How to improve literacy rates: a simple plan

The government is considering a simple plan. To improve literacy you mandate regular high-stakes multiple-choice national testing in our schools. This keeps teachers on their toes and students focused on what matters most.

I’ve just come out of a classroom where literacy rates seemed to have improved quite unexpectedly and dramatically. For eight weeks, a group of 90 postgraduate students, all of them training to be teachers in secondary classrooms, have been doing a course called ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’. At the end of the course, the students were asked to respond to the statement ‘My own literacy skills have improved.’ 18% strongly agreed, 39% agreed, 28% were neutral, 13% disagreed and 3% strongly disagreed.

It’s hardly hard-data research, but something of significance appears to have happened. Here are 90 students who have each had at least 15 years of institutional learning, and nearly 60% of them think their literacy skills have improved over eight weeks.

What did we do?

Did we make sure the students focussed on their reading and writing by giving them a test? No.

Did the university tell me that my job was dependent on whether or not literacy rates amongst the students improved? No.

Instead we did what I think much good education has done in the past: we wrestled with an unsettling series of questions, and we tried to get our heads around a challenging body of knowledge. We read a great deal (a textbook and, between us, over 300 shorter texts); we wrote a great deal (each student reported on two significant pieces of original research and most made substantial written contributions to over a dozen online discussions); and we talked a lot in our weekly tutorials. Because the content was, for most of the students, relevant and disturbing, it stimulating a great deal of thinking. A number of the students found themselves mulling over issues as they cooked their dinner or walked the dog or stood in the shower.

The government has a simple plan. Unfortunately it is missing the point about how people learn to read and write.

If we want our young to become better readers and writers, we need to make sure that they do lots of reading and writing. The government’s plan will reinforce current pressures to narrow the curriculum. There won’t be time for wide reading and creative writing. Worse, there will be less and less time for talk, which is where so much fruitful engagement starts, and less time for meandering and mulling. Test scores might go up, but real literacy will be a casualty.

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In a future blog post I’ll write more about our ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’ course. It’s been highly stimulating and intense.

ELPC 4: And finally, a rubric

This morning I’ve been working on a rubric for the journals referred to in the earlier posts in this series. I don’t like marking with rubrics (but then I don’t like marks much!), but I do find rubrics useful as a way of exposing my values and criteria to my students. It’s good to talk about draft rubrics.

So here’s the one I’ve come up with this morning.

This is going to be of more interest to my students than to other readers, though Karen, Dan and Elfarran will notice their fingerprints on this one.

Sorry about the size of the print.

And here are the notes I want to attach to this rubric, for us to talk about in our first tutorial.

Notes:

1. The final journal submission has a word limit of 2000 words. This is twice the word limit of the last journal assessment submission.2. Your 2000 words can be in the form of extracts culled from your ongoing journal, or in the form of a 2000 word paper, drawing ideas and material from your journals, tutorials, reading, interactions with students and teaching practice.

3. I will be asking myself a series of specific questions when I read these 2000 words. These are:

• Has this student made it clear what he/she sees as his/her ‘core disciplinary business’? Does he/she see this in terms of (i) the traditional historically approved version? (ii) his/her personal heart-of-heart version? (iii) the radically transformed literacy landscape we now live in version?
• Has the student made it clear that he/she has become informed about the current debate about literacy in general and writing in particular?
• Has this student thought through any implications a redefining of writing would have on his/her philosophy and pedagogy?

4. You’ll notice that this time I’ve put ‘contact with staff’ in with ‘reading’. Last time ‘contact with staff’ was in with ‘interactions with students’. It didn’t sit well there, as many of you wanted to talk about Tovani and Prof Lowe together.

5. It is my hypothesis (obviously shared by many of you) that feeling a sense of belonging to a vibrant and stimulating community is a key in the development of successful literacy skills. Criteria 3 is there to give you an opportunity to reflect on this aspect. If the ELPC G2 community has been stimulating, here is an opportunity to discuss this. If, on the other hand, you disagree with my hypothesis, here is an opportunity to challenge it.
6. Criteria 4 & 5 are not compulsory. You do not have to address these in your 2000 words. But they have been included in the rubric because, for some of you, the teaching practice and/or the Writing Skill Task will have made a significant contribution to your thinking about literacy.

ELPC Part 3: Redefining writing? What next!

I used to think that I worked best on my own, down at the coast with my own emerging thoughts and the world shut out. It was never true, I now realize. Even when I was writing my PhD thesis down here, I was reading books and articles and drawing on long conversations with my supervisors. I was also sharing chapter drafts with them. That’s the way it’s been over the past couple of days, too, but now I’ve got a PLN for the sharing of ideas. As I walk along the beach or jot ideas down, I have Teresa’s voice quietly urging me to be more controversial, Elfarran reminding me that my own preoccupations are not necessarily the same as my students, Susan and J.D. letting me know that they’re enjoying reading my stuttering thoughts, Dan taking me back to the connection between love and literacy, and Karen (as always) making the view of the territory clearer. You’ve all helped me sharpen my focus question and also given me ideas for the structure of the course.

I’ve settled on the following as the focus question:

Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?

In our first lecture or tutorial, I’ll mull aloud about the various parts of this. How is writing being redefined? The history of passing fads in education. Elfarran’s breakdown of the question ‘What’s my core disciplinary purpose?’ into three parts:

• in its traditional historically approved version,
  
• in my personal heart of hearts version and
• in the radically transforming literacy landscape we now live in version.

So I’ll say a bit to begin with. But the main business of the four weeks (it’s a ridiculously short time!) will be the students themselves exploring the question, in a number of related ways:

1. A literature search, based on Michael Wesch’s How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class. One of the comments on Michael Wesch’s post has described how Moodle might be used for this project, and later today or tomorrow I’m going to post a couple of examples to guide the students. In Week 1 of our month the students will find, read and create an abstract of (say) 3 articles, in Week 2 they will read the extracts created by their colleagues, and in the Week 3 tutorial we’ll have a discussion centred around our focus question and drawing on the ideas generated by all this research. I think this will be manageable, stimulating and (most importantly in a teacher-education course) repeatable in the students’ own classrooms.
2. Again later on tonight I’m going to create a Ning for us to use to share ideas. We’ve been using Moodle, but there are three reasons why I want to add a Ning to our box of tricks. Firstly, I want to explore with the students the idea that we stimulate writing by belonging to a stimulating community (thanks, Dan, for your comments on this aspect), and Nings work particularly well in creating an online community. Secondly, the Moodle blog feature doesn’t allow students to read others blog. And thirdly not all schools have Moodle, and Nings are free and easy to set up, and so again will add to each student’s repertoire.
3. All of the formal assessment for this part of the course will come from the students’ blogs. This is what we decided at the beginning of the course, and though I’m not sure I’d do it this way if I had my time over, the students have understandably resisted the idea of changing what we originally agreed on. I’m going to construct a rubric for this. I’m not a big fan of rubrics as marking devices (that’s a whole other story), but I do like the kinds of conversations that occur when a rubric is produced. Rubrics help clarify expectations and surface values, even if they don’t help assign marks in any objective way. The focus in the rubric is going to be on how deeply the student has researched and thought through the issues raised by the focus question. Karen la Bonte’s response to my last blog post is going to be especially useful here, and I’ll be pinching some of her words for inclusion in the rubric (which won’t please Karen, given her own distaste for rubrics!).
4. Each student will be required to work on one writing-related (defined broadly) skill, a skill that is going to be useful for them as a teacher. I’m going to do one too. I’m going to create my first digital narrative. (Karen has recommended Voicethreads as a good digital narrative tool, so I’ll be investigating this.) The subject of my digital narrative is going to be connected to this part of the course. In Week 4, those students who would like to share their little projects will do so in the tutorial. All students will write about their developing skill in their blogs.
5. In Week 2, my colleague Assoc Prof Kaye Lowe will run the tutorial on ‘Writing and Spelling’.  This will give us more food for thought as we think about the relevance of rethinking our attitudes towards the teaching of writing.

