!

Plan, plan, plan and plan some more

I watched students make tremendous gains today and am reflecting on what worked! Sometimes it seems like nothing is just right, but today was better! (Hmm...how to replicate).

Before thinking about the particular lesson, I am reflecting on what made it possible for today's lesson to succeed. It was a heap of planning:

1. an assessment plan with clear learning objectives for the term
2. learning objectives selected for today from that term-long plan
3. the day's objectives posted on the board and reviewed with students
4. challenging and engaging readings selected
5. readings that extended the previous topic (mindset/how we succeed)
6. strong general plan with details left open, so activities emerged out of my sense of the students interest and ability in the moment
7. no timing assigned to the lesson segments - no rush or stress to complete segments "on time" or "cover" them
8. spot decision to teach the one objective deeply instead of moving on to the next today

Phew! It would be nice to make these routines, because just listing them is making me tired.

Lesson on previewing ("flying over") text before close reading

Over the years I have developed a bad attitude about teaching previewing.  Previewing is a pre-reading strategy where the reader skims the material at a medium trot to see what the text is about and how the author is approaching the topic, returning later for a close reading. Sometimes it's called a "fly over."

As I have read more about the brain, though, I've come to appreciate why this technique might be valuable. The brain works by making associations. With material the brain has never seen, on an unfamiliar topic, it could be a struggle to create associations. It seems logical that previewing would give a reader's brain a quick dose of background knowledge - creating a mental framework to support further associations.

The problem is that previewing (as I have taught it in the past) has made no sense to students, for many reasons:

1. It flies in the face of students' dearly held schema for reading. Everyone knows that the way to read is to start at the first word and continue to the last word. Skipping around before you do that is confusing. How can you expect to know more by reading less and taking information out of order?
2. If the problem for the struggling reader is that reading something first word to last word takes a a long time, adding steps before the reader starts that process makes a bad thing worse.
3. The steps themselves seem arbitrary to students. What if there are no headings to reveal the structure of the text? Why would it work to read only the first sentence of every paragraph? What if the first sentence of many of the paragraphs is taken up with rhetorical questions and flourishes, instead of conveniently announcing main ideas? What if the reading is 50 pages long? 
4. Previewing comes at the beginning of the term (the first of a chronological sequence of reading strategies) when students are anxious to improve comprehension. Since it seems unlikely to make a difference, this lesson leads students to question whether they will make any progress in the course or whether this is another situation where they will not learn to understand what they read.

Yesterday, though, I had a rare shining moment teaching previewing. It left me hopeful that my students grasped the value of the technique. I plan to post-test them at the end of the term to see if they will share with me which strategies they plan to keep using after the term and I am fascinated to see whether previewing will make the list.  Here is the lesson I used, adapting what I used to do based on principles of Reading Apprenticeship:

Lessons on Previewing: Objective: Students preview a text with no headings.

Past lessons related to this (starting with previewing with headings):

Lesson on previewing a reading with headings:  On Day 1 the students used the Course Description document to work in pairs to solve and share their solution of a common student problem. (Note: depending on student reading level, class size and the type of class the number and type of problem varies. This link is to an example from a non-credit class. In graded classes I include many scenarios about grading, late work, etc.). In order to make it possible for them to solve the problems without reading the document closely I taught them to preview by skimming the headings, so they could become acquainted with the contents and the location of the information.

I explained:

• previewing helps the brain connect to the reading by building some knowledge of the contents
• it's easy to preview by looking at headings
• in previewing you don't slow read from the first word to the last, you skim rapidly
• the goal (put on board) is to find out "what's there and where is it" for future close reading

I demonstrated previewing the top of the document. They tried previewing, solo, and then used the Course Description to solve the student problems and share their answers with the group.

Yesterday's lesson:

• I gave students two articles about the value of failure (one from Forbes, the other from Harvard Business Review). 
• We started with one article (Harvard Bus. Review piece about the failure wall)
• I put them in pairs 
• I asked them to read the first line of each paragraph aloud, alternating with their pair
• I demonstrated this with a student pair very briefly
• Students tried it (and said it felt freaky!)
• I gave each student a sticky note
• I asked them to write down any words or ideas that came to mind after previewing
• We discussed what they wrote on their stickies as group and whether they were able to make sense of the content (most of them got the topic, a few got the main idea, one extracted the emotional tone only!)

