In Conclusion...

Overall, I found Tovani’s “Do I Really Have to Teach Reading” to be hit or miss.  I found some good strategies that I will surely apply to my lesson plans; however, I felt there were far more misses for my content.  By that, as I stated in a previous blog, this book would be great for someone who teaches reading and writing, or even social studies and history.  As for science, I felt Tovani glossed over any useful strategies to help students engage with the text in science.

Some helpful learning strategies that I think will help from her book:

·         Students should ask questions more often instead of just answering them.

·         Using a double diary to help students remember equations and formulas, as well as help students conceptualize through illustrating things like atoms and cells.

·         Giving students direction with the text instead of just having them read everything.

·         Using pictures to help struggling students, as well as ESL students comprehend ideas.

·         Show kids how to discuss a topic, and make the students feel safe in doing so.

Through reading this book, I’ve discovered that perhaps why it is so hard for Tovani to go into great detail in regards to learning through reading strategies in science is because most of her strategies tend to revolve around fiction, storytelling, and personal connections. By that I mean Tovani mentions several times that to help engage students the teacher needs to make the students identify with the text.  For example, a story about a boy and his dog, it isn’t hard for most of the children to be engaged with stories about children and dogs.  However, in science it is “dull” and packed with cold hard facts.  I suppose a science teacher could use analogies to help compensate, and perhaps find fun stories about cells and gravity, but those lessons would be exceptions and unfortunately, unless a child just loves learning about math and science, most children will just have to suffer through the tedium of science.  

As for my experience with blogging in general?  I sort of enjoyed messing around with pictures and layouts.  If I would have had more time, I’m sure I could have made this blog pretty super-awesomeJ. However, I stick with my original assertion, and that is I don’t really have much to say, and I can hardly believe anyone would want to read it even if I did.  Of course, I do like the idea of maybe setting up some sort of blog for my students for homework assignments, interesting facts, etc. 

Direction, Direction, Direction

In chapter 5 “Why Am I Reading This” Tovani has an AP student who is concerned that Tovani’s college preparedness class isn’t helping the student read faster, in fact it is making the student read slower.  When asked “why do you think you are slowing down” the student’s response is because “…everything you are asking us to do requires me to think”.  It dawns on Tovani that her student thinks being a fast reader is the same as a good reader, and that her student is thinking of it as a race. 

I would argue the student is freaking out because, as stated elsewhere in the book, in college there is a ton of reading.  Most of Tovani’s techniques are nice and all, but I would have to agree with the student a bit here, and want to be able to obtain the ability to pull out of the text the most pertinent information from an article, so I could move on to the seven other readings I need to get to this week. One strategy that Tovani suggests, that I agree with, is to give the student direction, to let the student know up front what information the teacher wants the student to pull out of the reading.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to read text in college with absolutely no clear direction or knowing what is the point of the text.  To be fair, I have also had several classes where direction was given, and I wasn’t flying blind with the text.  However, I’d rather focus on the instructors that think that giving direction to the student is “dumbing down the text”.  As Tovani points out that “we can’t expect our students to master the information in less time than we experts did”.  And therein lies the problem, we experts think the content we may be teaching is “easy” and our students should just as easily digest the information we are handing them, but we might forget that the first time we were exposed to our field content it wasn’t just given to us all at once.  It took years to gather together all of the content that we now take for granted, and unfortunately for some of us we forget how hard learning some of that content might have been to acquire in the first place.

I have done this to some extent, but after reading this chapter I am going to start adjusting my lesson plans to directional reading.  After all, what is the point of a student reading an entire chapter on mitosis when all I want my class to get out of the chapter is that cells divide, and these are their phases.

Speaking of mitosis, in one of my previous blogs I gave Tovani a hard time for not giving more strategies for science teachers, well on page 59 she does state how a science teacher used a double diary for his students to write the phase on the left side and draw an image of the corresponding phase on the right side.