So, five interconnected elements, all revolving around the question ‘Redefining writing? What next! Is this just a distraction from my core disciplinary purpose?’

ELPC Part 2: Inching towards a more charged focus question

So. Here I am, at the coast on my own for three days. Time to think and read and write. Bliss. It’s 7.30 at night and I’ve finished dinner (but still got my apron on); a salmon and bean frittata with an avocado, pea and olive salad. A glass and a half of cheap but pleasant red wine. I’ve been for a walk on the beach during a break in the wet weather, there’s a fire on, and I’m like a pig in poo.

I’m planning to write a short blog post each day. I’m here to sort out the focus and structure of the second half of our ‘literacy across the curriculum’ unit which I wrote about in my last post. The focus for our final four weeks is writing.

I’ve just re-read the post, and Teresa’s comment.  She wondered about my proposed research questions, and very politely suggested that they didn’t quite hit the mark. She’s right. They lack punch. They have no real charge, they don’t challenge pre-conceived assumptions. I need to work on them.

My students come from all the secondary disciplines, and they’re in the middle of a five week block in schools, where I’m guessing some of the bigger educational questions will be subsumed by concerns about classroom management and finding the time and energy to prepare properly.  Some of the students may well be wondering about the relevance of four weeks back at university thinking about writing.

And while they’ve been out in schools, I’ve done my own wondering. I’ve been thinking and writing about the many different tacks that we might take when we’re looking at writing.  What is the function of writing? Does writing imply an exclusive focus on the written word? What about multiple modalities? 21^st century literacies?  Literacies in the digital age? There are so many potential tacks that it’s easy to get lost.

So today I’ve been trying to find a charged and challenging question that cuts through some of this. Something that takes us into the heart of all this complexity and tension.

How about something like this:

Writing-as-composing, Multiple-modalities-in-writing, writing-for-web-2.0. What Now? What Next? Is all this distracting me from my core disciplinary business?

I like that this one acknowledges the skepticism, then asks us to examine it. I also like the way it invites us to think carefully about what our core business is, and to see if re-thinking aspects of writing fit into this core.

And it doesn’t have a simple answer, like my earlier version. There’s a strong debate going on in educational circles about this very question.

How does it sound to you Teresa? Others? Better?

****

Finding the right words for our focus question is just one part of the planning. There’s also the students’ reading (I’m going to adapt Michael Wesch’s idea on ‘how to get my students finding and reading 94 articles before the next class‘); the development of a composing skill (I wrote about this in my last blog post);  the way we might use the University Moodle and a Ning; the content of the tutorials; and so on. In some ways, the precise wording seems such a small part of what needs to be done. But (because I’m going through a bit of a Dickens-phase in my reading at the moment), I’m reminded of the way Dickens used to spend weeks playing with titles for his books before he could begin the real creating. The title often held some kind of essence for him. That’s how I feel about the focus question.

ELPC Part 1: A fertile research question

When it comes to learning something new, just listening to an expert is usually not enough. Nor is passively reading. Usually we need to do something, to actively construct the knowledge ourselves, from a number of different sources and for a particular purpose (often to teach or explain it to someone else).

This seems to be the principle driving the inspirational Michael Wesch and his university class. It’s the principle behind the structure of our postgraduate course called ‘literacy across the curriculum’ in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. (The course acronym is ELPC, hence my title.)

For the first four weeks of this literacy course, the students each had to do their own piece of research. In our last four weeks (in October, after the students have spent time in schools), I’m wanting to again have them actively constructing knowledge from a variety of sources and for a particular purpose.

I’m writing this blog post to help me find the words to describe this proposed project.

****

I’ve already discovered that these are quite remarkable students. Ranging in age from early 20s to mid 50s, from all kinds of disciplines and walks of life, many with their own families and the perspectives that come from being a parent, they’ve begun to challenge or extend accepted definitions of literacy.

• Michele and Renee were struck by the usefulness of reflective writing and blogging, and wondered how this might become a part of their teaching in the humanities and the arts;
• Niomi, Matthew, Adam, Pip and Rob wanted us to include aspects of ‘mathematical literacy’;
• Jane, Leigh and Alison urged us to include the ability to read images;
• Terry described the experiences of a friend of his who struggled with reading but came to know the world profoundly through talking, acting, role-playing and discussing, or what Terry called his friend’s advanced  “vocal, aural, relational and dramatic literacy”;
• Sarah wrote, “Literacy is about using our hands, our voices, our expressions, pictures, words and emotions.”
• Brett wrote a wonderful blog post about ‘reading the environment’, in which he told the story of a group of scouts going out into the bush.

Rachel eloquently summed up this desire to think more extensively and inclusively as follows:

everything can be read: … the world is made up of signs. Thus, in order to be truly literate, we need to be able to actively participate in multiple mediums. Yes, we need to have an deep and intimate understanding of written text and to be able to produce text in a way that precisely communicates our intentions. I don’t believe that imperative will ever go away. However, it is increasingly clear that, in order to survive and to make survival meaningful, our children need to be able to “read” technology, visual media, numerous intellectual disciplines, the non-human environment and one another. It’s knee-knockingly intimidating but as I write this, I’m also excited by the possibilities. Imagine being able to train our brains to easily roam over so many dimensions of existence, and to competently convey our insight to so many diverse beings. Truly mind-blowing.

****

I want to try to build on this kind of thinking in our last four weeks together. This time though, instead of having each of them do his or her own research project (as in the first four weeks), I’d like us all to be working together on a single project.

The focus, this time, is writing or composing (thanks Karen!).

So right now I’m trying to find the words for a fertile research question that would help us explore writing in a way that had the students constructing meaning for a particular purpose.

My friend Karen La Bonte has already suggested a couple of questions around which we might focus our work.

Do we express ourselves only to reflect what is already known (which we have recently digested), or are we creating new knowledge in and via our composition?

Does the act of composing have to be language-oriented to be valid?

These two questions connect very nicely with the kinds of questions the students have been raising.

But there’s more I’d like this research question to encompass. When the postgraduate students recently reported on their own research, many made the point (explicitly or implicitly) that literacy and love are connected, that literacy development is excited by exciting relationships, that a person is motivated to become literate through a desire to belong.