It was wild to see the impact of background knowledge play out. The person who made the most complete sense of the text on her stickies was a department manager in a business. We discussed the impact of her background knowledge.

Students asked why this technique makes a difference in comprehension? Was it worth the time? When would they do this? With all texts?

I invited them to

• develop the skill through practice 
• test out its effectiveness. 
• observe  and talk about whether this makes a difference in comprehension. 

I said in my own experience it's especially useful if I lack background knowledge of the text to start with.

I was so excited about the success of this lesson using college-level text. In the past I have used a text about how to read, aimed at struggling readers.  I am convinced the level of challenge is the key change. Students won't bother to learn a new skill unless their existing skills are not equal to the challenge in front of them. Texts about how to read, in my experience, don't offer students enough challenge to force them to confront the shortcomings of their existing reading strategies, which usually boil down to re-reading and moving on without comprehending. When I've taught them reading strategies is as if we were walking along flat ground and I spent a lot of time showing them where to put a ladder.

Unit relating mindset theory to reading ability

Today my Reading students learned more than I think I have ever had students learn in a single, 50 minute period. I'm making these notes to see if I can make this happen again! It was addicting.

I'm posting here one part of what we did today, which was the culmination of a unit on mindset theory. The rest of today's class is in a post that will follow.

Unit Objectives: 

1. Students identify their mindset (growth or fixed).
2. Students relate mindset theory to the process of learning.
3. Students relate mindset theory to the ability to read. 

Before today's lesson we worked on the first two objectives: Students...

• listened to me quickly describe Dweck's two mindsets (success comes through talent/natural ability vs. success comes through effort)
• thought, talked and wrote about a time they were successful
• identified their own mindset based on that example from their lives
• listened to me read aloud a page from Dweck's Mindset with the story of Michael Jordan
• continued to read a few more pages of that excerpt about Babe Ruth and a female runner (optional homework - many did it and asked to discuss in class after reading)
• thought about whether reading is a natural ability as a "do next" assignment before they came to class (thinking question I give out at the previous class)

Today's lesson focused on the third objective: Students...

• wrote about whether reading is a natural ability for 5 minutes silently as a "do now"
• were asked to take extra care to back up their opinion with examples 
• discussed their views as a group, using a talking stick, starting with a student, continuing around without my comment until each member of the group spoke, concluding that reading was mostly effort but it started with some natural ability to make sense of the words as sounds 
• listened to my contribution/wrap up, affirming their conclusions and adding some background I learned from John Medina's Brain Rules and from Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain:


• our brains were designed in the Stone Age 
• our ability to read depends on the brain re-purposing functions originally designed for pre-literate life
• almost all humans have the wiring that lets them read
• some people use a different part of the brain to read (dyslexics)
• the brain constantly changes, actually moving around physical material, based on what we demand of it
• a dyslexic brain, like any other brain, can change over time, depending on what is demanded of it 
• true story example: a dyslexic person I know, how they learned to read at different ages and what strategies they used
• big idea: we can improve our reading through effort and we change our brains as we go

Follow-up assignment (link to assignment sheet):  

Choose a pleasure book they have never read before (help and resources offered to make this choice). Read 15 minutes a day (or more to go the "extra mile"), aiming for a regular time of day to build a reading habit. Discuss the reading at a Readers' Cafe first thing at Monday's class. Write about the reading every week, due on Tuesday. (This could be a Moodle forum or could be postings to Goodreads - we haven't decided that yet and I am going to ask students to choose as a group.)

In connection with this assignment students also reviewed their 10 rights as readers, by Daniel Pennac and illustrated by Quentin Blake. One important right is the right not to finish a book, which is why I focus on the literacy habit (15 minutes, same time each day), instead of finishing a particular book or reading a set number of pages.

Don't stick peas in your ears

I have found the old saying, "what you resist, will persist" to be true in managing classrooms at the community college, college and graduate level, as well as at 1st, 2d 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels. I don't quite understand why this is true, but I have come to believe it.

