Two months ago I shared a synthesis of reading strategies I had been using with my high school students in the May 11 session of Virtual Viral Hangouts through the Media Education Lab. In the presentation, I had participants focus on three of Beers and Probst’s signposts and one of their disruptive heart questions with Jennifer Fletcher’s ideas about having students do a PAPA Square with some of Renee Hobbs’s ideas about structure. 

I had originally envisioned that I would add to this work, make this presentation better, and possibly share it at the Fall Conference of the Iowa Council of Teachers of English. Sadly, Covid-19 has changed many of our plans for having large group meetings this fall. And Covid-19 also cut short more frequent use of these reading strategies.

Priority 1 for my school district involves “Education Equity and Improvement,” and I was working on these guiding questions with ALL of my students when the governor suspended school:

• • How can I broaden my perspectives?
  • How can I improve my reading skills?
  • How can I transfer essential rhetorical ideas to my own writing?

The presentation below attempts to bring together four writers and six works to analyze Justin Baldon’s TED Talk “Why I’m done trying to be ‘man enough’”: 

• • Renee Hobbs’s Create to Learn (2017): “What are the consequences of your creative work as it may affect the attitudes and behaviors of others?” (p. 19). In essence, this driving question for my students also became a driving question for me. What disruptive teaching practices am I creating to affect the attitudes and behaviors of others? How am I creating a “lifelong learning process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action, using the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world” (p 18)?
  • Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s Notice & Note (2013), Reading Nonfiction (2016), and Disrupting Thinking (2017): “Reading ought to lead to thinking that is disrupting, that shakes us up, that makes us wonder, that challenges us. Such thinking sets us on a path to change, if not the world, then at least ourselves” (2017, pp. 160-1).
  • Jennifer Fletcher’s Teaching Arguments (2015): Teaching for transfer to “enable writers to write for diverse audiences, purposes, and occasions.” This touches on a core standard in Multimedia Composition. Fletcher’s Teaching Literature Rhetorically (2018): “Teaching for transfer prepares twenty-first-century learners for a changing world” (p. XVI).

References

Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2017). Disrupting thinking: why how we read matters. Scholastic teaching resources (teaching strategies).

Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2013). Notice & note: strategies for close reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2016). Reading nonfiction: notice & note stances, signposts, and strategies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Fletcher, J. (2015). Teaching arguments: rhetorical comprehension, critique, and response. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Fletcher, J. (2018). Teaching literature rhetorically: transferable literacy skills for 21st century students. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.

Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to learn: Introduction to digital literacy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Last week I returned to two pages from one of the core texts of our 2019 summer course on the Secondary Reading and Writing Workshop.

On p. 8 of Workshopping the Canon (2017), Mary E. Styslinger writes:

Along with the above, when structuring reading and writing workshops around classical works in middle and high school classrooms, it is important to keep in mind the stages of reading literature suggested by Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (2012). They proposed four stages of reading literature: (1) reader response, (2) interpretive community, (3) formal analysis, and (4) critical synthesis. This four-stage construct moves student readers from responding personally to sharing and deepening these responses within an interpretive community, to illuminating them through formal analysis, and toward synthesizing critical perspectives into their own interpretation. Milner et al. (2012) explained the teacher’s role during the initial stage of reading as nurturing unmediated, unencumbered, felt responses to the text. Once students have responded to the text personally, they are ready to move into an interpretive community, as teachers facilitate engagements that bring students together to unravel the text. During formal analysis, we help students explore the craft of the text read, noting such elements as plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, style, themes, or symbols. In the final stage of reading literature, critical synthesis, the text is considered from the perspectives of varied schools of literary criticism, such as historical/ biographical, moral/philosophical, archetypal, feminist, Marxist, or Freudian.

And on p. 49 of Workshopping the Canon (2017) Styslinger continues:

While the more text-centered theory/pedagogy of New Criticism may seem at odds with reader response, it does not have to be. As Rosenblatt (2003) clarified, “Emphasis on the reader need not exclude teaching criteria of valid interpretation or application of various approaches, literary and social, to the process of critical interpretation and evaluation” (p. 7). In the workshopping classroom, we begin with reader response, allowing and encouraging students to bring prior knowledge—their personality traits, past events, present needs, physical conditions, moods, and preoccupations—to the text. These initial associations form the foundation on which we build, establishing an interpretive classroom community through sharing of personal responses, then engaging in more formal analysis and critical study. During formal analysis, we guide students in understanding how a text achieves its effects and, often, its meaning. When we embark on critical study, we view a text through one or more literary theories (e.g., historical/biographical, moral/philosophical, Freudian, feminist, archetypal, Marxist, formalist, rhetorical, deconstructionist, new historical, etc.).