Reuben described the secure and stimulating emotional climate in which he gained his insatiable love of reading; I’ve quoted his words in an earlier blog post. Coming at it from the opposite direction, Geoffrey wrote about the effect his father’s sudden death had on his literacy learning as a 5 year old.

Geoffrey’s father died suddenly when Geoffrey was 5, and this had a profound effect.

What my own experience as a child of 5 and 6yrs old highlights for me is what a huge impact one’s emotional state has on one’s ability to read and comprehend and find joy and pleasure in literacy. Powerful emotions such as trauma, grief, anxiety and inadequacy may make it impossible for a student to learn anything, let alone enter into a text and gain some pleasure from it. I was unable to learn some of the basic building blocks of literacy because my consciousness was flooded and overloaded by some very powerful emotions. I think there are many young people in a similar situation as I was but for other reasons no doubt. Martial breakdown, domestic violence, homelessness and sexual abuse, would I believe all have a similar debilitating impact on a student trying to comprehend a text. For them as well as for me, it would not be before these intense emotions have dissipated that I or they could begin to enter into the other world that unfolds in literature. I was never [at school] able to go back and relearn or learn for the first time the things that I had been too engulfed in pain to absorb.

As Jane put it:

If the context we live within is fractured or unsupported, absent or indifferent, volatile or dormant, then the chances are that we will struggle to make any connections that are meaningful and⁄or insightful.

Literacy develops within a context, within an emotional climate. My own hypothesis (obviously shared by many of the students) is that we’re barking up the wrong tree if our literacy strategies continually focus on the individual, and in particular on what skills he or she lacks. We need to be thinking more about creating the environment, the culture, the community, the relationships, in which a desire to become literate can and will grow.

I want our final four weeks together to explore and reflect this. I want our research work to be vibrantly collaborative, conducted partly online and partly face-to-face in our four tutorials (three of them taken by me, one by Kaye Lowe).

So what’s the research question that captures all of this?

I feel blocked.

****

I’ve just been for a walk. Walking usually helps. On the way home I had a thought. I think the research question might come in two forms.

First there is the research question which we as a group would be working on. It might be worded as follows:

Do current theories and practices take too narrow a view of what constitutes ‘writing’?

This would involve some review of the literature, lots of discussion, some tutorials and some composing by each of the students.

What kind of composing?

Well, perhaps a second research question might guide the students’ work. Something like the following:

Given that writing (composing) (1) functions both to express and to discover and (2)  has many forms (not just word-focussed), what writing skill (traditionally associated with my discipline or inspired by a different discipline) might I develop over the next four weeks which will improve my teaching and⁄or my students’ learning?

I like the direction that this question would take us (though it feels too wordy). The students would each find a skill that they wanted to develop, and over the four weeks would work to develop it; lots of scope for variety and creativity, but lots of cross-fertilisation as well. I’ve already begun to think about what skill I might work on in the next couple of weeks, to model the kind of approach I’m thinking about. The student journal (blog) would become the place both where the student experimented and developed the skill, and where he or she reflected on the progress being made. The progress would be shared informally in the tutorials and online. Each student would leave with a useful skill honed, and Kaye Lowe and I would be left with lots of raw material for some useful reflection and writing of our own.

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I have a test that I like to use for research questions. It’s based on the work of the Israeli educationists Yoram Harpaz and Adem Lepstein, who suggest that a good research question must meet the following six criteria:

OPEN: The question had no simple single answer, but probably several, different from and even contradictory to each other.
UNDERMINING: The question undermines or challenges the basic assumptions and fixed beliefs of the student; cast doubts on the ‘self-evident’, on ‘common sense; uncovers basic conflicts lacking a simple solution; and required thinking about the roots of things.
RICH: The question requires grappling with rich content indispensable to understanding humanity and the world, that is impossible to understand without careful and lengthy reflection and/or research.
CONNECTED: The question is relevant to the life of the student, and to the society in which he lives.
CHARGED: The question has an ethical dimension, a strong emotional and ethical charge which motivates further inquiry, reflection, discussion and/or research.
PRACTICAL: It is a question that lends itself to further to exploration, about which information is available to the student.

I’ve managed to negotiate (with work and family) three days at the beginning of next week when I’m going down to the coast (this time with broadband USB stick!) to think some more about these questions and to begin to put a firmer structure to these final fours weeks in October.

So I’d be interested in your thoughts. Do the questions meet the criteria? Does the approach make sense?

Some thoughts on the fly

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. A lot has happened, is happening, and I keep trying to find time to write about it. There’s no substantial time right now, with journals to read, schools to visit and lessons to plan and follow up. But I don’t want too much to slip by without at least a mention. So here are some thoughts on the fly.

Heloise and Abelard

My Year 11 Extension class are studying the connections between text, culture and value and are currently working on a text of their own choosing. I especially enjoy this part of the course, especially when a student discovers a text that opens up worlds. For Will, strange and compelling worlds have been opened up in his reading of the letters of Heloise and Abelard, and his study of two appropriations, Pope’s poem and the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If you’re interested in what a 21st century 16-year-old might see and feel as a result of reading this story, I warmly recommend taking the time to browse through some of Will’s blogs on our class Ning. His writing describes his struggles to understand how such a tragedy could take place. Will is drawn deeply into the story of the two lovers, he’s appalled by the punishment dealt out to Abelard and the tragedy of their enforced separation, and he is profoundly curious and puzzled by the question of whether a commitment to the church and God can ever wipe clean the memory of a passionate love.

In the last week or so, Will has written a series of letters, in the form of poems, between Heloise and Abelard. All of them are published on the Ning. Here is the second one:

To Abelard, my lord,

My love I write to you at last,
Although I thought these passions passed.
Like a phoenix from the cinder,
Love returns again to hinder
This process of forgetfulness,
And draws me from my dark recess.

This letter comes from painful tears,
Forgotten in these silent years.
Unsettled by your words and woes,
That stirred me from my sweet repose.
Sadness flows and blots the page
As I write from holy cage.

I cannot rest within these walls,
These rugged rocks and hallowed halls.
Pensive in my own bastille,
Locked away with holy seal.
My mind does stray to thoughts of old
As passions come and then unfold.

They told us love should come through trust,
But what is love if without lust?
Infatuation takes command,
With trepidation hand in hand.
Look past these consecrated vows
And find the place where passion grows.

You have proven me your affection,
And love has seen its resurrection.
Now memory takes authority,
When emotions claim priority.
We can hope to fight desire,
But we will never quench Love’s fire.

Involving university students in research

For the past fortnight I’ve been mulling over a dilemma.

My university students are currently out on a five week stint in schools, so our ‘Literacy across the curriculum‘ unit is on hold. We’ve had what I think is a highly stimulating first month, looking in particular at the question ‘I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?‘.

But what do do when the students return for our last four weeks together?

I’ve suggested to my students that we vary the original plan and have them doing some research on a literacy-related topic of interest to each of them; but they have let me know that they’re worried about workloads and they’d prefer it if we stuck with the original plan which had me sharing with them some of my ideas about writing. I’m worried that the final four weeks will be too passive (teacher presenting, students absorbing); they’re worried that the final four weeks (if we follow my later suggestion) will be too over-loaded given the workload they’re expecting.

So what to do? How to find a way through this dilemma?

