Reading? I thought this was a writing class!

The Big Concern: How do we teach the critical reading skills necessary to get our students to read past the first page(s)?

The Group: Adam S., Jenn K., Kyle, Mike, Heather, Matt F.

The Answer: No final answer arrived at.

The Best Guesses:

• We've got to deal with at least two issues right off the bat: what the students are interested in (if a whole class can share an interest) and what is just simply too long.
• Is it possible to create curiosity in a topic? Is it possible to create enough curiosity to read a 15 or 20 page scholarly article?
• And a third issue: Is there something necessarily wrong with using the first page or two of the text?
• We teach students to look for the thesis statement and general argument summary first. We teach students to write that first.
• When we teach peer review, we emphasize what goes on in the first few paragraphs as a way to set the tone of an argument.
• Should we just tell students to start peer reviewing from the middle?
• If we want students to analyze someone's evidence/building-block arguments, how do we enforce that over looking at the thesis?
• Don't they need to make a point of the thesis/overall argument to contextualize their source use?
• How do we teach reading/analyzing/writing about both?
  
• We can work critical reading skills into peer review.
• "Summarize your writing" or "summarize your partner's writing." "Respond"
• Jenn suggested having students write a request for their reviewer's, something to pay attention to in particular. Reviewers read through once without commenting, then again paying attention to the request.
• Forces annotation, paying attention to the whole text
• Hard to assign too much during peer review, especially in a 50 minute class.
  
• Do reading in class
• Time is a concern, but it's worth it.
• Teach annotation along with it
• In student writing, we can respond to misread or misquoted sections by saying "Check your annotations" or "I read that as something different," and students should have enough to fall back on to fix errors or better explain reasoning.
• Class conversations about reading
• Adam had trouble getting much of a response out of Harry Potter book reviews
• Matt had trouble getting much response out of short readings about privacy and terrorism or long readings about putting tracking chips in released prisoners
• Heather had really good luck bringing in an article from a British Labor Journal. Not necessarily because it's British or about Labor issues, but because she had Business and Econ students in class. They knew which questions to ask and could help lead the rest of the class through it.
• Suggestion: Find something that at least a few people are ready to deal with, then use the resulting conversation to model close reading.
• Tell students to pick a topic that interests them and find an article in one of the library databases (maybe make sure it's longer than a few pages). Read those articles in class.
• Model scholarly reading by telling students to use their phones and various internet machines to look up words they don't know. Encourage using context clues, but enforce the way scholars and professionals actually read these sources ("That writer is showing off. Now we look up what s/he meant.")
• Make annotation an assignment
• Jenn assigns several annotations by asking students to mark texts in the ways that seem most helpful (more than check marks and underlines, when possible). Gets students in the habit and shows that it isn't so bad.
• Would this help explain the weird marks (check marks and circles) we leave when we feedback papers too?

Cognitive Dissonance (Way, MaryEllen, and Erika)

- students can’t cope with the longer sources; students are lazy

• we ask a lot of students: choosing topics in which they’re probably not experts, writing longer essays than they’ve ever written before


• How much reading is appropriate?


• Should we dictate the number AND the length of the sources our students need to use


• We should induce some cognitive distress in students. Where do we draw the line between useful and overwhelming cognitive distress?


• Does giving students a number of sources encourage them to use convenient instead powerful sources?


• Can we individuate challenge by having students choose topics and sources of varying difficulty?


• Can we give them a “menu” of sources? Can we ask them to speak with the reference librarian for ten minutes to find appropriate articles for the topic?


• Students who have met with reference librarians to help them find sources have tended to be successful. Structure as a homework assignment.
  - Set a high bar, then allow students to negotiate down


• Alternate approach: you have to have X number of sources and together they make Y number of pages


• This is all just “housekeeping;” what really matters is the source’s purpose and students’ purpose


• Let’s ask students to think about the overall purpose of a source first; then they can summarize (or paraphrase) incompletely while still having understood the gist of the entire source.

On illuminating source context (by SuperGroup--Ti's name, not mine.)