In my experience, telling students what not to do is like telling them not to stick peas in their ears. It sets up a vicious cycle. Students get a good idea of what not to do, they do it, you get irritated, and you can go around and around on this, as many times as you choose.

The way out of this cycle, for me, is to tell students what I want them to do, and help them articulate why it matters. So, for example, instead of announcing rules about cell phones I say "give the class your undivided attention" and "treat everyone with respect." Students figure out that this means a lot of things, including turn off your cell phone and don't answer it in class.

When I take a class, for example, and the professor gives me a course description listing the things that I shouldn't do (don't skip this class, don't talk on your cell phone, don't leave early, don't turn things in late, etc.) it strikes me that these things must have happened frequently in this course in the past, and I get the idea they are likely to happen again. This makes me wonder whether the class is going to meet my needs, because I like to learn, and I like to be in groups where others share this desire. It also makes me wonder whether the class and/or the material is going to be boring!

Colleagues have told me that they can't leave out these warnings because if they did, students wouldn't behave.

I have had the opposite experience. I demand that my students treat me and each other with respect. I hold them accountable for this. I also set my expectations high in the Course Description:

You can expect me to:

• Prepare lessons that help you understand what you read and read more easily.
• Follow your progress to help you reach your educational goals.
• Treat you with respect.
• Be ready to start class on time, with the materials needed.
• Give the class my undivided attention.
• Be available to meet with you privately when you need 1-on-1 support.
• Return your work promptly.
• Ask questions and make mistakes as I learn what you need as you learn.
• Do my best.

I will expect you to:

• Take risks and make mistakes as you learn.
• Ask questions when you don’t understand.
• Ask for support when you need it.
• Treat others with respect.
• Attend every class, giving the class your undivided attention.
• Be ready to start class on time, with the materials you need.
• Participate actively and positively in class.
• Study at home roughly ½ hour each day.
• Complete assignments on time.
• Do your best.

Once we have gone over these expectations I can ask if there is anything unreasonable here. If not, then I trust my students will live up to the expectations, and with few exceptions, they do.

How to go deeper into Reading Apprenticeship

Here is the handout from the in-service presentation "But they don't read it!" from Sept. 30, including a collection of links and resources for more information about Reading Apprenticeship.

Several people have asked for books to read about the method:

The book I have found most inspiring is Building Academic Literacy: Lessons from Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, Grades 6-12, edited by Audrey Fielding, Ruth Schoenbach, and Marean Jordan (scroll down if you use this link). In the first section a teacher who uses the method describes how he used the method, giving you the blow by blow details and showing the structure and delivery of a whole unit. I found it very helpful and concrete and exciting. The subsequent sections are written by other teachers using the method in different ways but I didn't find them as useful. Some of the teacher/writers seemed to have an emerging level grasp of the method and described difficulties they had in implementation. This book is available through LCC's Summit interlibrary loan and also can be purchased cheaply, used, through Amazon. 

Another resource is Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms, 2nd Edition, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia L. Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy (scroll down if you use the link).  This is a longer book with a complete teaching guide and filled with useful resources. It's helpful and I'm excited to learn from it, but somehow I don't enjoy reading it. There is something removed about the writing. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems to be lacking concrete and direct voice. If I think of this as a reference book it seems more useful. It is chock full of amazing resources. This is available through LCC's library as an ebook that you can read online or download for up to 7 days. I imagine you could print sections for future reference but haven't tried it. I bought it from the WestEd website linked above. It's also available used on Amazon.

A third resource is Building Academic Literacy: An Anthology for Reading Apprenticeship, edited by Audrey Fielding, and Ruth Schoenbach (scroll down if you use this link). This is a collection of readings that English and Reading teachers could use as a student text to raise themes for discussion. I wasn't wowed by every selection, but that's a bit unrealistic of me, isn't it? It might be useful to use until you built up your own collection of materials. Seems like there should be enough OER materials on these themes to save the cost of student texts.

Using an inquiry approach

The most exciting feature, I think, of Reading Apprenticeship, is the fact that it fits so well with an inquiry approach. I am, in fact, doubtful that Reading Apprenticeship methods, by themselves, would yield strong learning gains, because students may not see the value of reading strategies. I think it's the inquiry that makes teaching the strategies possible.