A discussion with my colleague Anita Collins and some mulling over the example set by the wonderful Michael Wesch has given me the beginnings of a glimpse of a way through the fog.

Michael Wesch organises his Digital Ethnography course so that he and his students are involved together in some authentic research. As he writes on his wiki:.

Our goal in this course is to work together to complete the best research project possible. Therefore, given the dynamic nature of ethnographic research, there is no fixed schedule. Even the points below are not fixed. We can redistribute point values at any time. We are simply using points to motivate us all to stay on track and work as well together as we can. Ultimately, our success will not be measured in A’s and B’s but the quality of our work and its impact on the world.

Could I set things up for the final four weeks so that the students and I are involved in a piece of authentic research together, with me as the co-ordinating spirit (setting the question, suggesting resources, setting up the structure for student inputs), but with the students exploring the question in diverse yet connected ways? I would draw things together, write up our final report, broadcast it to relevant places in the world; the students would contribute their own thinking coming from their diverse disciplines and perspectives. This would give a focus to their journal writing and so wouldn’t vary expectations or add to the volume of their workload (and so would meet some of their concerns about my most recent suggestion); yet it would inject into our final four weeks the necessary element of students actively using what they coming to understand (and so would meet the concerns that I had about the possible passive nature of our original plan).

I think this could work. I’ll mull some more.

I’ll need to think, for example, about what our central research question might be. In a sense, I think that’s the easy part. We’re studying literacy across the curriculum, we looked at reading (defined broadly) in the first four weeks, and we’re planning to look at writing (again defined broadly) in our final month. So our research question would be something like this:

How does each of the disciplines write? That is, how do the disciplines communicate their knowledge, within the discipline and to outsiders? And can the disciplines learn from the writing modes of each other?

This probably needs work (thoughts or suggestions anyone?), but it’s a start.

Why Shakespeare? A student perspective

Recently folk at the English Companion Ning discussed the question ‘Why teach Shakespeare?’ from the teachers’ perspective. A week or so ago, my two Year 10 classes (in Canberra) joined with Jenny Luca’s Year 9 class (in Melbourne) to discuss the same question from a the students’ point-of-view.

The full discussion can be found on our Ning. Here is a summary.

… because of its relevance to modern life (Charlotte)

I can’t think of any good reason (quite a few students!)

… because the English Department is either lazy or unimaginative (Adrian, being provocative but stimulating too)

… to develop and broaden our interest in literature (Angus)

… because I love Shakespeare (Linda)

… to further consolidate themes and ideas taught in English classes (Josh)

… because it speaks to our age group [we're currently studying Romeo and Juliet] (Christian)

… to learn about love (Mayank)

… to find out where our language came from (James)

… to prepare us for Years 11 & 12 (Max, Kurt)

… to separate the students planning to do Advanced and Standard English in Year 11 (Angus)

… because it has a timeless quality (Nick, Christian)

… because it is magic, it makes me smile and it captivates my mind (Sam)

… to understand and appreciate why there’s so much respect for Shakespeare (Amber)

… to understand the links between our culture and the play  (Amber)

… so you can get better at analysing symbolism and studying techniques (Jack)

… because you can learn about life from studying classics like this  (Laura)

… to become competent at extracting meaning from texts  (Gurtej)

… because we are now old enough to be able to handle a challenging text (Eliot)

… because it is so famous, and there are so many references to it in modern culture  (Rachael)

… to broaden our knowledge of the English language (Alex, Nick)

… to learn about other times and other lives (Taylia)

… because the twists and turns fo events that lead to pure tragedy is great (Elsa)

… because it’s a challenge (Will)

… because the play has everything: drama, comedy, action, suspense (Jo)

Soon after these thoughts were posted on our Ning, I made cards out of the summaries, and in one of my Year 10 classes I got each of the students to ‘adopt a card’, which they then used as a starting point to explain their point of view. We had a terrific discussion, with those saying that studying Shakespeare was a waste of our precious time more prominent than the above summaries would suggest. Then, after I’d listened to all the very eloquent arguments on both sides, I announced to the class:

Well, I’ve listened carefully to what you’ve all been saying, and frankly those arguing that there are better ways we should be spending our time have been surprisingly convincing. Therefore, starting from next lesson, we’re going to abandon Romeo and Juliet and do other types of English work. That’s it. That’s the end of our time with Shakespeare.

There was a shocked silence in the room. Some of the boys looked genuinely upset, others disbelieving. Of course I then told them that I’d been joking and that they might each reflect on their gut reaction when they heard the ‘news’.

Discussing classic texts with Year 11 students

My year 11 Extension class is doing a course called ‘Text-Value-Culture’, and last term we read ‘The Odyssey’ and talked about the way this story has been appropriated by different writers for different purposes. This term each of the students has chosen a pre-WW2 text and a couple of appropriations to study.

You can read about what the students are doing on our Class Ning.

Some of the students have expressed an interest in finding people from outside our classroom who share their interest in a particular text. Shannon is exploring Poe’s ‘The Raven’. Tom is looking at how the story of Tarzan has been adapted by different cultures. Will started with the story of Heloise and Abelard, and that has taken him to a poem by Alexander Pope and the film ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. And Michael is reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

If you are interested in reading what these students have written about their texts,  then feel free join our Ning and to join the conversations.

The mystery of learning to read

My colleague at the university and in our course on ‘Literacy across the curriculum, Associate Professor Kaye Lowe, has talked with our students about the essential mystery of how we learn to read. It’s often impossible to pinpoint what it was (if it was any single thing) that led to us ‘getting it’.

It seems to me that this applies to all kinds of learning, that the successful classroom is essentially a mysterious place, though I’ve tried to put my finger on some of the essential elements in a series of earlier posts, culminating in On the nature of literacy (with a nod to Spinoza).

It’s a mystery that many of my postgraduate students are wrestling with at the moment. They’re wondering both how they themselves learned to read, and how they can set up a classroom environment of deep learning when they graduate.

One student, Reuben, has done a particularly fine job at capturing the learning environment in which he learned to read. He has given me permission to quote from his online journal:

I have always had an insatiable appetite for books and reading and I have been attempting to recall or understand my motivation as a young reader. What was the cause of this appetite, where did it come from? There are a few elements that I believe contributed; I was often read to by my parents, and the material that they read to me was often above the expected level of comprehension so that I had to struggle to understand it. It is my hypothesis that the link was formed in my mind between information and books – and I have always desired information. I think, developmentally speaking, this is true of most children (as anyone who has had a chain of endless “why’s” from a toddler can testify). However I was indulged in the aspect by my parents and in particular by my father on the topic of ecology, which is a large part of his work. He would never shy away from complex, involved answers which I found fascinating.

Once I was able to read reasonably well, my parents also made a point of frequently taking me to the public library or secondhand book stores, and allowing me to make my own choices. I can still recall the first secondhand book that I chose for myself, and took immense pleasure in reading.

The title of the book was “How Things Work” and featured diagrams and explanations of the scientific workings behind a range of otherwise mysterious devices and phenomena such as telephones, radio-broadcasts, weather patterns and geological formations. Obviously, it was adapted for a child’s level of literacy, but I believe the title is a very telling statement on my personal motivation as an early reader. I was driven by a desire to learn ‘How Things Worked’.

