Scaffold Students to Rise to the Challenge of Difficult Reading

Student sharing with the class her group's poster of a chapter of The Scarlet Letter

History was pretty horrible. I’m glad I live now.

This was actually easier reading than A Midsummer Night’s Dream last year.

Third time’s the charm, they say, and my third time teaching The Scarlet Letter is off to a charmed start. Last year’s start was disastrous (see my blog here), so this year I started with the reading strategies and poster idea that salvaged last year. There’s one other thing I did differently this year, too. Instead of starting with a nearly full period of introductory lecture on background, biography, history, themes, styles, influences, romance, transcendentalism, symbolism, things to look for, etc…. I decided to just jump in. 

I have a personal theory that in any well-structured work of literature the first page, couple of pages, or chapter (depending on length and work) will contain in embryonic form most of the themes, motifs, symbols, and other significant signposts of the rest of the work. At this point in 11th grade, I can remind students of where we particularly looked at this in 10th grade: Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, and Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. So all the introduction I gave them was that this is a novel written in 1850 as historical fiction set in 1625, and that Nathaniel Hawthorne was so mortified about his great-great-grandfather Hathorne who persecuted Quakers and his great-grandfather Hathorne who convicted over 100 witches, that he separated himself from them by adding the “w” to his name. 

Students already know that this novel is a part of our quarter 3 study of the relationship of the individual and the community. We’ve already read a number of short pieces. Now it’s time for our marathon piece—to keep up our reading stamina. It’s also the last long work we’ll read before the AP test in early May, so it’s the hardest. This is a challenge, I tell them—the hardest, longest piece you’ll read this year. And in addition to the quarter-long question about the relationship of the individual to community, we’re also addressing the essential questions of how to interpret difficult text and “What do old, dead white guys have to say to me?” 

With that, I handed out the guiding bookmark for the novel study (see below), the novel, and a one-page copy of the first chapter. I said, “Instead of lecturing you about the background and what to look for, I’m going to read you this first chapter, and stop and model my thoughts to you about where I see everything you need to look for in the rest of the novel embedded in these first 2 pages. And I want you to annotate as we go, taking notes about what you’ll need to look for in the rest of the novel." (Yes, I start with the 2 pages of chapter 1. I skip the 49-page introductory sketch about the custom house. I tell the students what I’m doing, and that if they ever re-read the novel as an English major, they will appreciate the introductory sketch much more than they would now. Purists out there may gnash their teeth at me, but I’m okay with that.) 

I’m thinking that maybe I’m doing a better job of cultivating curiosity and the value of asking questions, because while I was passing the books out, I heard a student mention “romance” and ask how this book was going to be that. It must be on the cover some place? So I got in a mini-lecture on what Hawthorne meant by romance.

After reading/reflecting through the first 2-page chapter (if you love and teach the book, try it sometime! or ask me about it in a message), I sent students off to read the next 2 chapters—about 20 pages—at home. I said, “Copy down in your journals a central image for each chapter, along with a quote you think is important, and any other questions you have. Remember, this is hard, and get what you can.”

The next day, students came in actually excited. One student way showing me her journal even before class began: “Look at my image: It’s Hester shivering, because CHILLingworth gives her CHILLS!” When the bell rang, I asked if they had any questions. The unanimous answer was that the questions were all about vocabulary. So we talked through some of the vocabulary, and then I gave each of the groups of 3 or 4 a paper and markers and the assignment to produce a poster with the following: (1) the chapter number and title, (2) a central image, (3) a 1-sentence summary, (4) a significant quote, (5) a connection to some theme or topic on the bookmark, and (6) a question. They had about 10 minutes to do this, and then 1 minute for each group to present. Here are the posters from chapters 4 and 5:

How do you scaffold students to rise to the challenge of difficult tasks in your field?

Service Learning Needs Special Opportunities and Daily Opportunities

I'm thankful for bus drivers willing to guide big vehicles full of children down busy Japanese roads!

February is GREAT! Not only is it a special month for recognizing Black history (I’ve learned about some amazing people on social media, like Eugene Jacques Bullard), it also has a special day for expressing appreciation to our loved ones (yeay, Valentines!), and at my school, a special week for service.