As I look at these different lenses, I find that I am more comfortable using the Feminist and the Social Class lenses. When I was teaching AP Literature & Composition, I used the Postcolonial Lens during our critical study of The Heart of Darkness. Now as I’m confronted with an Equity Challenge by my administration, I’m thinking that my application of the Postcolonial lens to just The Heart of Darkness was too limiting. So I’ve been re-viewing my teaching practices. What teaching strategies do I need to return to and to strengthen for contemporary use? How can these lenses work with nonfiction? If my teaching is too myopic, perhaps this is just the prescription that I need.

One text that influenced me in the past was Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015). In her third edition, Appleman includes these two strategies for exploring the Postcolonial lens:

1. 1. Search the text for references to colonization or current and formerly colonized people. In these references, how are the colonized people portrayed? How is the process of colonization portrayed?
   2. Consider what images of “others” or processes of “othering” are present in the text. How are these “others” portrayed?

And Appleman goes on to write: “Analyze how the text deals with cultural conflicts between the colonizing culture and colonized or traditional culture” (p. 203).

So this week I’m turning my attention to the “processes of othering” that are present in our culture, in my school and in my classroom. I’ll try to give a vision update soon.

“Making Curriculum Pop is fizzing with exciting ideas and creative plans for classroom teachers, but it also has a clearly articulated rationale. The LEOs (Learning Experience Organizers) provide a systematic and engaging way to explore the diversity and complexity of media texts with students in a wide range of curriculum areas.”

—David Buckingham, professor at Loughborough University, UK, and author of Media Education: Literacy Learning and Contemporary Culture

Discovering Learning Experience Organizers

One summer when I was in graduate school, Dr. Richard Fehlman took a group of us to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to hear Dr. David Buckingham offer the audience brilliant, inspiring, and practical advice about media literacy. Buckingham’s Media Education was the go-to book in our graduate course as we explored expanding concepts of text and of reading.

And so Buckingham’s praise for Making Curriculum POP: Developing Literacies in All Content Areas (2016) in the epigraph above and on the first page of Goble and Goble’s book added instant credibility and only fueled my enthusiasm for reading and later incorporating the Gobles’ theories into practice in my own classroom. And I have to note that seeing exemplary presentations by the Gobles at the National Council of Teachers of English and at the Iowa Council of Teachers of English though the years only added to the Gobles’ credibility.

In their opening chapter, the Gobles succinctly describe the shifting educational paradigms of the last century and the theory and research behind their Learning Experience Organizers. They contrast their noninterlocking LEOs with traditional study guides and worksheets (p. 20). And if you’ve ever used literature circles in your classroom, these LEOs will be familiar hybrids ready for your immediate consumption. However, these LEOs “are not your daddy’s caddy.” These Learning Experience Organizers have been modified for today’s students and today’s expanding textual experiences.

In addition to the impressive feast of 55 LEOs in Chapter 5, the Gobles include a chapter on designing learning experiences, a chapter with suggestions for modifications, and over 60 pages of impressive “Resources to Make Your Curriculum Pop” (pp. 66–132). Although I don’t have time to describe the magnificence of Chapter 4, the media-rich resources are perfect companions to the Learning Experience Organizers.

Returning to a discussion of the LEOs, the Gobles write:

Using Learning Experience Organizers, or LEOs, creates a highly differentiated instructional practice designed to engage students with any print or nonprint text, including objects and spaces. Instead of using a traditional study guide to search for a text’s “right answers,” students can use LEOs to individually and then collaboratively interact with the text using a variety of specific and open-ended foci. (p. 12)

And later in Chapter 1, Goble and Goble stress the importance of student choice: “Choice is a feature of this type of study guide, as is the opportunity to explore connections and feelings, make predictions, and focus on better responses (as opposed to those that are right or wrong). Noninterlocking study guides—such as our LEOs—incorporate higher-level thinking” (p. 19). Goble and Goble bring Chapter 1 to a triumphant close as they summarize “six interrelated strands of education research and theory” (p. 22) that have guided them as they created LEOs. Because the Gobles’ guiding ideas (pp. 22-8) of

• Constructivism
• Collaborative and Cooperative Learning
• Cultural Studies and Media Education
• Culturally Relevant Teaching/Engaging Students in Learning
• Differentiation of Instruction and Multiple Intelligences
• Literacy Across the Curriculum and New Literacies
• 21st Century Skills

mirror so many of my own guiding ideas, grafting the LEOs into my lessons required minimal changes.