This desire was very much a natural phenomenon – how then to capture some practical application of the same enthusiasm. Can it be engineered in students? Cris Tovani discusses this, with the anecdote regarding the teaching of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although I remain a little apprehensive about my own skills in the area, I am convinced of the importance of modeling as described therein. There is no more powerful motivator than a confident display of skill, as long as it is tempered with the information that it is entirely achievable.

Another vivid memory that I recall when considering my personal history as a reader is an incident involving my Grandmother’s second husband Trevor, who I quite admired because of his own proficiency with language. As a child and a young teenager I would often visit them for holidays, and reading would be a primary entertainment. At this particular stage, I was obsessed with the technical skill of reading, and the speed at which I could accomplish it. I would work my way through a huge stack of library books, proclaiming to anyone within audible distance when I had finished a book. Trevor must have been watching this behavior, because he began to quiz me on details from the books whenever I finished one. Without explicitly stating it, I was made aware of a large deficiency in my understanding of the books. Though I am sure it was not his intention, I can recall feeling ashamed to discover that I had not really been reading the books at all, but just mechanically processing the text with my eyes.

The exercise that we completed in the tutorial this week made me recall this memory and I am sure there in a profound lesson there, though I am still not certain how to explain the sensation of sudden realization, the radical change in thinking and perspective that I experienced.

*****

Kaye Lowe has been reminding us that where we once tried to understand the reading process by seeing what struggling readers had difficulty with, we now understand more about how to encourage literacy by observing how good readers came to read. It seems to me that Reuben has described some of what’s essential.

Thoughts on ‘literacy across the curriculum’ from my students

The university course is now almost a fortnight old, and the 90 postgraduate students have all begun their blogs. The course is called “Literacy across the curriculum”, and the students have been writing about their current understanding of the term ‘literacy’, their response to the question But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?, our textbook, and the various discussions and sessions we’ve had together.

We’re trying to find some way of making these blogs available for all the students to read. Some have public blogs, such as Charmaine’s  The Write Words , Amy’s Inky Ponderances,  Michelle’s Readin’ and Writin’, Mat’s Stuff that happened and Brad’s 21st Century Education.

But there’s lots of other stimulating writing from other students too. Until we’ve found a way of making more of these blogs accessible, here is a selection from a few of them:

Andrew

What is literacy? To many the term refers exclusively to reading and writing. I have a very different view. “Literacy is the ability to authentically participate in a given context.” By this definition possibly the most literate folk to have ever existed were the Japanese Ninja. Their job description not only included killing people without leaving marks, but such diverse activities as ettiquete, diplomacy, languages, singing, dancing, and many more, such that they could participate authentically in any context; they could blend in. To be illiterate is to feel uncomfortable, unable, out of place.

Thomas

I struggle with the simplicity of the definition that describes ‘literacy’ as ‘being able to read and write, or to understand something.’  By this definition I consider myself to be highly literate in some languages, fields, and discourses but completely and utterly illiterate in others.  If I was to compile a list of those texts and discourses that I am able to deeply understand (such as academic papers in archaeology, textbooks on educational theory, letters from my grandparents, Hollywood blockbusters, etc) and those that I can’t (Indigenous Australian Art, spoken or written Mandarin, academic papers in particle physics, etc.) the balance is well in favour of those forms of knowledge of which I have no hope of understanding at my current level of education. I am, by these criteria, illiterate in most areas of human experience. But within my social and cultural context I am literate, and have managed to get through 12 years of schooling, about 6 years of university (and counting), many jobs, and have not been a complete social misfit. Clearly, the social and cultural context of literacy cannot be taken for granted.

So where does this leave me, a SOSE teacher in training, pondering the question of what role I have in teaching ‘literacy’? Where do I begin? Before students even enter my class they have to demonstrate literacy in any number of intertwining and colliding worlds. Bus timetables, street signs, roll call, uniforms, codes of behaviour, bells, sirens, lining up, how to speak to peers, how to speak to teachers, class schedules, room numbers…literacy is a big deal in real life! Then there are the academic requirements of my class. Students, despite their protestations that essays are what they do in English, are graded on their ability to communicate in written and spoken English, and to conform to particular generic characteristics depending on whether they are producing a report, a persuasive essay, a poem, a role-play as a medieval serf or as an academic historian. The nuts and bolts of the English language are integral to their being able to succeed in this. Finally, we pile on discipline-specific literacy. Students need to be able to read a History textbook (or Geography, Legal Studies, etc.), a map, a primary document (whatever form it might take), photographs, paintings…etc. and understand mathematical ideas such as trigonometry, area, and probability. Come to think of it – I would struggle to think of ANYTHING that could possibly be taught that is not ‘literacy’ – understanding and being understood, and interpreting and making meanings from symbols within a specific context.

Reuben

I am radically opposed to the idea that the purpose of education is the creation of a future workforce. To prepare my students for the world that they will find outside of school, I would attempt to teach critical reasoning and compassion, to create an ethically and intellectually developing individual.

Rachel

I asked my research subject if she remembered first becoming interested in reading. She said that she hadn’t really seen the point for quite a while and that what she remembered liking as a young kid was going outside and getting lost in her own world that way. It took a while before she realised that she could do that through books as well.
She told me that she remembered being small and looking up at her parents’ bookcases towering above her! …. She said that it had made her curious to know about the ‘worlds’ inside them …

I am, by my own admission, woefully financially illiterate. When I have to think about superannuation, childcare benefit rebates or tax returns, my mind goes cloudy; I try to avoid the subject; I think of all kinds of good reasons why I don’t need to focus on these details. I imagine that most people must experience some kind of comparable mental ‘fog’ when confronted with their illiteracy/cies.

I am finding it a relief to finally be in a classroom such as this. Studying and teaching literacy feels central to what I find important; it’s central to who I am.

Jane

So the long and the short of it is that now I’m getting excited. Thoughts are skipping through my fuddled brain and I’m thinking of all the connections we make that aren’t formally considered literacy yet are a way of understanding that denotes we have to have drawn upon a prior knowledge to make those connections. Is that a form of literacy? Are we talking of literacy as a way of making things understood. A form of expression and understanding that is successful in itself by being understood.

Katherine

Some thought on my own reading, based on discussion with Steve during tute. I’m a lazy reader when I’m reading for a purpose other than entertainment. I tend to skim read, skip to summaries or just read the start and end of paragraphs. I picked up this habit as a PhD student and never really broke it – there was always so much to read, and more papers coming out all the time. Also, much of what’s written in a paper isn’t really important except for the abstract unless it is immediately relevant to your own research. As an academic I have generally taught large classes and frequently had hundreds of lab reports, essays, exams to mark. So again, it is partly to preserve sanity that skim reading becomes a habit. I’ve also noticed that the more closely I read a student’s work the fewer marks I give because the more I pick up small errors, evidence of not really understanding, etc. Other reading for preparing classes etc has generally been the same – searching for the right equation, a good diagram, a nice example or some specific data. In contrast, when I read for pleasure I read every word, and often read a sentence or paragraph a few times when I come across an interesting idea or a clever analogy, etc. I enjoy words and read a bit of a poetry, a couple of novels a week typically including at least one science fiction. I enjoy well written books with no plot (but not Samuel Beckett, ever, at all) as well as good stories. Some books I return to every few years, and read again. It took me a couple of years after finishing my PhD to be able to read fiction again without automatically skipping around looking for the key ideas, I still find myself doing it now and then.