From my reading I have learned the human brain was designed in hunter/gatherer times, and thus that hunting is a brain strength. This includes hunting for answers.

I like to dramatize this each fall at Halloween - with my hunter/gatherer of knowledge costume. 

If I can set up a meaty inquiry I can engage my students in hunting information. On their way, they are interested in learning more reading techniques because it helps them hunt successfully.

At the League for Innovations in Community Colleges conference in March 2013, Chabot College Emeritus faculty Cynthia Hicks presented a sample inquiry from a reading/writing classroom that was something like "Should the United States make gun control stronger?" Another type of inquiry was in the nature of a simulation: "Imagine you are a member of Congress and you are considering whether to..."

Some other possibilities (just brainstorming here):

Why does the order of operations work? 

How can I add fractions of different sizes?

What are the conditions that lead to war?

Why are human beings violent?

What effect does blue/green algae have on Oregon lakes?

What conditions lead cells to multiply beyond the body's ability to manage that growth? 

Is failure necessary to success?

(After much searching I have found, and will be posting here more examples from Prof. Hicks' presentation.)

More about the inquiry approach (from Prof. Hicks' presentation at the League):

According to Prof. Hicks, "inquiry is an instructional focus that engages students in activities to help them develop skills or strategies for dealing with data in order to say or write something about the data."

Teachers "pose very specific inquires for students," giving students data in the form of text. The inquiry appears as a prompt from the teacher, to write or think. The teacher gives the students the prompt before they begin to read.

"The whole point is to have the students get practice in working through the reading and figuring it out in order to respond. They develop knowledge and cognitive strategies for effective reading and analysis - it’s automatic."

"There are three ways to develop inquiry prompts:

1. present students with data about a controversial situation, something people argue about

2. give data with general information about the controversy, with a variety of perspectives

3. ask students to support an argument and support it. "

Prof. Hicks recommends using a limited set of data. "More is not better! Prevent overwhelm," she said.

"As part of the inquiry, teachers support readers' use of cognitive strategies:

• predicting
• picturing
• questioning
• connecting
• identifying a problem
• summarizing
• using fix ups"

"The critical strategy is to give students a clear purpose for reading. Students pay attention 

important content not trivia, related to the problem at hand. Students need to

identify patterns, predictions, inferences and conclusions, evaluating data for

bias, consistency, and compatibility with prior knowledge."

Prof. Hicks recommended What Works in Written Composition by George Hillocks as a guide to inquiry prompts. I did a quick check on Amazon but didn't find it. I haven't yet tried the campus library and library-sharing sites.

I found this interesting site about using inquiry in the math classroom.

Four ingredients of the Reading Apprenticeship method

The Reading Apprenticeship/inquiry method (published by WestEd) offers a promising way to help students improve college reading skills.

Here is a prezi I made for a faculty inservice last week, describing four key ingredients of the method, which I describe as:

1. Use inquiry
2. Read in class sometimes
3. Keep it collaborative
4. Talk about the content and the process of getting the content from the reading

The theme of this approach is that content area teachers (e.g. people who teach history, science, welding, culinary arts, auto-shop, art, etc.) are experts in reading in their academic disciplines, and if they are willing to share that expertise with students (their "reading apprentices"), students can become more skilled in reading along with becoming more skilled and knowledgable about the content.

I am calling this the "teach a person to fish" approach...


Credit where it's due: I created my summary based on

1) my reading of the text Building Academic Literacy: Lessons from Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, Grades 6-12, by Audrey Fielding, Ruth Schoenbach and Marean Jordan; and

2) my readings from the text Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms, 2nd Edition, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia L. Greenleaf, Lynn Murphy, 

3) attending portions of the RA101 online course from WestEd, and

4) the excellent presentation by Chabot College emeritus faculty Cynthia Hicks
at the March, 2013 League for Innovation in Community Colleges conference.

"Personal reading training" aka using miscue analysis with adults

One way to help students improve their reading is to help them become aware of what they are doing when they read. Ruth Davenport, in her excellent teaching resource, "Miscues, not Mistakes" offers a technique called "Over the Shoulder" miscue analysis.

I tried out Davenport's method in my developmental reading class in Fall term 2012 and found it eye-opening and useful.

