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SLI Contact Information: Ruth Schoenbach Cyndy Greenleaf Jana Bouc
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Reading Happens in Your Mind, Not in Your MouthTeaching & Learning "Academic Literacy" in an Urban High School(Published in California English volume 3, no.4 Summer 1998) by Christine Cziko
FACING
THE PROBLEM: TACKLING
THE PROBLEM:
"I am surprised because my whole attitude toward reading has changed since I was in this class and that is the honest to god truth."--Ninth grade "Academic Literacy" student Although I have been teaching English for over twenty years in both middle and high school classrooms, I hadn't thought explicitly about teaching reading until 1995 when I became involved in the Strategic Literacy Initiative, a research and professional development effort based in San Francisco. During my teaching career I had become increasingly concerned about getting my students to read, but I was reluctant to look at the problem of reading head on. As a person who loved literature, I held to the belief that there was at least one book for every child, the book that could move him or her in a way which would open up an entire world of reading. With luck, I would help my students find those books. Over the years there had been students in each of my classes who already thought of themselves as readers before they entered my classroom. But increasingly, the majority of students in my urban classroom were not reading books, either those assigned in class or for their own pleasure. I could not even count on many of my students finishing a short story assigned for homework. As I spoke to my colleagues in other English classes as well as those teaching history and science, the story was much the same. Students were not reading school texts, and even those who insisted that they had "done the reading," could often not explain what they had read. In an effort to have class discussions on important issues raised in the books which, I realized, many of my students were not reading, I tried to find ways to provide everyone with at least some common experience with the book. I read to students, gave time in class to read, "talked through" the book, and, when desperate, showed the video. It began to dawn on me that I was doing more and more to provide students with the story and meaning of the book, without expecting or helping them to find ways to become independent readers. I started to feel that I was in a kind of co-dependent relationship with my students- an arrangement that actually enabled them to not read.
"But I'm a High School English Teacher--It's Not My Job to Teach Reading" My first conscious reaction to this dilemma was resistance: "This is high school, teaching reading is not my job!" But since it was clearly the job that had to be done, I couldn't hold onto that attitude for long. I wasn't too concerned about students' ability to read words; most of them could decode reasonably well. Reading short, simple texts with a clear narrative line and lots of action wasn't a problem either. It was the reading of extended and sometimes complex texts--high school texts--that students seemed to have given up on. My second line of resistance was quick to follow: "But I don't know how to teach reading!" I couldn't remember how I had learned to read demanding texts, and didn't even understand how my own two children had learned. I was stuck. In 1995, soon after I moved to Northern California from New York (where I'd been a teacher consultant for the New York City Writing Project) I joined the HERALD Project's Strategic Literacy Initiative. The HERALD Project had been working with interdisciplinary teams of high school teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District to improve students' oral and written language skills across the curriculum. After eight years of this work, they had convened a network of English and Social Studies teachers from three of these schools to focus on issues of reading. Their aim was to bring together teachers as research partners in a professional community for the purpose of examining recent research on reading, and jointly experimenting to adapt promising practices for use in secondary content classrooms. In addition, this teacher-researcher collaboration also developed a set of "literacy cases" for other teacher groups to use in the future as a center for professional development and community conversation about teaching reading in secondary content classes.
A Writing Process Teacher Discovers the Reading Process One of the key activities in the Strategic Literacy Network meetings, was reading different types of texts and talking about how we made sense of what we were reading. By forcing ourselves to think explicitly about the strategies we were using, and by sharing these strategies, we became more conscious of the varied and complex reading processes each of us use. We discovered that by making the reading strategies we use explicit to ourselves, we could tap into an extensive knowledge base about reading comprehension that we could share with our students. I realized that thinking about what I did when I read had strong parallels to the writing process approach that I had been using in my classes for years. It was like a light had been turned on. I did know what a competent reader had to do in order to make sense of text; I was doing it all the time. Now the challenge was to make the strategies I used explicit first to myself and then to my students. I began to think more about my own reading and to use techniques adapted from my years of experience with the Writing Project to create classroom activities that would help students explore their own reading process. I took the same kind of reflective stance toward my reading that I had taken toward my writing. Through articles and discussions in the Strategic Literacy Network I began to see the potential for real instructional approaches and strategies that could help students begin to "break it down" as one of our students said, or as literacy scholar Lisa Delpit describes it, to "unlock the power code." The process of looking closely at my own reading enabled me to begin to demystify reading for my students.