Terence

It began with learning the alphabet and, before that was even mastered, asking questions constantly of any sign, anywhere, anytime, “what is that letter? What about the last one? The one that looks like a circle?” Shapes and numbers were also a part of the questioning, and a lot of repetition, but not as a punishment for getting it wrong, rather as an encouraging opportunity to show the new knowledge was remembered, to feel accomplishment.

This moved onto words on cereal boxes, ads on the television or in the newspaper, short books with lots of pictures, the numbers of the fuel prices at the petrol station, the cost of cured meats or chicken at the delhi in the supermarket (even ordering from the deli – “Excuse me, I would like 400grams of devon, please.” All be it on tiptoe.) Also, with numeracy, not only was there counting and recognising numbers, but also counting in patterns, by 10’s 5’s, 2’s. Addition and “lots of” (multiplication) were all also a part of my pre-schooling education, and looking back personally and having conversed with my parents about it, the reason was not to give an inflated sense of self-importance or accomplishment, but rather the prepare my mind with the tools necessary for learning, to awaken a love of learning and a desire to seek out opportunities to do so. Car trips and visiting relatives or friends were also the most sought after times to play these games, which often then began including our cousins or friends. Even as a small child, I remember the smiles of joy and happiness (sounds a little corny, but kids really do have an ability that we dull as we grow to find satisfaction and joy far more easily in far more places) when my friends and cousins were asked the questions, got them right, or we had to help and give hints. Inclusion, belonging, encouragement and joy are all important parts of the learning process, and something I have resolved that I don’t want to remove from the process, especially with regard to literacy and numeracy skills.
I believe that the inherent joy I have of learning and the ease at which it often occurs is due to the way I was introduced to it all – a safe, fun, encouraging and interesting environment that was about inclusion rather than competition. Competitive aspirations are great, but never when they discourage or dishearten children.

Matthew

So how do I approach reading to learn? My own strategies often involve knowing what I want to learn – and chasing down the particular piece of information. Unlike English Literature, one does not read a book starting at the beginning and proceeding as the author constructed the book. Often many sections of technical literature are redundant for you as an individual, as you already have learned the concepts. There are many different ways of quickly locating the relevant information: abstracts, contents,introductions, indexes, appendices, and skimming within a selected chapter. But this is when you actually use books and printed journals – which for me has been less and less frequently. Most of my reading has been conducted online for years. I use favourite web resources (slashdot; the register; etc.) but more often use google or other search engines to find my desired content. Then the regular strategies come into play. To retain content, I rewrite and summarise what I have read, or attempt to put a technique into immediate operation, and hopefully document my technique and resource for the technique appropriately – so others can learn and understand the reason for the chosen technique. I have never been strong on underlining, highlighting, writing in margins, etc. – and I guess this is a personal preference. Do I carry questions in my head during my reading? I tend not to write questions down before reading, but I allow my mental questions to shape and guide my reading as stated above. Sometimes I have not even articulated the questions to myself: but if asked for the question, I could answer without hesitation.

Cris Tovani’s ‘Do I really have to teach reading?

This blog post is a bit different from all the others. The subject is Cris Tovani’s book Do I really have to teach reading?, the set text book for the postgraduate students doing my unit ‘Literacy across the curriculum’. The course begins in a couple of weeks.

For the past three days I’ve set aside the mornings to read the book, armed with my sticky labels and highlighter pens. After reading each chapter, I’ve been writing up some thoughts. I’ve decided to publish these in this blog partly as a guide for any of my students not sure how to approach reflective journal writing, and partly in the hope that this post might help make some connections with teachers who have also used some of Tovani’s ideas.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Half an hour ago I picked up our textbook for the first time. Tovani’s Do I really have to teach reading? I’d heard good things about it, but still had a lingering worries.

1.  Is this going to be one of those trite books on ‘How-to-achieve-instant-success-in-10-easy-steps’?
2. What kind of classroom experience has this author had? Or does she sit in some ivory tower?
3. Is her focus going to be exclusively on reading, on the act of decoding words on a page, or is she interested in the broader (and more important) question of how we learn, through various disciplines, about the world?
4. How might what she says align with what I’ve discovered about Josh?
5. How might what she says align with the seven propositions that I’ve come up with? Will I end up amending my list?

The first chapter (‘I’m the stupid lady from Denver’) answered some of these questions. She seemed both down-to-earth and thoughtful at the same time. Experienced but open to new thoughts in the light of further (sometime uncomfortable) experience.

Two things stood out for me.

The first was her insistence that good questions were the key to reading success. We need to begin to read with questions in our mind which we hope the text will answer, and I noticed how true this was of the way I was reading her book. I had questions which I wanted answered. And not just any question. As Tovani says (p3), ‘the questions have to be questions that I really care about. I can’t ask any old question – it has to be one that I truly am curious about’.

I wondered, as I read this, how many of the postgraduate students would be coming to this course on literacy across the curriculum with a sense that it was going to answer questions that they really cared about. I wondered what I might do, in the first week, to help them discover some of these questions.

I also liked her focus on the broader issues of learning. We want our students to learn what our subject has to teach them, and reading is a means to that end, not the end in itself.

We are simply trying to help kids get the skills they need to understand and learn about the content we as teachers care passionately about…” (p7)

Meaning doesn’t arrive because we have highlighted text or used sticky notes or written the right words on a comprehension worksheet. Meaning arrives because we are purposefully engaged in thinking while we read. (p9)

“Purposefully engaging in thinking…” Isn’t this education in a nutshell? Isn’t this the sole aim of this university unit? Of every classroom? To the extent that our students are ‘purposefully engaged in thinking’ (instead of ‘skillfully engaged in avoiding’, or ‘skillfully engaged in ticking the right boxes’), our job as teachers is pretty much done. How we get to them to that state, or how we organize our classroom so that this kind of purposeful thinking flourishes, is a very complex matter. But that’s the goal.

Chapter 2 The ‘So What?’ of reading instruction

Again, a great little chapter which again keeps the focus on the ultimate purpose of what we do. Hence the question: ‘So what?’ As I was reading it, I kept thinking about stimulus questions for my postgraduate students, or ways I might help them reflect on Tovani’s ideas. But then I read this:

Good readers don’t need end-of-the-chapter questions or isolated skill sheets. They ask their own questions, based upon their need for a deeper understanding of specific aspects of the text. (p20)

So maybe the only question I need to ask my students from this chapter is: So what?

***

I’ve just got back from a walk on the beach (it’s school holiday time), and when I walked back in the front door I saw Tovani’s book sitting on the dining room table where I’d left it after reading the first couple of chapters this morning. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to pick it up and read Chapter 3. Yet the book has been sitting on my desk at home for the best part of a month, untouched. Up until today, I haven’t been motivated to read it.