Jen, Ti, Beth, and I discussed strategies for illuminating source context in the classroom, and here are some of our suggestions:

• In their work on the research paper, Ti has her students arrange themselves into groups based on similar topics, but with different sources, and discuss their sources and write an annotated bibliography as a group. This shows that they can use sources in a variety of ways and helps situate themselves inside a larger conversation on one topic.
• Reading sources in class with a consistent framework (asking the same questions) and drawing connections between in-class readings can be helpful.
• Providing information about the author, their work in their field/how their reputation might affect critical responses to their work, historical/geographical context helps ground scholarly articles in concrete information.
• Collaborative work helps students contextualize their sources/their work.
• Narrowing down from a broader topic helps students understand that everything has a larger context/is part of a bigger conversation.
• Activities in which students take one source and find and read the sources cited by that source helps students understand the way in which scholarly conversations unfold.

The Citation Project at WSU

Below are focus questions to consider after Diane Kelly-Riley and Jennifer O'Brien's presentation on WSU results from the Citation Project.
1)  How can we help students learn to "write from sources" rather than "write from sentences"? 
2) More specifically how can we provide students with feedback on the work that will help them accomplish this goal? 

Please post your group's responses to these question on the blog.

Great Library Resource on Citation in MLA Style

This is a screen shot of one of the resources from the WSU Library.  Ari sent me the link.  It looks like a terrific resource for your students.  http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/electric/quickguides/docs/mla2.html

Guidelines for reading critically
These questions are kind of dumb EXCEPT for:
- What is the purpose of the text?
- What are the author’s main points?
- What questions does the text suggest to you?
We find that we don’t usually enumerate all of these points as a list of individual processes.
Why bother analyzing the images? This isn’t relevant for most of the writings we assign (though it is for a few.)
What does it mean to read actively? Whether or not we need to do this with WSU students is a matter of debate among us.

Our own reading processes:
- Drawing lines in the margins
- Highlighting and scribbling questions in the margins
- Writing down ideas and responses to the reading in a separate document


Guidelines for summary
- Way: uses the 5-minute argument as a strategy to understand summary, i.e. the 5-minute argument is a summary of the paper they would write
o Jenae: uses a similar process to the list in the book, but doesn’t number them or give them in as formal an order
o Way: I don’t have students do that because students try to do the summary process as they’re reading and you often can’t summarize something until after you’ve finished reading. We, expert students, can keep track of multiple trains of thought at once, but our students don’t necessarily know how to do this yet.
o Ti: I split things up on multiple days. After they’ve read something, I ask them about the main idea. On the next day, I ask them to summarize it.

Students have a really hard time summarizing texts. (Way) Should we give students summary quizzes? How do we teach summary?

• Talk about how to choose quotes, how to explain a reading to someone who isn’t in your English 101 class. (Jenae)


• Write a 200 word and a 2-page summary of the same article. (Ti)


• The metaphor of translation for summary and paraphrase

Ways to talk about reading strategies: ask students to volunteer their own strategies, volunteer your own strategy, talk about reading as a useful skill and figure out which tool works best for you. (Jenae)

Then we talked about Friere, Foucault, and hegemony.

Summary of our thoughts (get it?!)

At the outset, Kyle Thomas noted that the example of student annotation (264) would be very useful to break down the process and reasoning behind making these marks in a text. Unfortunately, those of us that had already talked about the Etzioni article and Stevons response in chapter 4 didn't think to use an example that was so far removed from the original.

• We also discussed the value of having annotations in books when you buy them, even if writing in the book ruins its resale value (but everyone rents books now, right?).
• A text that's already been annotated is like a blog, but it's hard to get a system working where students actually annotate a text in a blog rather than respond to it.

