Teach a Boy to Think...

During the three months that I decided to teach literacy all of the 7th and 8th grade boys at my school, leaving the girls in the capable hands of a colleague, my mind was opened to just what these facinating creatures do- and don't do- while reading.

In the first month, I decided to try to teach them the the comprehension strategy of visualizing while reading fiction. The night before, while doing some pleasure reading of my own, I caught myself visualizing a scene at the beginning of a chapter. I remember getting to the bottom of that first page, and thinking: "Really? Some people don't do this while they read?" It occurred to me that I visualized the most when there was a descriptive part of the book (like setting up a scene at the beginning of a chapter), when I was confused and trying to figure something out or when a scene reminded me of something a I had experienced before. It also realized that it was the visualizing that really enhanced my experience of the text, that the ability to see the text like a movie in my head was what made the reading enjoyable.

Armed with this discovery, I went into my classroom the next day with a text I was particularly excited to read to the boys: To Build a Fire by Jack London. This is a classic man-vs.-nature tale of a lost explorer who faces death by freezing in the wild. The opportunities London created to visualize with his descriptions of the setting and the details of frostbite were abundant, and so I began.

After reading a particularly detailed scene, I paused and asked the boys how many of them could visualize what was happening in the story. Of the twenty-six students, not one raised their hand. Chalking this up to a vocabulary problem, I rephrased, "When I was just reading that scene to you, how many of you could see it happening in your head like a movie?" Aha! Glimmers of understanding as the cloud of confusion passed, but still, only about six hands were raised. As I surveyed their faces, I quickly recognized that these hands belonged to the boys who voraciously read fantasy like Harry Potter and Eragon. Hmmm....

I stood there at the front of my classroom, book in midair, my mind racing from one thought to the next: Do these boys who read fantasy visualize because they read fantasy or do they enjoy fantasy because they visualize? Is it really possible that twenty of these students don't visualize as they read? No wonder boys hate reading fiction! What else do boys not do while reading that never occurred to me before?

Bruce Pirie is quoted in the Ontario Ministry of Education's Guide, Me Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills:

"If we leave [the] processes of reading and writing cloaked in mystery, telling ourselves that it all either comes naturally or else it doesn't, we surrender to voodoo pedagogy. In voodoo, privileged people, objects and rituals are invested with secret magical power, and to some of our students it certainly seems that there must be mysterious, unnamed powers needed to do well in English."

So, I read to them and modelled my own visualizations. We read together and I encouraged them to do the same through drawing and with the support of graphic organizers. We discussed how to incorporate the use of all five senses in visualizing. We read. We practiced. They improved. It had not occurred to many of them before that they actually had a role to play as a reader that came with responsibilities attached to it- like thinking. There were a lot of eyes going left-to-right over print, with very little else going on. This is not reading- a point that they had yet to understand.

It was the possibility for the next steps that really excited me. If you could teach a student how to visualize while reading, what else could you teach them that they might not do otherwise? This was the moment for me as a teacher that I learned that it is possible to teach comprehension strategies, and that there is hope for adolescent readers entering high school who continued to struggle to with reading. My strategies to support these learners prior to this experience really just amounted to offering some textbook-coping strategies and ways to get around text. I knew that I wasn't impacting their actual reading ability because I wasn't actually teaching reading...

yet.

References:

London, Jack. To Build a Fire. www.jacklondons.net/buildafire.html

Me, Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills Ontario Ministry of Education. www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/brochure/meread/meread.pdf

Kurt- Huh. Who knew?!?!

Kurt was a grade eight student in my class, slightly taller than the other boys mainly due to the fact that he had been retained a grade earlier in his elementary career. At thirteen, he was reading at a 4th grade level and experiencing general learning difficulties as a result. Where this may have made another student disengaged and more challenging to teach, Kurt was one of the nicest kids I ever taught.

In the few years prior to teaching Kurt, I had been reading and learning about teaching reading comprehension. My first book, I Read It But I Don't Get It by Cris Tovani, opened my eyes to a whole world of teaching that I never knew was possible. I was very aware of the fact that the students coming up to me in grades 7 and 8 were not all reading at grade level (I had been dilligently collecting data to prove it, but doing little in response) but I had never really known I could do anything about it before reading her book. Was it really possible to teach an adolescent to read? Wasn't it too late? I had thought that my best bet for these kids was to give them some coping strategies for all of the mountains of text they were sure to face in high school. The idea that I might actually be able to teach them to read was intriguing.

With a sense of optimism and a spirit of adventure I decided to test this out. I had been dabbling with teaching some comprehension strategies at the same time I had been learning more about boys' literacy. In the year Kurt was in my class, I had decided to engage in an action-research project wherein I took all of the grade 7 and 8 boys for the literacy block, leaving the girls to my teaching partner. My plan was to engage them with great texts, hands-on learning activities and to teach them a few comprehension strategies. In the three months of this project, I really hoped to improve their attitudes about reading thereby motivating them to practice more so that they could become better readers.

