Students talking reading--skills, not books (or "Annotations, again.")

Still missing the mark over here. 

I listened to my students prepare for their portfolio conferences today; these are their student-run conferences in which they reflect on and share their thinking about their reading and writing and content understandings. I ask them to consider their learning towards three course goals for their conferences. But this is the one I’m thinking about right now: 

read challenging texts for nuanced comprehension, thoughtful interpretation, and creation of connections across texts in order to develop compassion for others and cultivate conceptual knowledge;

I overheard one of my students… (okay, more than one of my students) say, “One of my weaknesses in reading is annotations.” 

Me: “Why is that a weakness?”

Student (all the students): “Because I don’t do them.” 

Me: “So why is that a weakness in reading?”
Student (all the students): “Because you told us to do them.” 

Rinse. Repeat.

Even after I pointed out to them that their annotations were just making their thinking visible on the page and were really evidence of their nuanced comprehension, thoughtful interpretation, and creation of connections across texts, a number of them still came to their portfolio conferences and talked about how annotations are a weakness, not about which skills those missing annotations might represent. 

I’m missing the mark because I haven't taught my students reading in a way that helps them really enter into conversation with the author or the text rather than in a way that has them thinking about what I'm requiring them to do. I also haven't spent enough time studying with them the different kinds of thinking that happen when we read. 

In her excellent book A Novel Approach: Whole-Class Novels, Student-Centered Teaching, and Choice , Kate Roberts writes about the challenges of "trying to get a sense of what your students are doing as readers." She writes, "The invisibility of reading is a barrier to teaching reading: we must find ways to peek inside the minds of our students." In the margin, I wrote, "YES! YES!" One of the challenges to teaching reading is that it is a receptive skill, not a productive one. How do we get in our students' heads so that their whole conversation with the text doesn't stay in their heads? 

Roberts also highlights the hurdles that emerge as we do the work of annotations: "First off, students don't find it natural to stop in the midst of reading and write down their thinking (neither do I for that matter). And yet we need them to do so. Secondly, when students do write, often they do not push themselves to practice the work of the unit, but instead rely on safe strategies that they know can fill the space, and then they move on." Yes. This. 

Well, most of this. While Roberts doesn't find it natural to stop and write while reading, I actually do. With the exception of novels I read for pleasure and library books I'm not allowed to write in, I tend to read with a pen in my hand. I try to teach my students to do the same with our class novels. But Roberts' note about her own habits is a good reminder to me that we don't all approach texts the same way. 

It's the second part of her comment that I really connected with: "When students do write, often they do not push themselves to practice the work of the unit, but instead rely on safe strategies that they know can fill the space, and then they move on." "The work of the unit." I need to better define what that "work" is in my classroom. Roberts' argument is that we should not be teaching books but that we should be teaching skills. She writes, "When reading a whole-class novel, it is difficult to separate content from skills and to choose to focus largely on the latter... When we lessen the focus on the content of the novels we teach, we can focus more on the skills we want readers to get better at any time they read." My students are struggling to see the skills work of the unit; they see the book. 

To lessen the emphasis on the content of the novel and sharpen the focus on reading skills is a challenge in my particular teaching context for a number of reasons I've written about in earlier posts.    I teach at a college preparatory high school that puts a heavy emphasis on content. We build our entire units around novels (the text and context) and not around skills. But we also are currently confronting the fact that our students are still developing readers (not coming to us as "fully baked" as we long thought they might have been). Fortunately, a unit plan doesn't have to be a matter of one (the content) or the other (skills). A shift to this kind of thinking will certainly mean a stronger shift in pedagogy, though. 

The annotations conversation that started me down this rabbit hole has gotten me to a place that seems obvious. It's a familiar spot at the crossroads of knowing what needs to be done and actually doing what needs to be done. Portia in The Merchant of Venice seems to get it: "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces" (1.2.206-08). She's not my favorite character, but she somehow seems to get it--it's the doing that's hard. Deliberate, articulated skill instruction for students needs to be done. I've been hovering around it forever. Taking stabs at it periodically. Asking kids to read often. But I haven't necessarily seen a path that I thought was the right one to take with my kids. Roberts' book (along with Lemov's book) helped point me in my current direction. 

The Doing

On annotations and teaching, Kate Roberts writes this beautiful sentence: "And yet it will be difficult to think of your teaching as anything other than a pleasant invitation to be politely declined if you do not find a way to connect much of the writing about reading your kids do to the lessons you have taught." My students have been politely declining my invitation to annotate for quite some time. The "lessons" she is referring to here are the lessons of comprehension, interpretation, and making connections across texts--the lessons of reading skills. Ouch. I suppose we can all hope that if students are going to decline our teaching, they will be polite about it. But I'd rather hope that my students are going to jump in, book and pen in hand, and learn and grow in my class. 

I'm rethinking how I'm going to approach our fourth (and final) term of the year with my current students to make the reading skills stick. The annotations they are (or aren't) writing aren't the skill. The skills are the skills. Roberts looks to Grant Wiggins to make an argument about transfer and the importance of transfer. That's where I'm leaning as we end the year--I want my students to leave sophomore year with skills that will transfer. Roberts quotes Wiggins:

Arguably transfer is the aim of any education. Given that there is too much for anyone to learn; given that unpredictability is inevitable; given that being flexible and adaptive with one's repertoire is key to any future success, it stands to reason that we should focus our "backward-design" efforts on the goal of transfer, regardless of what and who we teach (and in spite of pressures to merely "cover content"--which ironically inhibits transfer and worsens test scores. . .) The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life. (Wiggins 2012)  

When my kids are talking about writing annotations because I ask them to write annotations, they are thinking about being "good at school." That's where I'm missing the mark. Time to focus again on them being good at reading.

Transfer on, teacher friends.