This past week, 6th-11th grade students worked together to serve our community in all kinds of ways, including cleaning up local beaches, doing projects at nearby churches, visiting with residents of elderly care homes, making and serving dinner at a homeless shelter, putting together athletic programs for older elementary students and Bible school programs for younger, and using music, art, and dance to entertain audiences. Generally, the groups spent Monday preparing for their project, Tuesday through Thursday carrying out their project, and Friday debriefing their project, putting together a presentation for their peers, and then celebrating with everyone’s presentations in the afternoon.

It was a great week, and I’m glad we show our value for service by providing the time and resources for this focused week. I also hope it isn't the only opportunity for service students see themselves as having. Any more than Valentine’s Day should be the only time we say, “I love you,” to our nearest and dearest, or February should be the only month we mention Black history. 

How do we infuse service into the daily routine? Notice it, name it, and teach the skills to do it better. Daily service opportunities in my high school English classes include the following:

• Answering group members’ questions in small group discussions. 
• Providing group input that propels the discussion forward and deepens everyone’s learning.
• Listening to each other to understand, not to formulate a reply.
• Inviting the participation of quieter peers.
• Giving each other helpful feedback in reading classmates’ writing drafts. 
• Sharing good books.
• Thinking about our audience—what they need to hear, and how I can help them best hear it—when creating, practicing, and delivering presentations. (Instead of thinking about myself and what people are thinking of me.)

What other daily service opportunities do students see themselves encountering in your classes?

This is how we prepare students for service-oriented lives: some special opportunities, coupled with a lens through which to see all of life as a series of daily opportunities for service.

By the way, you may wonder what service project I led students on during Service Week. I didn’t. I had my own personal service project—being the bus monitor on our longest route (3 hours round trip, morning and afternoon) so the other monitor was free to focus on his organizing role in Service Week, so the bus driver could focus on driving safely rather than on the behavior of nearly 50 students, and so the students could get safely to school and back so they could participate in Service Week. Yeah, that's what the picture at the top is about. Here’s some more of what it looked like for me:

Me and my bus from the outside

Me and my bus (empty and quiet) from the inside

Starting to fill up!

Giving Skills and Content a Purpose

Why did she do that?

When was this article written? I feel like it’s talking about millennials and not us.

Which values did you choose? Let me see your paper!

One of my favorite moments in teaching: when kids walk into class already talking about the topic before the bell has even rung. That’s when I know I’ve hit the sweet spot where purpose meets learning, and motivation and classroom management take care of themselves. That happened a lot over the last 2 weeks in 10th grade, so I want to examine what works so well with this unit which centers on A Doll’s House, a late 19th century modern prose drama by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (full text available from Project Gutenberg). 

We know purpose is hugely motivating, so I never title my English units with genre, time period, or name of work. The unit on poetry is “Paying Attention” because we can and we must when we have so few words to work with; the unit on A Doll’s House is “Finding Myself” because that is the protagonist’s epiphany at the end, and our response is to begin the work of finding ourselves now, before we find ourselves in Nora’s dilemma. 

The essential question for the literature portion of the unit is “Why would a reasonable, rational, normal human being do that?” If you were an actor trying out for a part, even a minor one, you would have to figure out that character’s motivation and backstory just from what she says and does, and what other characters say about her—and whatever they think, you have to be able to read her lines with empathy and believability. It’s a lot like life: There is no omniscient narrator telling you why people are doing what they’re doing, or what they’re thinking while they’re doing it. No one acts “crazy”—given how they’ve experienced and perceive the world. Inference is a life skill: “Why would a reasonable, rational, normal human being do that?” Actually, I got a lot of those ideas from the excellent human resources book Crucial Confrontations, and I said to myself—hey! That’s what we have to do when we read drama! 

While pursuing this essential question, we practice reading strategies. First I read and model them. Then groups read and do them on their own. Then students can do them on their own. (See below for the reading journal that guides us through the reading looking at quotations from the text and what we infer about character and motivation from them, as well as requiring the use of several other reading strategies, paying attention to how the playwright guides our responses and to the role of minor characters.) We wrap up with a whole group discussion (see questions at the end of the reading journal) that segues into the writing/response portion of the “Finding Myself” unit.

