What's Holding us Back?
I think all too often, a mistake that we as ELA teachers make is we assume that the comprehension we work to see happen as students read texts silently, and somewhat passively, "happens" after they read. I think we unknowingly foster this belief when we give them a piece to read, whether in class or for homework, and then give them a sheet of "comprehension questions" to answer after they finish.
Too often, the style in which these questions are posed demands very little in the way of complex thought or careful deliberation. They are usually plot-centric and entirely surface-level, which is why it's not at all uncommon to see kids finishing up their questions even as they read, while they should still be absorbing the material in their brains so that they can quickly move on to another activity they enjoy more.
It is a joke, really. Such an assignment does not assess their comprehension. It makes them think that reading comprehension is a chore to cross off their checklist rather than a tool that grows and matures with continued reading, helped along by interaction with the teacher or other students.
The question is, why do we do it? On some primordial level, we must know this isn't Best Practice, so why do we force this kind of thinking on students?
Maybe it's the pressure of grades. As we talked about in class, often we focus more on evaluating students than assessing them, passing out value (numerical) judgments over constructive criticism. When we are mandated to have a certain number of grades per nine weeks, we panic. There's no way I can possibly teach the way I was brought up in college and seminar and give my students 16 grades per quarter! That's almost like at least two grades a week, be they quizzes or tests! Think about what it will do to them! It reinforces the mindset that you don't come to school for the pursuit of knowledge - you come to be judged by cold, hard numbers. You don't come to have your mind engaged, you come to atrophy brain cells as you sit there, disengaged, or until the worksheets are passed out, which at least gets your motor skills going.
Or maybe we're scared of being different. This has to do with either teachinh with different methods from my colleagues or straying from the way I was taught when I was in school. What happens when my middle-school kids discuss with parents or other teachers how we read texts together in class, and I probed them with the "hooking" questions mentioned in CtW, chapter 6? I tell them funny or serious anecdotes that the stories remind me of (which encourages them to interrupt me to tell me theirs), or pause to request a prediction, or ask them to enter the mind of a character and imagine walking a mile in his/her footsteps, etc.?
And then we get the dreaded email or contact that questions our methods, then "politely" requesting that we go back to the "traditional" form of reading comprehension. What do we do then? I can name-drop Vygotsky, Atwell, Freire, and Kohn until my lips turn blue, but if they come back with, "well, you know, I don't really care about all of that because this is the way it's always been done as long as I can remember, so you need to get with the program already. Stop rocking the boat." How's a teacher supposed to respond to that?
Last year, my tests stood out significantly from those of my colleagues. Especially when it came time for semester exams. Scantrons were considered the default testing format, which meant most, if not all, questions were relegated to multiple choice or true/false. And there could be up to 100 of them because of the pressure to include everything from the semester on one exam. Whether they personally agreed with this style, I can't really say. But we can't deny that it results in much faster grading, definitely a bonus when you have to submit a grade report before the Christmas and summer breaks.
And you know, I understand. We are human, after all, we have families to go home to (and in their case, families to take care of). But I just couldn't do it. After a whole semester of in-depth, short answer questions, I couldn't change formats on them like that. That didn't seem fair or right to me. It may have taken me longer to assign grades, and I probably looked a bit weird grading these packets of multi-sentence answers rather than processing them through a machine. But I was fine with that. I just wanted to be consistent with my teaching.
Too often, the style in which these questions are posed demands very little in the way of complex thought or careful deliberation. They are usually plot-centric and entirely surface-level, which is why it's not at all uncommon to see kids finishing up their questions even as they read, while they should still be absorbing the material in their brains so that they can quickly move on to another activity they enjoy more.
It is a joke, really. Such an assignment does not assess their comprehension. It makes them think that reading comprehension is a chore to cross off their checklist rather than a tool that grows and matures with continued reading, helped along by interaction with the teacher or other students.
The question is, why do we do it? On some primordial level, we must know this isn't Best Practice, so why do we force this kind of thinking on students?
Maybe it's the pressure of grades. As we talked about in class, often we focus more on evaluating students than assessing them, passing out value (numerical) judgments over constructive criticism. When we are mandated to have a certain number of grades per nine weeks, we panic. There's no way I can possibly teach the way I was brought up in college and seminar and give my students 16 grades per quarter! That's almost like at least two grades a week, be they quizzes or tests! Think about what it will do to them! It reinforces the mindset that you don't come to school for the pursuit of knowledge - you come to be judged by cold, hard numbers. You don't come to have your mind engaged, you come to atrophy brain cells as you sit there, disengaged, or until the worksheets are passed out, which at least gets your motor skills going.
Or maybe we're scared of being different. This has to do with either teachinh with different methods from my colleagues or straying from the way I was taught when I was in school. What happens when my middle-school kids discuss with parents or other teachers how we read texts together in class, and I probed them with the "hooking" questions mentioned in CtW, chapter 6? I tell them funny or serious anecdotes that the stories remind me of (which encourages them to interrupt me to tell me theirs), or pause to request a prediction, or ask them to enter the mind of a character and imagine walking a mile in his/her footsteps, etc.?
And then we get the dreaded email or contact that questions our methods, then "politely" requesting that we go back to the "traditional" form of reading comprehension. What do we do then? I can name-drop Vygotsky, Atwell, Freire, and Kohn until my lips turn blue, but if they come back with, "well, you know, I don't really care about all of that because this is the way it's always been done as long as I can remember, so you need to get with the program already. Stop rocking the boat." How's a teacher supposed to respond to that?
Last year, my tests stood out significantly from those of my colleagues. Especially when it came time for semester exams. Scantrons were considered the default testing format, which meant most, if not all, questions were relegated to multiple choice or true/false. And there could be up to 100 of them because of the pressure to include everything from the semester on one exam. Whether they personally agreed with this style, I can't really say. But we can't deny that it results in much faster grading, definitely a bonus when you have to submit a grade report before the Christmas and summer breaks.
And you know, I understand. We are human, after all, we have families to go home to (and in their case, families to take care of). But I just couldn't do it. After a whole semester of in-depth, short answer questions, I couldn't change formats on them like that. That didn't seem fair or right to me. It may have taken me longer to assign grades, and I probably looked a bit weird grading these packets of multi-sentence answers rather than processing them through a machine. But I was fine with that. I just wanted to be consistent with my teaching.
posted by david @ 6:06 AM
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