ASD

Take a little detour from the Tovani book, and write a tad bit about ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).  After completing the “Reading and Writing Problems” assignment, I continued researching ASD and I came across this article by Newschaffer “Autism: An Emerging Public Health Problem”.  Newschaffer’s article mostly discusses the diagnoses, burden, cost, detection, and prevention of ASD.  When discussing the health aspect, the article was mostly boilerplate, insomuch as what is ASD, theories to explain its prevalence (genetics and vaccines), and interventions early in life and medications that have been shown to be sometimes useful, but what was attention-grabbing about the article was when it discussed the burden and cost of ASD.  According to Newschaffer, the annual cost of ASD in the United States is in the billions of dollars, and that most of that cost is “…shouldered completely by the families of those affected.”. In the classroom setting, just the cost of special educators, modifications, technology, etc., the costs must be staggering, but include the cost to the family, and/or government, for specialists and health costs; it is easy to see how those numbers could make sense.

As mentioned part of the article wrote about vaccines being a piece of the cause of ASD, but I was just remarking that the article does not state that vaccines are the cause just research is being conducted, in fact the article specifically states that there is still no evidence to support vaccines being a contributing factor to ASD.

As stated earlier, what really got my attention in the article was the cost of ASD in the United States, and what 2 billion dollars a year would even look like.  If for no other reason than money, ASD really needs to be “cured”.  

When Sticky Notes Are Not Enuff

When writing in the margins, using sticky notes, is not enough Tovani used a strategy called a “double diary”.  She used it for English literature helping students make personal connections from what they had read, and then defend the connection.  The defense part is kind of a funny story: she was stating that she had a problem with a student, and no matter what question was asked or connection was made the student would always say “so what?”.  Two of the easiest words to use to shut down a struggling student, so the teacher incorporated the “So What?” into the double diary.  According to the author, the student never said “so what” ever again in her presence.

It’s nice to have such strategies available for teachers of literature.  Tovani mentioned that a science teacher modified her “So What?” double diary to work in his class.  Unfortunately, Tovani doesn’t write anymore on the matter, however, as a science teacher, I would really like to have read how her science teacher peer adapted the double diary.  I like to think the thinking strategy would work well in a lab setting.  I have seen some lab sheets that teachers use that pretty much do something similar to this “So What?” thinking strategy, unless I am just misremembering and I am really a genius that just thought of the perfect worksheet to accompany a lab (both could be true). 

Lab:

1.       Connection to the textbook (what are you doing in this lab activity that relates to the textbook)

2.       Ask a question and/or draw a conclusion

3.       “So What?” What does this lab have to do with what you learning in the class?

4.       How does this thinking help you better understand the textbook?

5.       Bring the thinking back to the textbook

I don’t know which would be easier teaching: literature or science (I know I personally wouldn’t be any good at teaching English, since my punctuation is terrible).  But my point is that Tovani is an English teacher, and most of these reading strategies I’ve come across in this book would need to be drastically changed to fit a science class.  For example, in this section of the book I am writing about, she’s asking the students to draw on personal experiences to better understand the text; however, it is hard to ask a student to draw on personal experiences when asking them to comprehend the principles of the Lewis Dot Structure.

Final thought on this strategy is that I think it would work well for most non-science classes.

Using Pictures to Read

In chapter six Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse, Tovani shows her class a picture of a shark jumping out of the water about to attack a man dangling from a rope ladder attached to a helicopter. Above the image it states that the photo is real. She asks the students “what do you think?”  After a while the students start to respond to the photo thinking it is a fake, and Tovani asks them why they think it is a fake. 

What she did was engage her readers with as little text as possible, but despite the lack of text the point of the exercise was to show that how they “read” the picture by asking questions, make connections, and making determinations on the sources authenticity is what all readers should do while reading text. She points out that thinking while reading is difficult to gage since it is “complex” and “invisible”.  The only way to measure the students thinking, while reading is for them to be able to talk about it or write it down some way. 

