The Method (A Basic Overview)

This is part 2 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

            So this is what I’ve been doing.  It’s what I’ll continue to do, obviously with some thoughtful alterations as necessary.  Although it contains a lot of standard practices, the systematic approach and the desired outcomes are a bit different – students using these practices to actually read difficult texts, while teachers use them to assess.  It’s important to note that this entry isn’t meant to be exhaustive and none of the posts on this site are meant to be particularly linear.  Questions raised here might be answered later.  Alternate examples or individual anecdotes are coming.

What do I actually do to teach students to read difficult texts?

             
          Basically, it’s a process of slowing down and annotating what students understand while reading.  Students are required to write summary annotations in the margins every time they complete a given section of a text.  This might be a paragraph, a page, or even just a line if a text is very complex.  The key is to have students recognize the difficulty of the text and adjust their annotations accordingly.  So, if a student is comfortable with the meaning of a text – perhaps it’s one of those terrible test prep packet readings – and needs to just focus on answering post-reading questions, she can annotate very lightly, perhaps just short phrases for every paragraph or two.  If a student is very challenged by a text, she can summarize what she understands about every line.  After several annotations have been written down, students look back over them, attempting to put the meaning of the text all back together in terms of their own words and understandings. 

But how does this help students understand the text?

            I came up with this method after the thousandth instance of a student reading a passage and then saying “I don’t understand any of that.”  My stock response for that was always “Of course you do.  Let’s look at it.”  Because students do understand things in even the most complicated texts – there are words, phrases, and whole ideas that are completely comprehensible, even comfortable.  The problem is that we’ve taught students to be caught up on what they don’t know.  So, having students read in terms of what they understand makes it possible to read more complex texts for some meaning, opening up the possibility for constructive re-readings that could then help students fill in gaps. 

            This is what we all do as competent adult readers.  I don’t always understand the finer points of the wonkish moments on Paul Krugman’s blog.  But I read it and I understand the text for the most part, often learning how to read the more specialist language of economics in the process.  Almost nobody understands the finer points of the instructions on tax return paperwork, but (unless we can afford to have somebody else file for us) we tend to trudge through and make sense of it, accumulating knowledge and the ability to read these types of texts in the meantime.  

            So, when students read a bit, take a couple seconds to think about what they just read, write a sentence or two in their own words to hit the high points, and then use these notes to make sense of the larger development of the text . . . they’re reading things that might have seemed unreadable to somebody just sitting down and reading from first to last word without any reflection in the middle.

How do I assess this in real time?

            The fantastic part about this method, from the standpoint of a teacher, is that any in-class readings are easy to assess.  A roving teacher can see the frequency of annotations, suggesting a student’s level of comfort with the text, as well as the accuracy of summaries.  Therefore, a teacher doesn’t have to wait until a student completes a text to individually assess whether or not a student is comprehending a text.  As a summative assessment, scanning a student’s annotations provides more information about his understanding of the entire text and its development throughout, since students are not as easily able to highlight portions of the text, to the exclusion of others. 

            During this process of assessment, it’s also very easy to quickly suggest ways that students could further their thinking, fill in gaps, look back at information they could fill in, and generally to show students how to get more from a text.  In my experience, this can informally take place by pointing at a particular annotation and asking things like “What do you mean here?” or “Is this all that’s going on?” or “What part of the text showed you this?”  When necessary, an important but un-annotated section of text can be pointed to and dissected with a few questions like “What’s happening here?” or “Can you tell me about this sentence/paragraph/section here?”  Generally, a student left this section un-annotated because it was confusing, so this gives the teacher another chance to walk through the process of taking apart a sentence to get what students do know from it.

So that’s the basic method? 

See, it’s pretty simple, right?  Tell students to read a bit and determine how difficult a text is (you have to teach kids to do this, or course), then slow down so they can very briefly summarize what they do understand as they’re going, then occasionally reread to put all the ideas together.  If the length of the text permits, have students go back over the text to fill in details once they understand the basics of the text.  It’s a scaffolding process really, and one that is certainly open to a continual reduction in the use of the tool as students develop their skills.  But let’s be honest.  This is a skill that lends itself to reading in graduate seminars.  The real trick is teaching students to determine exactly how much annotation is necessary for a particular text.  Yeah . . . that’s a challenge.  More on that later.