What’s changed?

Is it just that I’ve forced myself to read the first chapter and have found that I’ve enjoyed it? I don’t think so. I think it’s more than that. And I think the ‘more’ is relevant to this whole topic of literacy across the curriculum.

Over the past couple of months I’ve given myself time to prepare myself for the content of this course. I’ve wondered about the question of relevance: is the teaching of literacy really the business of all secondary teachers, regardless of their discipline? I’ve written down some initial thoughts in my blog, and had a go at formulating some maxims or propositions. I’ve argued over the content of the course and I’ve written a unit plan. I’ve spent some time talking to Josh, a secondary student at the school where I teach, and I’ve mulled over what he’s told me. With a group of other teachers I’ve read a book (Readicide, by Kelly Gallagher) on how schools are systematically killing off students’ motivation to read.

So I’ve come to the reading of Tovani’s book in a very active and purposeful frame of mind. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the issues before I’ve opened a page.

How differently we often approach things at school. I visited a class the other day where, as an introductory exercise to the study of a Shakespeare play, the class was asked to read a number of articles about Elizabethan England and Shakespearean theatre. No warm up. No preparation. No pre-thinking. No eliciting of questions. Just straight into the reading, cold. Result? Little engagement, little interest and no useful learning.

My postgraduate students won’t have had the time to prepare for this course in the same way I have. But nor will they then come to it cold, like the students in the Shakespeare class. Their desire to become good teachers will most likely mean that they’ll read the Tovani book in the spirit she advocates: ‘purposefully engaged in thinking while we read’?

 Tovani Chapter 3: Parallel experiences

If you were going to plonk every teacher on a spectrum with those who see the big picture (the thinkers) at one end and those who see the detail (the doers) at the other, then I’m with the thinkers. I’m stronger, therefore, with ends than I am with means.

Tovani seems to have a nice balance, and I’m guessing what I’ve got to learn from her is more to do with means than ends. Someone at the other end of the spectrum, the doer, is perhaps more likely to learn from what she says about the big picture.

In this chapter she makes the following point (p35):

If you’re able to slow your thinking down a little and notice things that you do when you read content material, you can teach the strategies you use to students.

Here’s a challenge for me! Next term I’m teaching Romeo and Juliet to my Year 10 classes. I tend to focus on the big picture: on what the play says about love and hate, for example. We spend a little bit of time getting the basic plot and the main characters clear, and then we make connections between the drama in Verona and what’s happening in the students’ own lives. We revel in the Baz Luhrmann film (or at least I do!). I also focus on the sound of the language and the drama of the scenes, so we get out of our seats a lot and act out parts.

But do I do enough to help the students read the play? I don’t mean that I should be encouraging them all to sit down and read Romeo and Juliet from cover to cover. I’ve never done that, and I’m sure it would kill the thing stone cold dead if I did. I’m thinking more about how they might make sense of a difficult passage. How they might work out what it’s about, and how it’s saying what it’s saying? (And, by extension, how might they make sense of any difficult passage, not just in Shakespeare but in any challenging text they come across in their English studies.)

I’m thinking of Josh here. He was in my class last year when we studied Macbeth. I suspect that much of it went over his head, or that he relied on SparkNotes. Could I do it differently this year?

Here’s an experiment.

I’ve just found a passage in Romeo and Juliet that I don’t remember reading before. (I probably have, but I’m 62 and I forget things!) Here it is:

Indeed I never shall be satisfied
With Romeo till I behold him – dead –
Is my poor heart so for a kinsman vexed.
Madam, if you could find out but a man
To bear a poison, I would temper it
That Romeo should upon receipt thereof
Soon sleep in quiet.

I then went into my 15 year old son’s room and asked him to read it. He saw the film some years ago and knows the basic plot, but he doesn’t like reading Shakespeare.

When he’d finished reading this short passage, he said “Well, at least I get this bit. This guy wants Romeo dead.”

“Who does?” I asked.

Oliver looked down at the text and this time noticed something he hadn’t taken in first time.

“What? Juliet? Why would she want Romeo dead? Or maybe I didn’t get it? Maybe Juliet can’t stand being in love with him and wants him dead?”

I could have said, “You’re not sure you got it right?”, as Ol was now doing what Cris Tovani advocates, letting his questions guide his reading. But because I wanted instead to do my own slow reading of this passage, and to notice how I went about making sense of it, I left it there.

How did I make sense of it?

I didn’t understand what ‘tempering’ the poison meant, but (like Oliver) I got the gist of what she was saying. The line

Is my poor heart so for a kinsman vexed

didn’t seem to make grammatical sense until I reminded myself that Shakespeare (and poets) often muck around with the order of words, and that the line might have been easier to read had it been:

my poor heart is so vexed for a kinsman

Same words, different order. Now it made perfect sense, though this time we’d lost the steady beat of the iambic pentameter.

Like Oliver, I was initially surprised to hear Juliet wishing Romeo dead, and offering to administer the poison herself. Why was she saying these things? It didn’t seem to make sense.

I looked to see who Juliet was talking to. It was her mother, and I knew that Lady Capulet knew nothing of Juliet’s marriage to Romeo. Was Juliet dissembling? I flicked back a couple of pages to find out when this conversation took place. Romeo has killed Tybalt (her kinsman), Juliet knows what has happened and has just said goodbye to Romeo after a secret overnight visit to her bedroom, and Lady Capulet has found Juliet with tears on her face. Juliet has to explain her tears, so she pretends to be weeping for Tybalt, and Lady Capulet puts into Juliet’s mind the idea of revenge through poisoning. She says to Juliet:

I’ll send for one in Mantua,
Where that same banished runagate doth live,
Shall give him such an unaccustomed dram
That he shall soon keep Tybalt company;
And then I hope thou wilt be satisfied.

Yes, it all made sense now. Juliet was dissembling.

Tovani says that if we can uncover our own strategies and teach these to our students, they too will read better. How did I make sense of this passage? By reading it slowly and using my knowledge of the way poets play around with word order for the sake of rhythm. And by letting my questions guide my further inquiry. (Why is Juliet saying these things? Who is she talking to? What’s just happened? Is she dissembling?)

I’m guessing that if I were to show Oliver how I went about doing this, he might have another string to his interpretive bow when he next encounters a confusing passage in Shakespeare.

Did I do enough of this kind of thing with Josh last year? Do I do enough of this kind of thing in all of my English classes? I doubt it.

 Ch 4 Real Rigor

On page 40 Tovani says:

I also need to remember what it feels like to read something for the first time. I can’t expect my students to be able to read and understand for the first time text that I work at over a period of time to understand.

 I remember some years ago being asked, at short notice, to teach a Year 10 class for a term. They had just started to study Macbeth, a play that I hadn’t read. Each night I would anxiously and inefficiently read the scenes we were to read together the following day, trying to commit the notes in the margin to memory, trying to work out who was who and what had already happened, picking my way painfully through all the key passages. I was teaching other classes at the time, so I didn’t have the luxury of doing what I’d normally do when preparing to teach a major text: reading around it, watching a video or two, reading about it, thinking about how I might best approach the teaching of it. The train had left the station and I just had to sprint to get on board. At the end of the unit I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and said to myself that I’d be a happy man if I never saw a copy of Macbeth again. (In fact I ended up teaching it for several years after that, and came to love it, but only because I then had the time to get into it properly.)