After some time talking about summary/response in blog posts or assignments, we realized that none of us are really sure how to teach something that we do every day. Mike mentioned students already know how to do summary, annotation, rhetorical analysis and many of the other things we teach in 101, but they don't have the language or the keys to explicitly pointing out that's what they're doing. The questions/flow charts on 265 & 267 are handy, but they probably won't blow anyone's mind. In order to blow our students minds, we discussed different ways of

• Always doing something new, partly because the last attempt wasn't as successful as we wanted, partly because we can end up summarizing ourselves without teaching anything new (meta).
• We give a task to practice summary, present it to a group or the class, then question what makes it an effective/ineffective summary. (We also do the same with other texts that pretend to summarize, like Netflix plot synopses.)
• We try to give a good explanation of why writers in all fields do summaries in the first place. 
• Sarah pointed out that she tries to find really good examples and ask students to summarize the types of texts they already summarize often, like movies.
• We try to draw attention to the ways we use summary in daily life, rather than just work.

At this point, we realized reflection was an important part of the summary/response process, which means we have to teach two important modes of writing that everyone does every day without second thought. (A Venn Diagram was made, but we did not fill in many details before moving on.)

None of us used the charts in Academic Writer very heavily (referred to them in the past, will probably draw attention to them in the future; they are not a cornerstone of our summary/annotation lessons), partly because we are still trying to figure out where these skills fit in. It's hard to teach annotation because it's something we expect everyone to be able to do already, and we don't want to start at too basic a level and lose our students' interest.

Our conversation branched into discussions of how important summary is in the final portfolio as an explicit objective, rather than a part of other projects. Mike Hilbert said something profound, but my laptop's battery died before I could save the notes. We discussed ways of relating projects to each other, so students would summarize themselves several times over the semester. 

I think Mike's deep thought had to do with a research paper assignment sheet he had his class create. They had all the freedom to make whatever kind of project they wanted, but in the end, the assignment sheet was exactly as he would have made it because the class just summarized his previous handouts and responded with more of the same. 

Automatic Annotation

1) While the questions in Ede's book were useful as a starting point for inexperienced readers and students, we decided that the majority of the prompts came second nature in our own processes. We already understand how to internally articulate audience and purpose; it no longer needs to be defined prior to reading. However, we do recognize that this is a developed skill--many group members recalled their own "close reading" experiences through high school AP literature courses--they learned by example.

The primary difference in our experience boils down to time. We have our students for 2-3 days a week, for brief intervals. This requires us, as teachers, to accelerate that process, as we don't have time to read multiple texts and reflect in class. The annotated process becomes a series of tasks that can help a student through the process, eventually allowing the student to fashion his/her own methods.

2) There was a general consensus that these questions would be employed with an in-class reading, either post-reading or during. Students should preview the questions prior to reading, then actively engage them with the text.

3) For summary, we discovered that most of our group members focused on a summary, paraphrase, and quoting unit instead of an individual unit on summary. We found that this larger unit addressed the task of using sources, but did little to promote reading comprehension. Thus, the focus on summary while teaching how to annotate seemed like it would be beneficial, if our class goals were such.

4) For other guidelines regarding summary, we concluded that summary should highlight the main points, foregoing detail in favor of message.

5) We concluded that the guidelines for summary should include using text objectively, asking students to employ memory as a source (for in-class practice), and adjusting for audience by requiring students to summarize for a variety of individuals. For example, one might ask students to summarize for a fifth grader, or perhaps a fellow classmate.

Critical Reading: Pedagogy Plus PDC 1/25/2012

Question 1

Pages 263-265 of The Academic Writer provide support for teaching students to annotate a text.  Discuss the following questions and write a group response in a post to this blog.

1. Do the questions (265) reflect your own processes when annotating?  How are the similar or different? 
2. Are the questions worthwhile (in your individual and/or collective opinion)?
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY!: How would you use these questions in your class to promote critical reading skills?

Question 2

Summarizing texts is one of the most important skills student must have to be able to "write from sources" rather than "write from sentences" (Rebecca Moore Howard).  Discuss the following questions and write a group response in as a post to this blog.

1. Do these Guidelines (267) make sense to your group?  Why or why not?
2. Do you have other guidelines you regularly use for summary writing?  Would you share those if you do?
3. AGAIN, VERY IMPORTANT!: How do you teach summary in your 101 classes and how might the Guidelines in The Academic Writer help your students write better summaries?  In other words, how would you use these Guidelines to promote better summary writing?