This is where note taking comes into play.  Below are her guidelines she for her students:

1.       Write the thinking next to the words on the page that cause you to have the thought.

2.       If there isn’t room on the text to write, draw a line showing the teacher where the thinking is written.

3.       Don’t copy the text; respond to it.

4.       Merely underlining text is not enough.  Thinking about the text must accompany the underling.

5.       There is no one way to respond to text.  Here are some possible options: Ask a question, make a connection to something familiar, give an opinion, draw a conclusion, and make a statement.

Even though this is a blog and not notes, I am aware of the fact that I broke her third rule by just copying the text, and lol, if we’re being honest, I’ve underlined a lot of the passages from this book.  That being said, maybe this is why some students have trouble with text because speaking as a person that has problems with text, if I do not grasp the text no matter how many times I read it I am not going to be able to respond to the text if I do not understand it, or care about the content. 

Example being the Rosenblatt article, I could read the words, but I had no idea what the author was talking about.  I would read a sentence, and just go “huh?”. It seemed so silly to me that this level of reading comprehension was required to understand something so simple.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of reading, but the only take away I got from the Rosenblatt article was that the author seemed a bit pretentious, or at the very least, made the article more important that is.   

Sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but I do believe that Tovani is correct in regards that the only way to gage what has been learned through reading is through talking about it or writing about it, and some of her guidelines I think I will give a try in my classroom.    

Do We Really Need Textbooks?

In Chapter Four: Real Rigor, Tovani states that textbooks are “too hard, too long, and too boring” (page 37).  She points out that the problem with textbooks is that they try to cram to much information into the curriculum despite the fact that for many of the students the text is too difficult, with too many concepts, and a lot of new vocabulary without much chance to use it. 

Despite the many problems with textbooks, it appears they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  She quotes Richard Strong, and I found it pretty interesting as well:

“Like it or not, textbooks are here to stay.  Even as technology changes the nature of nonfiction reading into a multisensory, multitext experience, the textbook—that single, hardbound, seemingly complete container of a year’s worth of content—remains constant…  Even if we choose to reject textbooks completely—it turns out that we would be doing our students a disservice in preparing them for college, where the first-year student is asked to read, on average, eighty pages per class per week, with most of the load coming from textbooks.”

That’s a good point.  Despite all of the flaws with textbooks, they should still be used in the classroom.  However, Tovani believes that including supplemental text, or what she calls “accessible text”, can do wonders in helping the student grasp the material from the textbooks.  Now what she is referring to are texts that are easier to digest such as magazine and newspapers articles.  She believes that this isn’t “dumbing down” the text, but rather articles that are pleasant to the eyes, and a lot friendlier to read.

I agree.  Teaching biology, I’ve discovered that the textbooks cover way too much information that is almost impossible for a freshman, let alone an adult, to digest.  And after what I’ve discovered the End of Course exams considers important, it makes sense to focus on broader ideas of the content, while focusing on a few specifics. And to do that, one of the obvious choices are bringing outside content (non-textbook) material to the class that help drive home the content while making it more interesting to the reader.  Because let’s face it, textbooks are boring.

How to Engage and Not Shame

While reading through this book, Tovani makes a great point to find good examples in less than stellar work.  In the chapter “Moving from Pictures to Text” she decides to have the students read an article (it was about a student who had an overdue library book and ended up having to go to court), and she had her students write in the margins personal thoughts about the article.  She told the students that there were no wrong answers, but rather just an exercise that allowed her to gage where the students reading abilities were at, and where she could better focus the class in the future. 

Anyways, just like any class you’ll always have a bell curve of a few exceptional students, a cluster of average students and a few less than mediocre students.  Tovani would pick a few of the students’ writings and put them on the overhead.  This was the part that I found intriguing, instead of just showing the great examples; Tovani showed the mediocre examples and used them to demonstrate good reading practices. 

One example was from a student that only wrote “Oh well, it’s not my problem”, which sounds pretty disengaging to me, but Tovani showed it to the class and pointed out that the student has done something good readers do, and that is he has decided that the article had no relevance to his life.  In doing so, Tovani is validating the student’s right to not be engaged in everything he/she reads. 