...and so began the testing! I conducted pre- and post- attitudinal surveys as well as tests of word recognition, oral reading and comprehension (using the Brigance Inventory). All initial tests confirmed what I knew in my heart: I had a class of mainly struggling readers who did not enjoy reading and were not excited to read more.

And, I have to say, the teaching was a thing of beauty! I turned the first month into SURVIVOR! We read survival stories, played survival games and plotted our own death-defying survival plans to escape numerous situations of peril. I was never more excited about my teaching and the boys responded in kind. I was sure I was onto something! I taught visualizing using descriptive texts from Jack London and Gary Paulsen. (During this time, Kurt was able to receive a little extra support from a literacy tutor with whom I collaborated so that she was providing additional practice opportunities for the strategies I was teaching.) Incidentally, Kurt ate the survival stuff up! He was an outdoorsy-kid, who wrote to me in his journals of the fort that he was building out of scrap materials on his property.

For the second month I planned a unit on Civil Rights that spanned the Underground Railroad to Martin Luther King, Jr. and decided to teach questioning as a reading strategy. These boys were reading everything I had- biographies of Malcolm X, stories of slavery- and they were even initiating conversations about what they were reading with each other in the hall! This had to be working! The third month didn't have a theme, but the focus was on inferring and I saved all of my best tricks for that instruction: graphic organizers, engaging short texts, etc.

Judgment Day! The three months went by quickly and it was time to run the post- survey and tests. I started with the attitudinal surveys, confident that my efforts would yield improvements in attitudes about reading. Survey says: BUBKAS! Their results were completely flat- no change. With a heavy heart, I proceeded to the reading tests. One by one, I was realizing that the boys were actually showing improvement in the three areas of their reading. In fact, thirteen of the twenty-six boys improved two or more grade levels in reading comprehension! This couldn't be right, could it?

And Kurt? He had sky-rocketed from reading at a grade 4 level to reading just beyond the 7th grade level... in just three months! Fearing I had completely messed up the data, I had a colleague repeat the tests with a number of students. The results held. It was recess and I ran outside without a coat to find Kurt. I approached him on the yard, arms crossed, very seriously, and said, "I have to ask you something. Do you think that you are a better reader now than you were three months ago?" He replied, "uhhh, ya". To which I challenged, "Really?!? You think you can read harder books now than you could just three months ago?" "Ya," he laughed nervously. "WHY?" I asked bewildered, "What made the difference?" All of the brilliant lessons that I had planned on predicting, questioning and inferring ran through my mind, the carefully-selected and engaging texts, the rich class discussions, the one-on-one coaching conversations... which of these gold nuggets that I threw out there would be the one he claimed as the difference-maker? He replied: "Well, now when I get to the end of a paragraph and I don't know what it meant, I just go back and read it again."

Really, Kurt? REALLY!?!? That's it? I realized I said this out loud when he responded, "Yup." All I could say was: "Well... it worked. Good job!" This was one of the strategies that we had discussed incidentally in discussing monitoring comprehension that he had been practicing with his tutor; and apparently, it made the difference because in three months, before high school, Kurt had succeeded in closing his reading comprehension gap by jumping more than three grade levels in reading.

Looking back on this, it is my surprise that it worked that is most interesting to me. After all of the reading that I had done, why didn't I believe that it would work? Hadn't I planned a whole action-research project on the very premise that it would? But, faced with the dramatic improvements that the data revealed, I was more inclined to believe I had somehow messed up the testing! This experience really taught me that "seeing is believing"; and, that with the hope of helping their students, many teachers will try just about anything that seems logical even if they don't actually believe it will work. It wasn't until I saw the results of my own students with my own eyes, that I actually believed it was possible to teach an adolescent to read.

Perhaps, the only person more surprised that it worked than me- was Kurt!

Reference:

Tovani, Cris. I Read It, But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers, Stenhouse, 2000.

Welcome to my blog!

Thanks for visiting my blog space, a place to exchange ideas about the challenges and triumphs of teaching adolescent students. If you are a teacher of adolescent students, then you will be familiar with the "kids in the hall", the ones who rarely seem to make it through a day without spending some independent time in the hallway. These are the students I want to talk about, because they are the ones who have taught me the most. I plan to tell you stories about actual students I have taught (pseudonyms will be used) and what I have learned from them. It is my hope that you will learn from them, too, and perhaps share your experiences back with me.

I was not typically a kid-in-the-hall, except for a short period between grades 5 and 6 when I got bored in school and looked for trouble of the worst kind: pre-teen girl drama! At that time, I did spend some recesses outside of my principal's office copying dictionary pages- clever!- to atone for some 'ostracizing' (I did look it up, Miss Z!) that I may or may not have done with my free time. Other than that, though, I was a model student who loved school. My brother was not so lucky. He was your typical 'kid-in-the-hall'. I'm dedicating this blog to my brother, Gavin, for whom I wish there were more teachers willing to make their classroom a place where he felt he belonged.

There's the bell...