Handling T4 Resistance

Handling T4 Resistance

-Kay Cole

One of the most common points of resistance that we encounter from students is from the metacognitive routine of "talking to the text". At the beginning of this school year, I was forced to confront my own perceptions of this obstacle when I read in a student's Personal Reading History that she perceived the act of "talking to the text" as a hindrance to her love of reading. She went on to describe how she felt that being required to write something on each line interrupted her flow of thought.  I utilize "talking to the text" as one method for students to engage in metacognitive thinking and make their thinking visible regularly, so this really made me stop and consider the source of this student's perception.

Why would a student feel this way? How could I both honor the student's experience, while also helping her to see the value in showing one's thinking? Below is the response that I wrote to her:

Student,

 Thanks for sharing. In the coming year, I will be asking you to make your thinking visible to me at certain times for important passages of text. However, I don't want this to be a hindrance, but a help. It will have a purpose (sometimes chosen by me, sometimes chosen by you) and the goal will be to consider the reading in a way that deepens your understanding or helps you perceive in a new way. If this becomes a hindrance, let's chat so that we can find a way to make this type of assignment useful for you as a learner and useful for me in understanding your thought processes.

 Mrs. Cole

At the beginning of my Reading Apprenticeship journey, I thought that perhaps oversaturation of methods utilized across content areas was the challenge, but now that I have traveled down the RA road a bit, I suggest that the dilemma is less about oversaturation, and more about clarification of purpose. We do not claim that students are ever "oversaturated" on reading or writing - yet, students engage in these activities in all content area classrooms every day. Thinking and demonstrating thinking, in addition to reading and writing, are keys to student learning, so I had to confront why a student may not see the value in this particular endeavor, and work actively to address the challenge.

In confronting, questioning, and revising my own practice, I have developed some "rules" for myself when assigning a T4:

1) Always set a clear purpose: After "talking to the text" is introduced and students understand the concept of metacognitive conversation and have had the opportunity to practice a few times, I set a clear purpose for why we are engaging with the text in this way. The purpose either connects directly to something that students are about to learn, reinforces something already learned, or acts as a scaffold for a future authentic assessment such as a project or essay.

2) Always communicate the purpose to students (this is the piece that I struggled with the most): Students must be reminded each time that they embark on this kind of deep metacognitive activity that the purpose is to deepen understanding, help them break apart text to increase comprehension, or to help them with a next step. I find that now, each and every time I assign a T4, I find myself saying "Remember - we don't talk to the text just for the sake of writing something on paper, but to help us ___________"

3) Always use the T4 for another larger end goal - it is the path, not the end: The T4 is not an end in and of itself - it is a scaffold for the metacognitive conversation. It must provide students with a content conduit into something else (a discussion, an essay, a project, pre-cursor or post-cursor to research into a selected topic, etc.)