Defining Disciplinary Disourse

Over the past year I have run into trouble defining this phrase and I ran across this clarification in Reading for Understanding today on page 40.

Discourse is a particular form of language.
Disciplinary Discourse is a particular form of language that develops in a particular social setting.

Give or Grow?

Today, on page 5 of Reading for Understanding I ran across this statement,

"To the degree that students cannot independently access the knowledge and information embedded in their books and other curriculum materials, teachers try to find alternative ways to help them 'get the content'."

I remember reading this statement the my first time through chapter one, but today, after a really challenging year of implementing Reading Apprenticeship in my classroom, it struck me differently.  It begged me to ask whether I am satisfied with just giving my students the answers?  Don't I want more for my students? Growth ...perhaps.

Reading Apprenticeship – A Mental Workout

For the past ten years I have overheard my well respected colleague say to his students that learning and studying is like working out.  You have to start with the small weights and use them every day until you can advance to the heavier weights and then you must once again use them every day so that you don’t lose your muscle tone.  With his analogy, he drives home the point that studying every day builds your endurance and ability to study for the big tests.   My experience with Reading Apprenticeship has amplified this analogy and I am seeing a direct correlation between students who are practicing their reading processes and working with the content with the students who are performing significantly higher in formal and informal assessments.  This challenges me as a teacher to think of ways to increase the number of students who comply with the Reading Apprenticeship model within my classroom. 

Firstly, I know that I have to trust the process and articulate to my students that this process is not only valid but beneficial in the short and long ranges of their education.  Next, I need to continually work on the social and personal dimensions of the framework, building trust and personal interest.  As a chemistry teacher this seems like a foreign concept yet it is a key to unlocking my students’ willingness to participate.  How can I create a space in which a student who has failed multiple science classes will volunteer his/her answer or thoughts?  How can I personally connect what we are reading about with students’ lives?  How can I make it matter?  (Please excuse the chemistry pun.)  Furthermore, I need to create a class structure and curriculum that holds my students accountable to doing their work.  For example, my warm up questions need to challenge students with what they read and recorded in their metacognitive logs the night before.  The warm up questions need to be important, challenging, and supportive.  I have also been noticing that when I provide students direct feedback on their work (not just a grade), the students pay attention to what I have said in a far greater way than if I had made a class announcement about the same idea.  This is a time-intensive move but it is a strategic way to increase my students’ compliance. 

Are you looking for ways to engage your students in the process?  Have you figured out something that seems to be working for our student population?  What else might we do as teachers to keep students in the mental workout of Reading Apprenticeship?  Please comment with your ideas.

Assessing the Process...Continuing the Inquiry

One of the most common inquiry questions surfaced in the first five days of training asks about how to assess students on the reading process while also assessing content, all while maintaining our sanity as teachers. This is the million dollar question!

In the spirit of true inquiry and collaboration, we are asking you to share some tips and recommendations for how you have been able to assess your students’ reading.

In order to model, I’ll start by sharing one of my assessment routines. When students complete a Talk to the Text, I always make explicit what my one or two reading strategy focus(es) are. They are encouraged to do what they need to in order to make sense of the text, but I ask them to especially focus on what I have selected to be the critical strategies that piece of text (based on genre, goals, previous T4s, etc). Then, when I collect their T4, I scan through their annotations, trying to answer or comment on a few questions they ask, and leave them a note on the top of their page. This note is in code and might look like this:

S √+

Q √

C-RW √

U √+

In this grading system, I identify the strategies they have used (S – Summary, Q – Questioning, C-RW – Connections to the Real World, U – Underlining) and rank how effective they seemed and were engaged in this text (ranging from a √- to a √+). Students then record these notes on a chart I give students at the beginning of the year. Over the range of assignments, they are able to see trends in which reading strategies they are using and which ones are most effective in each genre.

This is not extensively time consuming, but by the end of the 2^nd quarter, I start to fade to student independence where they will self-assess by the end of the year. We practice this in the 3^rd quarter with more peer assessment. In terms or numerical points, I follow the compliance-practice-expertise model  based on the T4 focus and where we are with student experience per strategy for each genre.

I hope this model clarifies the possibilities of sharing our experience. There’s no one right answer to this question, but with our collective thoughts and anecdotes, we can put together a more comprehensive understanding of the question at this stage. 

Social Dimension: What's Next?

Rita Jensen is quoted in Reading for Understanding Chapter 3, page 85:

 Teachers get confused that doing particular activities at the start of the year to set a classroom culture is the extent of how the social and personal dimensions operate in Reading Apprenticeship. If you're paying attention to the social and personal dimensions, building safety in your classroom takes more than a getting-to-know-you activity or norm building or personal reading history. These are important, no question, but they're just the beginning of what it means to build a classroom that feels safe. And students do need to feel safe if you're asking them to talk about being confused about something you asked them to read.

It's also important to keep in mind how all the dimensions keep interacting, all the time. Maybe the next time students are reading something really hard, you ask them to stop and reflect with a partner. They're going to need to be metacognitive, they're going to need to collaborate, they have an opportunity to develop stamina and to use cognitive strategies, they're probably going to learn something - all from a three-minute Think-Pair-Share - if the social and personal dimensions are being tended. The more experience you have with Reading Apprenticeship, the more you will appreciate the genius of how the dimensions are always interacting and the social and personal dimensions are always instrumental to the learning. They make the learning possible! 

 At this time in the school year, the crunch often starts to set in when we feel that the content does not allow for us to continue building the personal and social dimensions. On the other hand, though, we know and have experienced that when students are addressed as individuals with their own emotional and personal needs, they are more able to accept and learn the content. The personal and social dimensions are conduits to the content; therefore, students are positioned to be ready to learn more deeply. This is a steady reminder to all of us that a single routine has incredible power in honoring our students and their learning.

Some other routines that readily work on building these dimensions include the following: small group discussion (especially before large group share out), comments on students' questions in their homework/T4s, modelling complex texts for students (taking the risk with them), sharing chapter annotations and trying to answer questions raised by a peer, individual time to reflect on a question before discussion.

And to think that this is just one quote from Chapter 3! Enjoy your reading of Chapters 3 and 4 over the next three weeks.

A Buffet of Texts

So our textbook isn't the only text that we have have . . . so what else is considered a text?

• newspaper article
• word problem
• graph
• chart
• song lyrics
• lab report
• video
• essay
• novel
• comic strip
• graphic novel
• political cartoon
• manual
• directions
• equations
• pharmaceutical insert
• list of ingredients
• magazine article
•  pamphlet
• brochure
• journal
• children's book
• flyer
• poster

The best work is the hardest work...

Last week at the RAISE training, a participant made an observation that struck me as poignant and highlighted the difficulty of truly teaching our students and teaching them deeply:

 "Sometimes as teachers, we cut corners by teaching students as if they all think and read the same way. If we really want to build them to be successful thinkers, we need to show them how to do it."

Even though the practice of theory of differentiation is not new, considering it in the light of reading and thinking is not something that we often give precedent to. Instead, we believe that if we teach the content, the thinking will come with it. It takes courage for us to reexamine this assumption in our teaching and embrace a paradigm shift. This quote made me uncomfortable and upset at first, not wanting to ever think that I am cutting corners, but it certainly warrants deeper reflection methinks...