My first hurdle was how to market the process to adults. Many of my students, I knew, had unpleasant associations from remedial reading interventions in K-12 years. I positioned myself as a personal trainer who would help them practice and gain strength in reading - renaming the process "personal reading trainings."

Here's the assignment I created to make this method part of the course, including explanation of the trainings and their purpose.

Here's the list of reading strategies I was teaching from that term, adapted from "Readers and Writers with a Difference," by Rhodes and Dudley-Marling.

I created a form I used to collect data during the personal reading trainings, which I will link to here, when I dig it out of my archived Moodle shell (argh).



What are miscues? 

When we read, we make sense of the text as we go along, and we do that by bringing our own knowledge and experience to what we are reading. Sometimes we read the words exactly as the author wrote them, and sometimes we change words as we read, in an effort to make sense of the text. This change might be harmless (no change in meaning) or it might change and distort the author's meaning.

The technical term for the changes we make is "miscues." To illustrate the difference between changes that don't change the meaning and changes that do, in Davenport's book she tells a true story of a man with a graduate degree in Business who reads the book Blueberries for Sal aloud to his young daughter. As he reads the story, he changes some of the words. Perhaps he read berry instead of blueberry, or mama bear, mama or the little bear's mother, instead of mother bear.

The question for a "personal reading trainer" listening to this reading would not be merely whether the reader changed the text. The question would be: did the reader change the meaning? And why did the reader change the text?

Each miscue offers a window into the reader's process of making sense of the text. So, for example, when the father read aloud to his daughter, he made many changes, but he didn't change the meaning. He naturally made the book more accessible to his daughter. Thus he made miscues, but not mistakes.

Merlot wins my content, hands down, over Connexions

I took some time to compare two Open Education Resource (OER) repositories: Rice University's Connexions and the California state system repository called Merlot. I'd used Merlot in the past, and got a bit irritated with the multiple cataloging screens that come before uploading each resource, so I thought I'd try out Connexions.

First, I tried to set up an account. Every time I took action on the screen there was a bit of wait time - probably 30 seconds. Not too long, really, but longer than most web pages, especially since I was trying this near midnight on a Saturday. Could this be a high-traffic time?

When I tried to use the link the system sent to my email I immediately got an error message. I tried again and got another email. I noticed on the second time around that just underneath that first link was another one to use if the first one didn't work! Hmm. Why not fix the first link, instead of sending a link and a work-around?

Next, I set about to upload content. This meant reading several pages on the website to grasp new vocabulary. Hmm. This is starting to remind me of WordPress. Learning tech speak is not my favorite pastime - I'll do it if I have to, but there had better be a good reason...

I made it this screen to create a "module," only to find that I should upload a Word file, an Open Office file or type material into a box that looked like it needed html.

Hmm. I use Google docs. I could have cut and pasted the material into a word-processing document, but why bother when Merlot is so much easier.

After Connexions, Merlot seems like a dream to upload materials. Here's the main screen, which, to be fair, is followed by several cataloging screens, but it took me about 2 or 3 minutes to do each resource. Merlot is also flexible, allowing you to upload the material in the form you wish:

Getting to know students in Week 1

I've been updating the survey I use to get to know students. It's important to me to find out things like what other responsibilities students have, what they want me to know about them and their learning, what other school experiences they have had, and why they are taking my course.

A few resources to share:

1. Paper surveys for students:

Here's my current student survey. Sometimes I ask students to do this for homework, sometimes I ask for them to do it during class. I use the same format for all assignments: title, purpose and directions. If it's homework I add a section for due date before the directions.

Here's my sample response to the survey, which I ask students to read before they complete theirs. I'm using this to show students how I'd like them to answer in complete sentences, and to help them get to know me.

2. Survey online with a Google form:

I also experimented with putting the survey into a Google form, to be filled out online. If I were orienting students to Moodle right away I could put a link to this in Moodle. This looks promising as way to give students practice working online in the course. Here is what that looks like (just the top):

3. Survey online as part of a Moodle orientation activity:

In the past I have embedded these survey questions into a Moodle questionnaire.

This was part of a Moodle orientation activity, so it required students to try out whatever Moodle functions I was planning to use that term. Students might need to send messages to classmates, emails to me, post and reply to forum posts, check their grade, open and read course documents in Moodle and post questions about them, and print something from Moodle, etc.

