Irene Clark's Summary from the “Teachers for a New Era” English Study Group
on October 8, 2004
Topic: “Reading and Writing Connections”
The
TNE English
Study Group began last spring by addressing the question:
“If you knew that most of the students in your
class were going to be teaching, how might (or should) that knowledge impact your teaching?”
This question has served as a springboard for discussing the
nature of
the learning we want to promote in our classrooms, not simply in terms
of
presenting particular content, but, more importantly, of enabling our
students
to continue to learn, to grapple with new texts, and to critique new
ideas. Moreover,
if many of the students in our classes are potential teachers,
everything we do
in class may serve as a model that they will imitate in their own
classrooms. Because we want to “model”
good teaching and
to promote strategies for continued learning, we have a dual
responsibility—to
teach our students specific content and to communicate a method for
learning it.
Fostering connections between reading and writing thus constitutes an
important
means of fostering this continued learning, and the topic for discussion focused on
how to promote effective reading/writing strategies..
In
many classes,
both reading and writing are simply “assigned,” the presumption being
that
students already know how to read critically and write effectively—or
at least that
they should know as a prerequisite to college admission. Of course, we
all know
that many students lack these abilities, but for many professors, the
only
response is to express dissatisfaction about student inadequacies—a
phenomenon that
has been referred to as the “assign and complain” method of teaching. How transcend assigning and complaining in
order to teach students useful strategies constitutes a significant
challenge
for those of us who teach potential teachers (and, in fact, any
students).
The
opening question
for this session was: “What do you do in
your classes to help your students read deeply and critically—different
from
the way in which they read for pleasure (or are used to reading)”—and
discussion focused on a number of extremely useful approaches and
strategies. These
are as follows:
- Putting the text in context;
that is, giving the students a choice of which text to pick (from a
selection of texts) instead of choosing texts for them. The advantage
is that students have to pay attention to the texts they select,
thereby increasing their engagement with them.
- Modeling close reading—by
doing a close critical analysis of a text, possibly a paragraph or just
a sentence or two
- Asking open-ended questions.
- Holding a discussion on the
text in which everyone participates, no one can repeat what anyone else
has said.
- Examining texts as
writers—exploring how the text “works.” The point was made that
students often read an essay like a short story, and that they need to
learn to read an essay the way they would write an essay—learning to
read like a writer, making the connection between the thesis and supporting points.
- Reading aloud.
- Having students write about
their personal involvement with a topic before they read a text on that
subject.
- Having published authors come
to read their work aloud
The
second
question focused on how instructors connected reading and writing in
the
classroom. Responses were as follows:
- The first draft of an essay is
the student’s own perspective; readings are then done to expand the
viewpoint of subsequent drafts—a sort of scaffolding.
- Look at models of essays,
focusing on, for example, introductory paragraphs, to allow the
students to see how they can be drastically different from each other
- Look at student texts as
readings, asking students to analyze each other’s, and their own texts.
- Teachers model how to read
essays critically, showing students how to respond to student work
(particularly useful in a conference)
- Read aloud from published
works, an activity that helps to develop the student’s “ear. ” Reading the student’s own work aloud helps
the student discern errors or infelicities.
- Leilani Hall shared a
metacognitive approach in which she tested student understanding of a
reading by asking students to write a definition of a term from the
reading. They were then asked to read the
definition in the text and write about the difference between the two.
During
the final part of the meeting, a breakout session was held in which
participants
discussed a list of critical reading
strategies
which had been compiled by Sally Diessner from Dr. Kroll’s “Reading and
Writing Connections” class and a
handout which outlined a comparison between the reading and writing
processes.
Participants noted which strategies they used in their classrooms and
then
shared with the whole group which strategies they had found most
successful. The
group concluded that reading and writing are part of the same
continuum; one
cannot be done, or taught, without the other; and further, that
modeling and
reading aloud are privileged in the classroom as ways to communicate
this.
Everyone enjoyed the Indian food,
and during this week, several participants have already noted that they
have
incorporated some of these reading/writing strategies into their
classroom
teaching.
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