Cyndi

Although not required reading for this course, the article, “Don’t Confuse Technology with College Teaching” by Pamela Hieronymi will give you insight into my own measured enthusiasm for online teaching and learning. In this article, published this week in //The Chronicle of Higher Education// (13 August 2012), the author, a professor of philosophy at UCLA, addresses the costs and benefits of teaching and learning online rather than face-to-face. The following passage captures what is, to my mind, the essential difference between how a course is delivered and what students “get” from it:

Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods into computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less. Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.

__ Education ____ is not the transmission of information or ideas __. BUT [CM1] Education is __the training needed to make use of__ information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods into computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less. __Educators are coaches, personal trainers__ in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of [CM2] information and ideas, __teaching people how to think for themselves.__

[CM1] Added this to connect the two highlighted sections. [CM2] Upon review, decided this want not necessary.

=NCTE Policy Brief: Reading Instruction for //All// Students (September 2012)= Published in the September issue of the //Council Chronicle// "Reading instruction has always been stressed for elementary school students, but today it takes on increased importance for //all// grades" (15). And that--as we know--is largely because of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have replaced NCLB in almost every state. From the article, "Both the qualitative dimensions and the reader-text variables [designated and defined in CCSS] depend upon the professional judgment of teachers.... Research on student readers and the texts they read confirms the need for teachers to play a key role in matching individual students with specific books at appropriate level of textual complexity..." (15). //Read on...// ==

=Article: "Research for the Classroom: Seize the Data"= English Journal 100.6 (2011): 99–102 Julie Gorlewski

=Article: "A Snapshot of Writing Instruction in Middle and High Schools"= English Journal 100.6 (2011): 14–27 Arthur N. Applebee and Judith A. Langer

=Ideas for Shaping and Focusing Our Research Over the Coming Weeks....=

Reading Linda Flower, et al.'s //Making Thinking Visible: Writing Collaborative Planning and Classroom Inquiry// (1994; which was my inspiration for our CCCC proposal), I have been translating their project on writing into ours focused on reading. Last night, I came upon a few ideas I would like us to borrow as a way of shaping/organizing our research. I would be happy to provide copies of the chapters I am borrowing from--just let me know what you'd like to see more closely.

Here goes...

1. When Flower and her colleagues and interested K-12 teachers first began their project, they "tape-recorded [their] first attempts at being writers and supporters for each other and reflected on what happened in a large-group discussion." She writes, "We helped each other formulate and focus what we wanted to study" (29).

I think we've done some of this pre-planning together, but I would love for us to meet to practice on each other the kinds of questions we want to ask students and strategies we want to teach.

2. When Flower and company audio-taped their students' and other teachers' writing-process protocols, she writes, "We transcribed some of these sessions and brought excerpts to the seminars to share with one another" (30).

It would be great if we could do the same: Tape students talking through their approach to a reading assignment--early, middle, and late in our project or the semester (however we define the length of the study)--and then listen to some together, transcribe a few, and consider what they tell us. According to Flower (who wrote the chapter I'm quoting from here), "These sessions, along with the verbal and written reflections our students made on their collaborations, were the basis of how we came to 'see' and understand the thinking that our students were doing about their writing" (30).

This is an especially important perspective for me: I want to know as much about what our students are doing NOW--before our interventions--and why. I am not assuming that they are completely unequipped at the start, but rather that they can learn techniques and strategies that will help them comprehend better and become more engaged with reading as a useful as well as enjoyable (though that may be too high a reach) activity.

Along similar lines, I heard an interview on //Fresh Air// (NPR) en route home last night with Nate SIlver, a NYT blogger (whatever that means; he's also a statistician and psychologist) who just published a book called //The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't//, about how biased all data and data collection is and how much more important basic and critical literacy skills are today when only 10% of all the information thrown at us from every direction is really "new." (Kinda staggerin', ain't it?)

3. Another strategy I would like us to borrow from Flower's team is their "monthly two-hour seminar to which we each brought something we had written about using this process [whatever their focus] with our students during the preceding month" (31).

Question: Could we commit to doing this? Maybe on the day that Angela visits classrooms, so that she can consolidate her field work? We could meet at whichever site Angela is visiting, with Purnell Swett (perhaps) our default site since there are two of you there. :-)

4. Focus for those monthlies: "An important feature of our monthly gatherings was practicing with one another what we were asking our student writers [in our case, it will be readers] to do and seeing what we could learn from this" (31). Finally, "For a few of our seminar meetings, we came with reflections we had written..." (31).