The essential question for the writing/response portion of the unit is “Who am I?” We subdivide it into 3 parts: Who am I culturally, temperamentally, and spiritually? For nonfiction reading practice as well as for content on which to practice the skill of synthesis, we address each of those parts with content and discussion: for culture, we read “The Values Americans Live By,” mark which end of the continuum we fall on for each of the 13 cultural values, and select the 3 that are strongest for us; for temperament, we take one or more Myers-Briggs inventory and research and discuss what that meant (see Google Classroom announcement below); for spirituality, we work in groups on this Google Doc that gives students various Bible passages to research, explain, and connect, related to 2 principles about individual identity. 

That’s where we are now. When we come back to class after service week, we’ll begin on the final paper pulling it all together. Students saw the basic prompt at the beginning of the unit on the unit guide, we’ve been referring to it through our research, and when we come back, they’ll get this expanded prompt, couching it as an application essay for a summer academic or work program. It will also guide them through examining a model essay and beginning to brainstorm the order of their points, the logic for that order, and the support they will use (see here).

How do you give students purpose for learning skills and content?

Life isn’t something that is waiting for our students 3 or 7 or 17 years down the road when they finish school: it’s already happening to them in our classrooms and cafeterias, on the soccer field, at their jobs, in their homes, and everywhere in between. If we aren’t preparing them for that part of life—as well as the part that will happen next year, on the SAT, and in college—then we’re missing out on an amazing opportunity to tap into all the motivational power that purpose makes accessible.

What Does Thinking Look Like?

Over the years, I’ve stumbled upon exercises that really help students get traction on thinking—not playing “Guess what’s in the teacher’s head,” but grappling with ideas, articulate them, and coming to new understandings because of it. This week in AP English 11 we did 2 of my favorites. One is literally cutting up a piece of writing into its components—a paragraph into sentences, a short piece into paragraphs, or a longer piece into designated divisions—and having students work in groups to reconstruct the order. As they work, they have amazing discussions about transitions, structure, and argument—so much better than when they just look at an intact piece and respond to the question, “What do you notice about transitions?” In the photo above students are working with the 6 divisions of an article from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Later in the week, they worked on group annotations of poems. (See photo below.)

It’s nice to have a bag of exercises that are really effective, but because they’re so distinctive, they can also become gimmicky if we do them more than, say, once a quarter. So I need to answer the following 2 questions: Why do these exercises work so well? And how can I even more effectively call students’ attention to the thinking they are doing, so they can transfer that thinking even more effectively to other classroom settings and to life?

I found some answers this week in a book discussion with 7 other colleagues. In Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners, Ron Ritchhart and his colleagues say, “[W]e need to draw on our understanding of what thinking is and the types of thinking we seek to foster so that we can name, notice, and highlight thinking when it occurs in class” (29). Name, notice, and highlight the types of thinking we seek to foster when they occur in class. 

What are the types of thinking I’m looking for? I have a bulletin board listing them in the back of my classroom—I made it after reading this book for the first time this summer. But the bulletin board, alas, has not served as the memory trigger I’d hoped it would. That’s why I need this second time through the book with colleagues—taking it slowly, reviewing, and building in accountability. I was especially aware this week both as I read the first 3 chapters in preparation for the discussion Thursday afternoon, and as I set my application goal to name, notice, and highlight thinking when it occurs in class, especially the 6 moves listed on page 11: 

1. Observing closely and describing what’s there.
2. Building explanations and interpretations.
3. Reasoning with evidence.
4. Making connections.
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives.
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions.

And it’s actually working. I’m using those words—especially 1, 3, and 4. I ask students to observe closely and describe what’s there because that’s the basis for clear, careful thinking. It’s the basis of both of the exercises pictured above. Then they use those observations as the evidence for reasoning: What makes you think that section comes after this one? What makes you think the tone of the poem is angry? What is the character’s motivation, and what makes you think that? Making connections is probably the one that I use most naturally and frequently—What other work or character or theme or author was similar to this or different from this? Modeling my thinking by commenting on a news story or a TED Talk or a personal experience that connects, and asking students to come up with their own. 

Now for next week, I want to continue to name, notice, and highlight when students (or myself) observe closely and describe what’s there, reason with evidence, and make connections. I also want to work on naming, noticing, and highlighting the other 3: building explanations and interpretations, considering different viewpoints and perspectives, and capturing the heart and forming conclusions. 

What thinking do you name, notice, and highlight in your classroom?