Another example was when a student just underlined passages in the article, but didn’t include any writing of his own.  Tovani told the student that since he underlined the passages he must have found them important, or at the very least made him have a thought on what he underlined.  However, since the teacher is not a mind reader, he would have to write his thoughts down so she would know what he was thinking.

I like the strategy here but maybe not for the same reason as Tovani’s.  I like the idea of calling students out.  Not in the sense to shame them, and not to discredit their work, but putting the students on notice that their work may be presented to the class and that they may have to defend it, I think could produce positive results, and perhaps better engage some of the marginal students. Especially if when the work being presented is shown as a good example, but adding what could be done next time to improve on the work.

Stump the Teacher

Torvani mentions in her book that learning happens through asking questions, not answering them.  Back in my subbing days I used to try "stump the sub", and had the kids work in groups to try to formulate a question from the content that I didn't know.

Don't know if asking questions is better than answering them, in regards to learning, but when I used to have this activity in class you'd really see the students dig into the textbook to try and stump the teacher.

Repetitive Writing

While reading Tovani's book, it occurred to me a lot of her strategies at becoming a better reader include taking notes.  My only concern about that is if I am already a bad reader, doesn't that also mean that I am probably a bad writer?

In my experience, note taking has done me little to no good (unless of course tests that teachers gave me were open notes).  I remember when I started college I was such a diligent note taker.  I would fill spiral upon spiral of notes, but by the time I got to my senior year I hardly filled two pages.  Part of the reason, was through my educational process I was better able to detect the information the instructor was trying to make stick, but mostly it was because I realized that most of the note taking I did rarely made a difference in my performance.

I realized that my digesting the information had little to do with writing it down.  Either I found it interesting or not.  If it was interesting it stuck, boring it didn't (even if I took notes on the content).  Which brings me back to my students: I hope my students can read by the time they reach my class, and ideally they are able to understand learning through reading, but being a realist, and looking at my own hindrances towards reading, I believe the best way to educate my students in science is not through reading, but through doing and watching.

With one caveat: repetitive writing.

I learned that having students write hard scientific words repeatedly they were better able to recall the words.

Example:

Write Deoxyribonucleic Acid 25 times.
Write Photosynthesis 25 times

Just saw this ad last night that hinted at my point about blogging.

My history of blogging:

Well this is a first for me.  Never been much to write for the heck of it, let alone looking for an audience of said writings.

Now I've heard the words "blog" and "blogging"for years now, and I've always looked at bloggers pretty much how Hollywood depicts bloggers, and that is as people that took short cuts and never went to college but now think they are the authority of whatever niche they feel professed in such as fashion, tech, politics, etc.

My opinion hasn't changed.

Hopefully I will be able to really get into this book this week.  Unfortunately I am not the fastest reader, and I have difficulty absorbing information through text.

However, a brief synopsis of the book is as follows:

“Do I really have to teach reading?” This is the question many teachers of adolescents are asking, wondering how they can possibly add a new element to an already overloaded curriculum. And most are finding that the answer is “yes.” If they want their students to learn complex new concepts in different disciplines, they often have to help their students become better readers.

Building on the experiences gained in her own language arts classroom as well as those of colleagues in different disciplines, Cris Tovani, author of I Read It, but I Don't Get It, takes on the challenge of helping students apply reading comprehension strategies in any subject. In Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?, Cris shows how teachers can expand on their content expertise to provide instruction students need to understand specific technical and narrative texts. The book includes:


examples of how teachers can model their reading process for students;
ideas for supplementing and enhancing the use of required textbooks;
detailed descriptions of specific strategies taught in context;
stories from different high school classrooms to show how reading instruction varies according to content;
samples of student work, including both struggling readers and college-bound seniors;
a variety of “comprehension constructors”: guides designed to help students recognize and capture their thinking in writing while reading;
guidance on assessing students;
tips for balancing content and reading instruction.
Cris's humor, honesty, and willingness to share her own struggles as a teacher make this a unique take on content reading instruction that will be valuable to reading teachers as well as content specialists.

The book I have chosen to read is Cris Tovani's "Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?".