Entry 4: Finding the Right Balance

Kelly Gallagher, Readicide

Folder of Literacy Student Engagements

Bridging English, Ch. 5

When Kids Can’t Read

Reading Better, Reading Smarter

Mary E. Styslinger, Julianne Oliver Ware, Charles W. Bell, and Jesse L. Barrett “What Matters: 

Meeting Content Goals through Teaching Cognitive Reading Strategies with Canonical Texts”

I’ve always liked Gallagher’s writing, as he tends to state things that seem like they should be super obvious, but one might never think about the fact that there is a process in learning to teach them. Gallagher reveals how there are two ways of ruining reading instruction: overdoing it and underdoing it. Whether students like or dislike the book is not an issue so much as getting value from it. To avoid both, challenging texts need to be framed, and this framing often comes in the form of a reading “goal” for the students to be aware of. A teacher can slow down and introduce themes on the second read through of a section, or read aloud and pause to reflect and understand. The way this is done guides how students who are following along read the text alone.

The Styslinger et al. article has a related goal: “we wanted to deepen student comprehension, but we wanted to do so in ways that aligned with our commitment to study the matter and art of the literary works as well” (54). The article shows the results of several employments of cognitive reading exercises in various classrooms. These examples demonstrate what Gallagher was saying pretty clearly. The students were able to read complex texts with modeled cognitive reading strategies. The article points out some issues, such as the concern that teaching strategies in a vacuum could lead to them not recognizing other contexts to apply the strategies in; it is also possible to inundate students with strategies or to overemphasize strategies over the content of the text. My personal feeling is that strategies are ideally taught on a case by case basis. Students could be identified as needing support in visualization and then made to do the visualization exercises. That seems like a simple conclusion; the point is that the technique we utilize is not chosen at random or merely to satisfy a standard.

This week I reviewed many of the pre-, during-, and post- reading strategies in our various textbooks. One thing I had forgotten about this section of Bridging was the claim that “the debate over teaching literary form strongly resembles the debate over teaching grammar” (143). Isn’t it strange that there are so many aspects to our content area we have to justify teaching? Of course, my experience in internship so far has shown that even if we thought this was totally useless, the state would be having kids take standardized tests over it. Fortunately, it has also seemed like creating engaging formal analysis lessons is less difficult than I had anticipated, at least when framed properly. My CT introduces her kids to a swathe of literary devices in a long power point presentation, but each slide is interactive and asks the students to locate examples of formal elements in literature in the works they already know. Formal analysis can be a method of understanding more than just literature in schools. Those patterns and ideas exist everywhere.

Briefly looking over the literacy engagements in this week’s readings, the “Text Coding Symbols” document caught my eye. My CT has made a push for her students to learn how to annotate texts this year, which is similar to this exercise. I had never given it a lot of thought, but students (particularly in 9^th grade) may not have a great concept of how to take notes or make sense out of texts simply using a pen. It’s a form of analysis that we often do not assess, but could be even more valuable than the lessons we actually grade. I think making this process part of the curriculum is an excellent idea that encourages students to begin thinking analytically about texts as they are reading and responding to them.

The “Do” I have selected for this week is an example of a vocabulary exercise I had my students do over my teaching week. After reading their weekly scientific article, the students were asked to select five words they did not recognize and fill out this worksheet. At first, I thought students might take the easy way out and pick words they understood to make things easy on themselves, but to my surprise every one of them followed the directions and demonstrated that they understood their words at the end of about twenty minutes of time to look the words up and get to know them. I have marked out this student’s name, but wanted to show how s/he responded. I think this was a good assignment that demonstrates how formal analysis can be engaging and productive.