A Crisis Creates an Opportunity As I was rethinking my job as an English teacher, our school faced a crisis. Thurgood Marshall Academic High School is an urban public high school which was created explicitly to provide an academically rigorous education for students who have been historically under-represented in higher education. Our student population is approximately one-third African-American, one-third Asian-American and one-third Latino. Admission to our school is based on a lottery system. Though most of our students have college aspirations, the majority are underprepared for high school work. In the spring of 1996, 40% of our ninth grade students had only achieved a grade point average of 2.0 or below. A major cause of this failure seemed to be that many students were ill-equipped to read with comprehension the texts required to be successful in their classes. Since our school's mission is to prepare all students for post-secondary education, this high rate of academic failure presented an urgent challenge. Although most teachers at Marshall had taken a required "Reading in the Secondary School" course as part of their teacher preparation, the pressure to cover the content of the course and, perhaps, an unspoken belief that "teaching reading isn't my job" resulted in our providing little instruction to students in how to make sense of the texts required for their courses. Because I was excited about some of the ideas we had been discussing in the Strategic Literacy Network, and because teachers throughout the school were talking about the difficulty so many students were having in managing their reading assignments in different disciplines, I saw an opportunity. After speaking with our principal and the department heads council and getting their support, I approached Ruth Schoenbach and Cyndy Greenleaf (the Project Director and Director of Research) of the Strategic Literacy Initiative, and asked if they would be willing to jointly design, help implement and assess a new course which we called "Academic Literacy." This course would be required for all three hundred incoming freshmen beginning in the fall of 1996 and would use some of the most promising strategies we were discussing in the Network. Ruth and Cyndy agreed, and we worked over the summer to outline the curriculum and the key instructional elements we would weave throughout the two semester course. Meanwhile, I found three teachers who were willing to teach the pilot year of Academic Literacy with me. Our team was made up of two English and two history teachers, with teaching experience that ranged from one year to twenty-three years.
The Goals, the Course, an Overview The Academic Literacy course began as a ten-unit year-long course for all Thurgood Marshall freshmen in the fall of 1996. Its purpose was to help the incoming students become higher level, strategic readers and to prepare them for the reading tasks they would encounter in high school and beyond. We knew that for students to become active readers, they had to first believe that reading with comprehension was something that could be learned; that it was not a mystery that you either "get" or "don't get," and that ninth grade was not too late learn. We thought that if we could create classrooms in which students could use some of the energy they put into hiding what they don't understand into revealing and working to figure out their confusions, we might create a powerful new learning dynamic. We thought about ways to make it "cool" to be able to articulate what in a particular text is confusing and why, and about how to invite the entire class to contribute strategies to unlock difficult text. It was crucial that all ninth grade students took the course, so that strategies used by more successful students could be learned by all. The model would be, teachers as "master readers" and students as "apprentice readers". This was not to be a remedial course. Finally, in order to make the course inquiry-based, we decided to create a curriculum in which the reading process itself was a subject of investigation. Using the common adolescent fascination with themselves, we hoped to help students develop metacognitive understandings by inviting them to look closely at their own reading and thinking processes. We began the course by reading works by authors including Martin Luther King, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Frederick Douglass writing about the role of reading in their lives. In this introductory unit, in addition to exploring questions such as: "What roles does reading serve in people's personal and public lives?", we prompted students to think about their own relationships to reading, reflecting on questions such as, "What are my characteristics as a reader? What strategies do I use as I read? What role will reading play in my future educational and career goals? What goals can I set and work towards to help myself develop as a reader?" Students revisited these questions throughout the course. In addition to building students' awareness of reading purposes and processes, we also read and discussed articles which provided students with a common conceptual vocabulary for thinking about their own cognitive processes. They learned about schema, metacognition and attention management. The following comment from one of our students, a year after she took "Academic Literacy" illustrates how students internalized