For Wednesday, October 4, the John Bean and John Nordlof readings. In class, we'll also find out about any new students or new writing assignments and about your plans for your final course projects
Choose one of these questions to respond to and also respond to the post of one classmate. Thanks!
Suggested Questions for Blog Post #6:
1) Comment on students’ reading problems, especially reading-to-write issues that you have encountered in the classroom and the WC. Make connections to the Bean chapter. If possible, bring to class a sample page of student work with evidence of a reading-to-write problem.
Choose one of these questions to respond to and also respond to the post of one classmate. Thanks!
Suggested Questions for Blog Post #6:
1) Comment on students’ reading problems, especially reading-to-write issues that you have encountered in the classroom and the WC. Make connections to the Bean chapter. If possible, bring to class a sample page of student work with evidence of a reading-to-write problem.
2) How and when did you, OR, how and when could you, scaffold your
writing center students’ skill development vs. the alternatives: using a
sink-or-swim approach or doing too much of the work for them?
Unfortunately, I don't have a student paper to post. But since most of my students are ESL, reading-to-write continues to be an issue, because students have a hard time understanding assignment parameters. I know this is something we've covered before but it remains ever-prescient. For example, I have a student who is doing a rhetoric speech about advertisements in commercials. She was asked to take two separate commercials with essentially the same message, posed toward different audiences and analyze them. The instructor asked the students to do a sort of culture critique and identify the ways each commercial pandered to the prejudices of potential audiences and this was a huge stumbling block for her. I suppose my scaffolding/instruction could be mainly categorized in the Culture Codes for Comprehending a Text section, as I tried to help her identify what was subversive or manipulative about the messages we examined. I honestly don't know if it was successful or not--stay tuned.
ReplyDeleteI often find myself "buying the fish" for my students rather than letting them fish it out themselves. I think very often students read aimlessly without a sense of direction entirely missing the author's thesis. Then the questions they bring to class and the kind of points they tend to make during discussion are of the "relatable" kind or real life cases the author studies and which the students have either experienced or feel close to. Once this happens, then another student will "go off of that" or "piggy back" to mention something they have gone through which may or may not relate to the reading at all, let alone to the thesis. Most students need very close attention and explicit turn-by-turn instructions like a GPS directing someone with a limited tunnel vision. Steering the discussion becomes difficult. That's why I find scaffolding can be very helpful and especially some of the practices by Bean which I am eager to test. Foe example, before doing the reading the instructor can briefly introduce the piece, like Socrates' Cito, and then ask students to predict how an argument can be made and after that we can compare results. This might contain the discussion better because it directs their attention to the argument and provokes them to think.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who hasn't yet taught in a classroom setting (as opposed to a writing center), I found the John Bean chapter helpful in considering different techniques to test out in the future. Modeling one's own reading and research habits (sharing annotations, outlines, marked-up drafts, and so forth), if done clearly and humbly, seems like a reasonable way to improve student reading/writing skills as well as establish a rapport.
ReplyDeleteI also love, and have always loved, the concept of a reading log. Write-to-learn exercises, such as the invitations the writing center provides at the beginning of the semester, have tended to work wonders during my own experience as a pupil and as a tutor. One of the enrollment students I'm working with brings in supplemental reading summaries each week — and though the assignment is, essentially, to describe the argument of the text without much additional comment, we often end up discussing his perceptive personal/intellectual responses to what he's read, in a sort of reading-log spirit. Combined with these conversations, his comfort with active reading helps him more fully engage with each book — and that's reflected in his writing.
- Cassandra
Do you keep a reading log of your own? I like the idea, but I have not yet put it into practice. I like your emphasis on humility when sharing techniques with students. The same techniques will not work for everyone. I was a little startled to find that there are professors who insist on an approved system of note-taking. There was some flexibility, but unless they sought special permission, the expectation was that students would use the Cornell system. Their notes and reading logs were then graded. I can see advantages and disadvantages to this.
DeleteThe students who read without periodically self-checking for comprehension remind me of grade school "word callers." Because word callers can decode the words on the page, they think they are reading, even though they haven't constructed any meaning from the words. I think of word callers when I catch myself proceeding with a dense reading assignment without pausing to paraphrase or "nutshell." I did have one L2 student in the speaking center who was word calling this semester. He was so focused on pronunciation that at times he didn't know what he was reading. I suspect I may have some silent word callers in my class, a situation more depressing than if they simply weren't doing the reading. I think they try to do the reading, but don't retain anything because they haven't slowed down enough to process the material. I imagine the same thing happens when they are reading their drafts aloud.
ReplyDeleteI had to laugh at the suggestion that we share our notes, marginalia, highlighting, logs, etc. with students. I am still learning what works best for me, but I am finally at a point where I am writing regularly in my books, "defacing" the clean pages. I spent years reading "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book" and "Read it, Don't Eat it!" to primary students, pleading with them to keep "my" books pristine. I would like to spend some time with my rhetoric students talking about how to read and annotate college texts. I know that K12 students in Iowa learn to annotate texts now, but I haven't seen any evidence that the practice carries over to college.
Neala, I completely agree with teaching reading to college students - at least in the first couple of weeks. Teaching writing is so prioritized that academic reading is very often neglected as a "thing" assuming that it is the same thing or a continuation of earlier reading just a little more...time consuming? That is a paradox because many students think that professors read faster and that speed should improve in upper level courses. We must be honest with students and admit we are struggling with academic texts as well. Wouldn't that undermine our authority though (a sensitive issue for new instructors)?
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