This is how many students experience the play, I’m sure. They’re not given the time or the means to find their way through the challenges and into an experience of the drama and richness.

I worry that we’re repeating this mistake in this postgraduate course. The students are going to have 4 weeks (before they go out on a teaching round) to

• get their heads around the basic concepts of the unit, 
• write an ongoing journal,
• select a student to interview,
• prepare a presentation and
• read Tovani’s book.

Of course all of these tasks are designed to help the students immerse themselves in the concepts, to raise questions and reflect on their experiences and assumptions … just as I’ve been doing in this journal. But I’ve been preparing myself for the past couple of months; they’re being expected to squeeze it all into four short weeks.

It isn’t fairfor me to spend days or even years planning instruction around a text, and then expect my students to read and understand concepts the first time through – especially knowing that reading comprehension drops when readers are reading unfamiliar information. (Tovani pp40-41)

The course won’t work if there’s no time for the students to think, to wonder, to explore side-tracks, to relate the course material to their own experiences, and so on.

Tovani Ch 5 ‘Why am I reading this?’

A chapter about purpose. A strong affirmation of what I was trying to say in an earlier blog post about ends and means: literacy is a means to another end, not an end in itself. We don’t read in order to read better or faster; we read in order to understand something better.

I must have a reason for reading the piece. There must be something in it that will make my life as a teacher or a person better. If the piece isn’t going to entertain, teach, or improve my life in some way, I throw it out. (p61)

It’s the job of the teacher, says Tovani, to make the purpose clear.

So why are we asking our postgraduate students to read Tovani’s book? I think there are three main reasons:

1. To help them think about the unit’s central question: But I’m not an English teacher; is literacy really my business?
2. To give preservice teachers practical suggestions from a practising classroom teacher on how to teach their subjects more successfully.
3. To inform their thinking while they are doing the research project on an adolescent student’s reading.

I have to admit that I’m a tad uncomfortable with this. I’m a teacher who, at least most of the time, thinks “that setting the purpose limits the scope of the students’ reading’ (p60). I’m hoping that the students will have their own questions which they bring to their reading of Tovani’s book. I want to use our first tutorial together to surface some of these questions.

Ch 6 Holding thinking to remember and reuse

Lots of practical stuff in this chapter, different strategies for getting inside a challenging texts. It’s made me think about the strategies I use, and the ones I used to use. Tovani stresses active strategies; for her, underlining or highlighting is not enough. And, if I look back through what I’ve done with her book, there are quite a few scribbles in the margins when I’ve had questions or made connections.

But most of what I’ve done is to highlight, and then to write these little reflections. I think that’s always been the way I’ve ‘held my thinking’, or made it visible. By writing emails, or joining online discussions, or having conversations, or writing blog like reflections. I’ve always needed to feel that I’m communicating my questions and thoughts and summaries to someone else.

There’s another method I’ve used which I suspect Tovani might think was too passive (and too time-consuming). When I’ve been studying difficult texts, from the time I did my undergraduate degree all the way through to doing a PhD about eight years ago, I’ve copied out quotes. I like to hear, over and over, the voices of the authors I read, and somewhere on old outdated floppy disks I’ve got files full of quotes from Freud, Jung, Hillman, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Taylor, Bion, Campbell, Klein, Milner and others whose work I read for my PhD. And in a dusty plastic bucket in my store room, there are stacks of folders full of quotes (typed with an old ribbon typewriter, or handwritten) from the books I read as a young teacher, by John Holt, Dennison, Kohl, A.S. Neill, R.F. Mackenzie, and others. I love getting these out every now and then and hearing the voices of the authors who meant so much to me then.

But the world has speeded up and maybe today’s students don’t have time for that kind of slow absorbing. 

I have a strategy I’ve come to rely (over-rely?) on in my classroom. I often ask my student to respond to two questions when they’re trying to get into a difficult text.

• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?

These two questions seem to provide lots of opportunities for students to find ways into texts. I think they mirror the questions that good readers use naturally.

Tovani Ch 7 Group work that grows understanding

For lots of reasons, Tovani says, group work is an essential part of growing literacy. It’s a challenge establishing groups that discuss content well, but she’s sure it’s worth the effort.

I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I hate being put into a group myself to discuss some issue that we’re not all properly prepared for and interested in; important issues get trivialized and nothing is achieved. On the other hand, I’ll willingly force myself through the challenges of a tough text if I know there’s a discussion looming with some respected colleagues. One of my greatest professional pleasures at my present school was a Professional Reading Group, where we’d all read the same book and then meet for dinner, wine and rollicking discussion.

Tovani herself talks about her struggles with group work. She was better at controlling and stimulating a whole class discussion than at facilitating productive group work. I’m the same. I love the cut-and-thrust of a good whole class discussion well managed, and at times feel a little rudderless when the groups are each going in their own unpredictable directions.

All of this Tovani acknowledges, and yet insists that it’s worth the effort. Norms need to be established, models and scaffolds provided and problems tackled. When it’s working well, it provides extra stimulation and motivation: reading is more purposeful.

Mmmmm.

Next term, as we act out various scenes in Romeo and Juliet, the boys will work in groups to read and make sense of quite difficult passages. Maybe I’ll use some of Tovani’s strategies.

 Ch 8 Assessment that drives instruction

 Tovani says to her students, “It will be hard for you to fail if you are willing to share your thinking.” (p102) She notes that “Meaning does not arrive. It is constructed over a period of time. (p104)”.

It’s so much easier if we can get students to share their thinking. That happens when we tie their grades to the effort they put into getting that thinking … into written form, and into class discussions. (p115)

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this postgraduate Literacy Across the Curriculum course. The emphasis is on the students making their thinking visible, in sharing it and allowing it to deepen and evolve as the course progresses. Their grades are tied into ‘the effort they put into getting that thinking into written form’. They do not have to arrive at a particular conclusion or a pre-determined insight.

The focus question is: “But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really my business?”, and any number of perspectives on this is possible. At one end of the spectrum will be those who want to define ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ in a particular way and assign the job to English teachers, or to primary teachers, or to homes. At the other end will those who think about literacy more broadly and see it as a part of their job as a teacher, no matter what their discipline. And there will be many other positions between.

The important thing is that the students reflect on their own experience, on the student they research, on the reading they do and the discussions (and lectures) they attend. So their journals are worth 70% and their research presentation 30%. These aren’t the only places where students will be sharing their thinking. We’ll be having tutorial and online discussions as well. I’m hoping that the students will draw on these in their journals and presentations … but the Tovani chapter does makes me think about whether we are assessing what we value in the best possible way.

Tovani Ch 9 Last thoughts

This is a great little book. I’ve loved reading it.

Each chapter begins with a story and the story that kicks off this chapter is a particularly moving (and encouraging one).

And it begins with a quote that I’d be pleased to have at the front of our postgraduate unit:

If teachers become distant from their own learning, they will most certainly become distant from the learning of their students. (Alisa Wills-Keely quoted on p117)