We can certainly post these reflections on our wiki pages, but I think it will be useful to get together to probe them further with questions, speculations, insights, and ideas for extending the work.

5. Flower refers to "discovery memos" (I can provide examples of these when we meet, if you wish) as a way of reflecting upon and synthesizing the range of experiences--student performance and responses as well as instructors' own. They also wrote "newsletters" (there were dozens of people at at least six sites participating in this study as it progressed from year to year) in which they described "how different project members conducted their classroom inquiries and how they and their students responded" to their projects initiatives (33).

The beauty of this kind of documentation is two-fold: It will help us stay focused in our work to monitor and interpret it, and we will have more than enough text from which to develop our conference presentation, without feeling like we need to recall events from months earlier.

SO....

With the above in mind, please take a look at your calendars for November and "Reply All" with the best two days of the week and then the best two particular dates we might meet again.

By the way, according to a study in the current issue of the NCTE journal //College Composition and Communication//, Linda Flower's work is cited **the most** of any scholar in Composition Studies between 1987 and 2011. That's right: She's number 1!--before Peter Elbow (#2), the beloved Mike Rose (#9), and many other wonderful, well-cited scholar-teachers, living and long dead (e.g., Aristotle is #69!).

=Anna Quindlen, "Homeless": Lesson Plan, Summary, and Response= f

=Annotation strategy from //The Art of Slow Reading// by Thomas Newkirk (Heinemann 2012)=

Here's a substitute strategy to replace highlighting, from Newkirk's new book, as found in one by Stephanie Harvey (great stuff on teaching nonfiction, by the way, well before her time) and Harvey Daniels (guru of content-area reading and writing pedagogy, K-12):

✓ I knew that! ✕ This contradicts my expectations or knowledge. ✴ This is important to know, remember. ? This raises a question for me. ?? This is really surprising or puzzling or even shocking. L I learned something new!

Of course, we still need to teach students how to notice when their knowledge or expectations are challenged or when what they are sensing is a need to question. With luck, they will start to pay attention to what they are learning as they read and how they are connecting their reading to what they already know.

Hoping to get our permissions passed this week! Please go ahead and do your pretest any time, and start teaching this and other strategies. You might consider teaching reader-response using "written conversations" after a few practice sessions--class and independent--of something like the above annotation strategy.

=Written Conversations:= =One Way to Ensure No One Takes a Pass When You Want to Hear from Every Student=

Written conversations is an idea I learned from Harvey Daniels at a workshop in 2008 (I think). Here's my adaptation:

1) Students write their name in the top left corner of a sheet of lined-paper. And count off or arrange themselves into groups of three (or four, if necessary; five is too many; two is too few). 2) They are asked to respond/react to a reading--can be based on a prompt or open-ended (after an exercise on annotation strategies, for example). 3) Teacher gives students up to five minutes to write a response, guided or not, to a reading passage (or video clip)--whatever the text. 4) There is absolutely no talking allowed--this is usually the hardest part. I tell my students they will get to talk about all of it with one another at the end. 5) After 3-5 minutes (whatever seems like just enough, not so much they derail; not so little they get restless and chatty), they pass their written response to the right (or left) in their group. The next person writes his/her name in the margin, reads the original response, and writes a response based on both the original text and the colleague's response--hence, "conversation." We can say it's like posting on FB or sending text messages, only in full words and sentences. :-) 6) After all members in the group have written their thoughtful(!) responses, the paper is returned to the first responders(!), who then read and consider the entire conversations. At this point, the teacher can decide what kinds of questions to ask. I usually ask students to consider where their responses overlapped and diverged, what the similarities and differences were, and to try to account for these. I give them a couple of minutes to consider this, then allow them to discuss their "findings" and anything that surprised them, etc., with their group members. 7) Finally, I ask for volunteers to share interesting observations or conversation threads and try to propose ways to extend the "conversation" beyond the classroom. Almost always, there's something in pop culture or the news that supports or challenges some response.