Here is what that looks like:

Netiquette

"Hey you!" "Yo!"

Teaching in a classroom with an online course website, teaching a hybrid class and teaching a fully online course all require students to appreciate the need for courtesy. As we have all learned the hard way at least once, written communications are easy to fire off and difficult to erase from memory, if they are offensive.

The recommended link for online etiquette, or "netiquette" that the Lane faculty technology course recommended for sharing with students was this.

The same rules appear at this site, in a relatively nicer format, although you can't see all of the rules at a glance, at least on my screen. Also the explanation of the concepts is very brief. This is either an improvement or not as useful, depending on your perspective. As time passes it would be nice if these ideas were becoming absorbed in tech culture, but I am not sure if that has happened, or if it will.

Another best practice to prompt student courtesy is to define expectations for email and posting online. An engaging way to do this that I learned from Barbi McLain is to collect some of the more bizarre and egregious communications you receive, scramble them to protect student privacy, and share them with new students working in pairs or trios. The students can use the samples to create guidelines they feel are appropriate and workable. Or, students could compare their sense of the guidelines needed to the collection of non-examples that you provide. You could also ask each student to bring a non-example to class, redacted to protect privacy.

Increasing student persistence with Dweck's mindset theory

Carol Dweck's "mindset" theory is very useful in preparing students to take risks and persist in the face of challenge. (Thanks to master teachers Susan Reddoor and Merrill Watrous for recommending this resource!)

To summarize briefly and broadly, Dweck describes two attitudes towards success: fixed mindset and growth mindset.

Fixed mindset is the conviction that your success comes from talent - something you were born with. Growth mindset is the belief that your success comes from effort.

The problem with fixed mindset is that if you believe that your success is based on talent, you tend to avoid risk and challenge. Failing is a sign that you don't have as much talent as you thought you had.

On the other hand, growth mindset supports learning and the risks that come with it. If you believe that your success will come through effort, failure is not a permanent condition and does not need to be feared. It's just a stop on the road to success.

Dweck's book is filled with true stories from sports and business that demonstrate her points.

Here's how I use Dweck's theory:

1. I assign students to read a short excerpt about Michael Jordan and how he achieved it. This could be in class, with partners, or started in class and completed at home.

2. I give students a prompt and two sample reflections I wrote describing a time I was successful and whether I believe that success came from talent or effort. They read the sample in class and review directions for writing their own reflection online in the Moodle course shell for homework. This writing could also be started in class.

3. At the next class I ask students to think/pair/share in class about their reactions to the reading and whatever they wish to share about their own experiences (this is optional, since some reflections are very personal).

4. I then lead a group discussion about mindset and how it affects learning.

When I used this assignment in Week 1 I found students performed noticeably better on more challenging assignments later in the term. It was clear that students found this assignment affirming. I have many students who overcome huge challenges just to enroll in community college, and who do not see themselves as having "talent." The message that success comes through effort is supportive and prepares them, psychologically, to persist in the face of academic challenge.

After the first use I rewrote my sample reflection. I divided it into two samples - reflecting differing points of view, so that students understand that I am seeking an honest reflection, not a "right answer," i.e., a reflection that parrots the mindset described in the sample.

Checking in with students during the term

Early in Week 2 is a good time to survey students about the course. Here is a sample paper survey. I have also adapted this survey as an online Moodle questionnaire in some terms. 

I change questions 7 through 10 each term so that they reflect the learning objectives covered between the start of the course and the survey. In later versions the final block said: "Is there anything else you think I should know?"

I find students appreciate that I am holding myself and the new community accountable for the promises in the Course Description, which include things like we will treat each other with respect and we need a safe place to make mistakes. I find many students, excited at the start of the term, write positive notes to me in the open-ended section at the end. This helps them make a commitment to the course and hold that commitment when the going gets tough.

If a student gives a negative answer (false or very false), I follow up right away to find out why, typically by email, because that's easy for me to do quickly. This has been very rare, and so it hasn't been time-consuming. 

Whether I use a paper form or an online form I respond briefly to each student after I read this.

I'm an expert reader, or am I?