some of these ideas and strategies. "In Academic Literacy they taught you about different channels of your brain. Like my teacher would say, 'You have one channel for being with your friends, and one channel for getting dressed, and you have a channel for being in school" And so then we would be supposed to ask ourselves, "What channel am I on now? Am I on my school channel?" Another key elements of our Academic Literacy curriculum, and one of the ways in which students would apply and practice metacognition, was in our modified version of Silent Sustained Reading (SSR). Although books for SSR were self-selected, students were expected to finish a 200-page book each month and to keep a record of both what they were reading and what they were learning about themselves as readers. As the following ninth grader explains, "They teach you to think about what you think about when you read. Like when we do SSR, and we have to write in our log after, it's not like 'Write about what happened in the book,' it's like, 'Were you looking out the window? How much of the time you were supposed to be reading were you concentrating?'" We also spent a good deal of time in class with expository texts, modeling "think aloud" protocols--in which we would share our own thinking processes as we read and worked to make sense of these texts. In this way, our model of a "cognitive apprenticeship in reading" was continually reinforced throughout the course. Students were introduced to and given frequent opportunities to practice a variety of cognitive and "text-wise" strategies, in particular: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting; use of graphic organizers; and "chunking" or breaking down sentences into manageable parts. As we helped students understand, begin to master, and internalize these strategies, we kept reminding them that these strategies were becoming part of their reader "tool-kit" and that they needed to know how to determine which kind of text problem called for which kind of tool.
To evaluate the impact of the Academic Literacy course on student reading development, we used both quantitative and qualitative measures. We used the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) test1 and a student reading survey adapted from Nancie Atwell's book In the Middle. After seven months of instruction, across all ethnic groups and across all four teachers' classroom, students on average moved from being able to independently read a text at the level of Charlotte's Web to a text comparable in difficulty to To Kill A Mockingbird. According to the test developers, this is equivalent to almost two year's growth in reading ability, roughly equivalent to a change from early 7th grade level to late 9th grade level. Responses on their pre- and post- reading surveys also showed significant changes for many students, for example, in the pre-course survey students reported reading an average of six books in the previous year; in the post-course survey students reported reading an average of eleven books during the current year. In general, students' survey responses as well as reflective letters they wrote after comparing their own pre- and post- surveys, indicated that they grew more knowledgeable about selecting books to read and about ways to create reading situations that worked for them. These surveys and letters also show that most Academic Literacy students came to value reading in new ways, and that they acquired a greater sense of their own agency, responsibility and control of how they read over the course of the school year, as well as a much more elaborate set of ideas, strategies and resources for doing so. One student explained: "... I found out what kind of books I like to read and I understand more about reading, like what do you have to do in order to keep up the reading. Also now at least sometimes I enjoy reading....We have been reading for almost a year now.."
While we have been very encouraged by strong gains in DRP scores and the equally promising changes in students' readership habits and self-concepts, there are many problems we still face. We continue to worry about and work on issues of building background knowledge, increasing fluency, vocabulary development, and building students' capacity to monitor and self-manage their motivation--particularly with texts they don't choose to read, but are assigned. While our students have made significant progress in one year through the Academic Literacy Course , they must continue to develop as readers in order to meet the demands for higher level literacy required of the college students and professionals. This will only happen if we all take responsibility for teaching our students the discourse - that is, how to read the texts that lie at the heart of each discipline - as well as the content of our subjects. Although we realize that we are just beginning to figure out how to do this work, one student's comment reflects a common feeling among many of the Academic Literacy students, " I feel proud of myself as a reader. I really did grow." FACING
THE PROBLEM: TACKLING
THE PROBLEM:
1 The Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) test was developed by Touchstone Applied Science Associates (TASA). For information on this test, you can call TASA at (800)-800-2598. © 1998 WestEd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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