Designing and Developing Digital Learning Experiences

After using key LEOs with the whole class as we read several anchor works in my AP English Language and Composition courses, I had students use specific LEOs to respond to other shorter works in small groups. After multiple discussions and evaluations, I created editable PDFs of several LEOs that my students could use in nonfiction literature circle discussions of their choice books. (And if I had been a more careful reader, I would have noticed the link to PDFs right after the Table of Contents.) I liked how students were able to take more responsibility for their own learning as they chose and jigsawed the LEOs that would work best for their choice books. The LEOs were successful in terms of choice, independence, and critical thinking. And in terms of assessment, I found the Gobles’ metaphor spot on: “Most LEOs are designed for many possible responses, so we often assess these footprints of learning based on process and effort” (p. 51).

After four sessions of nonfiction book circles, I decided to make two design and instructional changes before we used LEOs with choice book again. First, about 5% of my students had problems editing the LEOs. Even after repeated instruction on the workflow, two or three students would inevitably turn in blank PDFs. To improve the workflow, I converted 18 of the LEOs to Google Docs, and I offered these HyperDocs to students as links that automatically copy the file for them. Here’s an example of just one HyperDoc LEO:

Connector

The CONNECTOR’s job is to relate your text to other things you have studied in school, your own personal experience, as well as things outside of school (self, text, world). Make sure you are specific—for example, if you are using a passage from a text, write out the EXACT QUOTE OR PASSAGE in the upper boxes with quotation marks. Please be prepared to share your connections with your group.

After switching from PDFs to Google Docs, all students easily mastered the process.

The second area that needed change was in assisting students to better choose LEOs and to emphasize that if a LEO is not working (not authentic) for a particular book or for a particular section, skilled readers adjust their response and find a better fit. In addition, I had the students jigsaw LEOs after having read about 25 pages, and this helped students make more informed choices the second time around.

In the end, the HyperDoc LEOs were easy for the students to use, and they gave students voice and choice in their learning. With the Gobles’ solid foundation in theory and their creative genius in the creation of Learning Experience Organizers, my students and I were able to make the curriculum pop!

References

Buckingham, D. (2012). Media education: literacy, learning and
     contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity.

Goble, P. B., & Goble, R. R. (2016). Making curriculum pop: developing
literacies in all content areas. Golden Valley, MN: Free Spirit
Publishing.

Yesterday at an EdCampIowa session in Ames on “Teaching Literacy 6-12 with the Iowa Care,” the discussion turned to reading instruction. This is a particularly relevant topic for me because I have one section of Additional Instruction, Reading each day with a group of students who are not reading at grade level.

One teacher mentioned that the teachers in his district have been reading Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers. I appreciate learning what others are using as a research base for their instruction. If we had had more time, I would have shared how influential Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies has been for me in the last two months.

Starting with Beers and Probst’s Notice & Note (2012), continuing through their presentations at the Iowa Council of Teachers of English in 2015, and now during my first and second reading of Reading Nonfiction (2016), I find Beers and Probst particularly appealing because their organic methods affirm some of the truths I have discovered in my 23 years of teaching students disciplinary literacy in English and journalism courses while providing me with scaffolding as I renovate my knowledge and understanding of content area literacy skills.

What I truly appreciate about Reading Nonfiction is that Beers and Probst have tested their stance, signposts, and strategies with students at multiple grade levels. In addition, they provide anchor questions for each signpost for students in elementary, middle school, and high school. While the signposts stay the same, the anchor questions increase in intellectual complexity to meet the cognitive needs of students. For example, elementary students coming upon Numbers and Stats might ask themselves: “What does this make me wonder about?” Whereas high school students reading historical texts might pause when reading numbers or statistics to ask themselves:  “How do these numbers help me see patterns occurring across time, regions, and cultures?” (p. 121)

Although I should be providing additional details to better explain my present renovation project, I’m going to turn to  how I have been implementing some of Beers and Probst’s techniques in my section of AIR. I’ve taken the signposts (slightly modified) and discipline-specific questions for high school students and color coded them on posters and bookmarks. Using the color-coded highlighting features in Newsela and in my Kindle app has kept me grounded when I’ve modeled think-alouds with my students. One of the reasons I have used Newsela is that I’m most comfortable sharing my knowledge of writer’s craft using news, feature, and opinion stories from newspapers and magazines. Newsela allows me to model and leverage my discipline literacy skills to strengthen my students’ content literacy skills. Another reason I like using Newsela is that allows me to naturally use a gradual release model in the classroom. I can model with a story at the original or a higher Lexile level and then have students practice with the same story or another story at or just slightly above their individual Lexile level.

I’m hoping this combination will keep my students in their ZPD.