I used to put a small figurine of a wizard on my overhead projector in Reading class. I would announce, with as much drama as I could muster, that the wizard was there to remind us that reading is "magical." Cute, but I was pointing emerging readers in the wrong direction. 

Most people already believe that reading happens by magic. Some people read well - they have the magic. Some people have to struggle to understand what they read - they don't.  

By the time we're adults, we think we know if we have the magic. Most of us think it's decided in elementary school. By third grade, I thought my label was best reader of all. I finished the "silver" readings in the SRA box, beating two boys who were contenders.


Neither high school nor college challenged my impression that I was naturally talented at reading. I made enough sense of the texts to take exams and write papers. There were some challenges, as most of the books I read in college were in another language. I figured out (was it laziness? arrogance?) that I could skip most of the words I didn't know, using the context to find their meaning. 

Law school stopped me in my tracks. Each class required reading an encyclopedia-sized tome of legal decisions written by judges. The writing was abstract and obtuse, loaded with technical legal terms both in English and in Latin. 

Luckily, first year law professors taught us in class to read and analyze legal decisions, at the start of fall term. They gave us five key questions to answer in reading each case. They taught us on how to organize our notes to prepare for their Socratic questions in class. I succeeded in reading law because experts taught me how to read law.

Yet the amount we were responsible for comprehending in law school took more hours than we had in the day (even after we eliminated sleeping, exercising, former friends, and family). Following the model of the law students in the Paper Chase, my buddies and I formed a study group. Each of us took responsibility for doing a close reading of the assignments in one course and making outlines of the key information to share and teach the other members. By the time I studied for the bar exam I knew that I had to underline, annotate, take notes and organize my notes into study outlines if I wanted to understand and remember what I read. The experts we learned from may have been fictitious, but the method worked.

Twenty years later, when I returned to grad school to learn more about teaching, there was plenty of reading and new vocabulary. I already had teaching experience and I could adapt the reading strategies from law school. I was able to function as a "good" reader. 

It came as a bit of shock, then, this past winter, when I tried and failed to comprehend a book I wanted to read. The book, ironically, is about the process of reading inside the brain.

First, there were these diagrams, optimistically titled "Getting Oriented in the Brain." My brain balked. Every learning styles inventory I have ever completed confirms that my visual and spatial knowledge is weak. This diagram of a three-dimensional object makes my brain reel. It's labeled with scientific terms that are just as useful to me as their Chinese translations. What do I do with this diagram? Memorize it? Refer to it later? What have I done in the past when faced with a problem like this? I figured I could skip it.

I read on to see if the words could unlock the author's meaning. Here's an example from a section about what the eye does when you read. To make sense of this paragraph I would need to know at least a little something about the parts of my eye and their functions: the fovea, retina, thalamus and cortex. I know the iris and, uh, the eyeball. 

This was just one paragraph. Many more to go.

I did what my students do - I stopped trying. I wasn't succeeding in making meaning. I made the calculus my students make: Can I get by without this information? Sure.

The following term, though, I was teaching future K12 teachers to teach reading. It seemed only fair that I should share my struggles with the neuroscience book and attempt it again, when I assigned my students to read and share a professional teaching book. I needed to model the best practice of doing the assignments myself. As luck would have it, one of my students was interested in dyslexia, which is covered in one chapter. I promised my student I would figure out what the author had to say about dyslexia and share that with him.

Armed with a concrete reading purpose, and back in familiar study group mode, I made a new effort. It took several tries. I'm hopeful that I managed to make decent sense of the author's main ideas about dyslexia, and explain them. I still couldn't have explained the scientific basis for the author's conclusions. If you asked me about it today, I might be able to recall the general thesis. I attribute my success in this, such as it was, to this fact: unlike my students, I knew I could stop after one chapter if I wanted to.

How is it that a good reader like me struggled to read a book about science that was intended for the general public? 

Reading is not magic. It's a complex process that has everything to do with our skill in making sense of the text, which is based, in large measure, on our ability to bring our own knowledge and experience to the text. Give me a text in the field of law, education, humanities or social science, and I am on solid ground. I have little knowledge and experience in science. To read a science text, and really understand it, I'll need to apprentice myself to a master.