CCI # 3: ¿Comprende?

Layer 1

Pre-Reading

Much of my classroom motivation revolves around my own personal charisma. I don’t say this is necessarily a long-term beneficial strategy, but my first year was characterized by a teacher who used his own personal excitement to generate excitement in his students. Luckily, I am young enough (assuming this strategy doesn’t work forever) to appeal to the students on a similar social level—we can relate on musical tastes, movie interests, shared views about the world and our generation’s place in it. They also are more eager to buy into my excitement because of my similar, but slightly older thus we’ll look up to you, age. I’ve got just enough life experiences, world travel, and college education to make me a role model without all the “uncool” baggage that will most certainly come later.

On a more serious note, I also did my best to actually apply some pedagogical practices I learned from my in-service trainings and my peers and mentors. Honestly, I did find the whole process of “activating prior knowledge” extremely easy, productive, and beneficial to motivating students. I teach British literature, which has the possibility of being, hands-down, the stuffiest subject on the planet. Most young adults could care less if Shakespeare was born in 1564 or who the Romantic poets were, but if I asked them interview their heroes and then compare those people to Beowulf in a hypothetical conversation over coffee they seemed to care. Another exercise I often tried was have them journal about a hypothetical personal experience that connected (tangentially at least) to what we were reading. For example, before we began reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I asked students to journal about what they would do if they were locked in a room with their worst enemies, what would you do if you had complete control over them. This situation is similar to the protagonist, Prospero, who has magical power over all his enemies on a deserted island. We then acted out in groups some of their responses to these prompts. The effects were not immediate, but it served as an amazing jumping off point for later discussion. When we finally reached Prospero’s response, light bulbs were going off as students were reminded of how they were similar or different to a fictional character conceptualized 400 years ago. If that isn’t indicative of the power of literature, I don’t know what is.

If I wasn’t asking them to activate through a personal connection, I would start almost every new reading with stories that I pretended had happened to me or a college buddy of mine. Students goofing off in the back would instantly perk up—literally on the edge of their seats waiting to know more about me. Much to their dismay, the stories were dramatic retellings of what actually happened in the upcoming book—deliciously unspoiled by the cliffhanger I left them all dangling on.

Post-reading:

After reading, my understanding did not so much change as it deepen and I found myself more resolved to use specific strategies to enhance comprehension. As with all learning, reading comprehension needs to be theoretically grounded, intentional, and child-centered. I was particularly impressed with the idea of creating “problematic perspectives” (VV&M, 176). You can utilize this using RAFT writing prompts, situated dramas (i.e. improvising a courtroom scene with defendants, plantiffs, judge, jury, and court reporters instead of simply having a formal debate). I firmly believe this activates the long-lost imagination of our older students and helps them create a meaningful interaction with the text.  I would like to push VV&M however to incorporate higher-level evaluative processes into this exercise. After being given a particular role, students should metacognitively evaluate their justifications for why they responded in the ways that they did—unfortunately, the book stops simply at responding to the imaginative prompt when a opportunity for true learning and comprehension awaits the question: “why do you think the way that you do?”

Layer 2

I believe I was very fortunate to have secondary teachers who understood the detrimental effect textbooks can have on minds who want to learn in-depth and focused our class on “trade books” instead of focusing on textbooks and supplementing with trade books. As a teacher now, I actively and openly confront the teaching of textbook literature in my classes—dramatically disdaining the use of the textbook by always showing the full body of the text with a trade book and comparing it to the shortened scrap the textbook calls an “excerpt”. By their very nature, textbooks create superficial comprehension through superficial interaction with the text, generalized and universalized bodies of text that have little to do with the specific needs of the students or the interest of the teacher, and seek a cookie-cutter comprehension assessment with bland and uninteresting prompts.

Trade books, on the other hand, allow for the liberating freedom of choice for the teachers, teachers who are intimately in touch with the needs and interests of their diverse student body. This is a daunting tasks for teachers, because it actually forces them to do the following:

1.     Know their students—if a teacher decides to move beyond the bland universalism of textbooks, they must commit to a pedagogical vision of what their individual students need. This is a commitment (financial and otherwise) that is a calculated risk and it can certainly fail to engage students, but the risk is minimized by know what will engage your particular students.

2.     Know the material—without the easy supplements of textbooks, teachers will have to do their own research, their own broad reading of the author’s work and commentary on it, and their own formulation of authentic questions.

3.     Know the end result—without built-in assessment, teachers with trade books will have to know how to mold the transactional experience of their students with the text in order to guide their progress through it. There are no question and answers found in the margins of Hamlet or Jane Eyre. When teachers decide to use trade books, they have to formulate the questions (or better yet, have students form the questions!) and be open to diverse answers. Project-based learning follows naturally from the use of trade-books because it naturally gives students (and teachers) choice and autonomy in creating their learning environment.

By using trade books, instead of textbooks, teachers are more likely to facilitate a “transactional” mode of interaction with the text (Probst, 378). The image Annie Dillard provides of literature necessarily changing the landscape of the reader’s life and the reader’s life form the literature like a river flowing within a riverbank is a powerful metaphor. Using trade books provides the possibility to do all of the things transactional theory hopes to do: put the reader first, tap into the power of prior knowledge and experience, and honestly honor the diverse primary response each reader will have with the text.