=Classroom Research on Reading: Pre-test (draft)=

// AN INVESTIGATION OF WRITERS’ READING HABITS BY WRITERS THEMSELVES // // Instructor // _ // Student // Please respond to the following questions about your reading habits, practices, skills, and attitudes with clearly expressed, well composed, complete sentences.
 * READING INTO WRITING: **
 * READER SELF-ASSESSMENT FALL 2012 **
 * 1) What role does reading play in your daily life?
 * 2) What have you read recently that you considered an enjoyable reading experience?
 * 3) What made that reading experience enjoyable?
 * 4) Have you ever recommended a book or another text (e.g., a poem, an article, a website, etc.) to a friend? If so, please name or describe it here:
 * 5) If yes to #4, why? If no to #4, why not?
 * 6) What was your worst reading experience? Why?
 * 7) Why do you read? That is, do you read for work? School? Pleasure? Information? Because you “have to”? Because you want to? Include examples.
 * 8) If you like to read, why? If you don’t like to read, why not?
 * 9) When you start to read an assigned text, what is the first thing you do?
 * 10) How do you check for understanding when you read for school?
 * 11) How do you remember what you read for school?
 * 12) What makes someone a “good reader”?
 * 13) On a scale of 1 to 5, rate yourself as a reader: _ and explain your choice.

// AN INVESTIGATION OF WRITERS’ READING HABITS BY WRITERS THEMSELVES // // Instructor // _ // Student // _ __ You will encounter a version of this assignment throughout your academic career—in essay tests, research papers, and other source-based writing, in English as well as other courses. We will repeat this assignment for practice and the opportunity to develop and hone your skills and strategies for accomplishing this kind of writing as we read and write our way through the course. (Time—30-45 minutes) __ Step 1—Select the passage __ Choose a short passage (3-5 sentences) from the assigned reading that you find especially important, interesting, provocative, or even a little puzzling. Be prepared to discuss this passage and explain why you chose it. __ Step 2—Transcribe the passage __ First, copy the passage, paying attention to spelling and punctuation and avoiding “texting” symbols and abbreviations. Frame the passage with an attributive phrase to provide context, and include the page number in a parenthetical citation. __ Step 3—Study the passage __ Read and reread the passage, paying attention to the kinds of words—their length, tone, and meaning—the length and structure of sentences, the sort of “voice” you hear in your mind as you read. Your reactions, responses, ideas, and interpretations about these textual elements are precisely what you will write about __ Step 4—Explain the passage __ Based on your observations in Step 3, explain the meaning of the passage in context. Compose a one-sentence thesis stating how the passage contributes to a reader’s understanding and appreciation of the whole text. __ Step 5 (optional) __ Share your findings with a partner or in small group. Help each other to see something you might have missed on your own. __ Step 6—Write the Paper __ Compose a one-two-page essay based on your annotations from Steps 4 and 5. Include Step 2. Be prepared to present your paper to classmates.
 * READING INTO WRITING: **
 * Connecting Reading and Writing Through a Passage-Based Paper* **
 * Adapted from Ellen Carillo, “Making Reading Visible,” //Currents in Teaching and Learning// 1:2 (Spring 2009), 38-39.

= Our (Accepted!) Proposal for the Conference on Composition and Communication (March 2013) =
 * This session will present the design and findings of a twelve-week status report on a year-long study of reading habits, practices, and strategies—before, during, and after instruction—for approaching and using texts to support and enhance writing in secondary, two-year college, and first-year composition classes. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve writing through the strategic uses of reading.

Inspired by Linda Flower's collaborative "Making Thinking Visible" project (1991) and book (1994, NCTE) as well as current scholarship in reading theory and pedagogy (e.g., Linda Gambrel, David Reinking) and the perceived need for reading instruction in support of composition instruction (David Jolliffe, et al), this panel of secondary and college-level writing teachers will first describe the design of their classroom-based research, which includes ethnographic methods (e.g., classroom observations, reading protocols, interviews) as well as their own interactive and reflective writing in blogs and wikis throughout the project, followed by summaries of observations and findings in the participating ninth- and tenth-grade as well as two-year and four-year freshman composition course. After an overview of the research design and methodology by Speaker One, individual teacher-collaborators (Speakers Two through Five) will describe their particular students, classes, goals, and outcomes during the research period. Additionally, Speaker Five will summarize the collective findings and inferences drawn at the end of the first twelve weeks of the planned year-long/two-semester study.

The shared goals of the project are not simply to motivate reading among reluctant readers and novice writers but to improve students' strategic uses of reading in order to support their informed writing according to the particular curriculum of each course in the study. Thus, in conjunction with Flower's stipulation that classroom research yield "a rationale and guide for decision-making," this collaboration seeks to investigate the status of reading among new high school and new college students and to increase and improve their uses of and facility with texts, ultimately to improve their writing by improving their motivation to read, their ability to learn from their reading, and their uses of reading to inform their writing. ||