MS: Welcome, Jon. Thank you for reading the post I recently
wrote for the
Nerdy Book Club blog. As a grade
9-12 teacher and administrator, why did it resonate with you?
JW: When I saw your post, I’d just finished reading a pamphlet,
produced by the National Council on Teacher Quality, called “Learning
About Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know” because
I’m mentoring a new teacher this year. It includes six “proven practices that
promote learning for all students, regardless of grade or subject.”
The first recommended teaching practice, one with mountains of research to
support it as all these practices have, is pairing graphics with words. So when
I saw the student reading preference data in your post, I thought, This is cool:
Since expository text often includes a wider variety of
visuals (photos, charts, diagrams, infographics) than narrative writing, the results
of these reading preference studies reinforce the recommended teaching
practice.
Why is that cool? Because often what
students say they prefer is not consistent with the “mind, brain and education”
(MBE) research. For instance, many of my AP U.S. History students tell me they
like to prepare for the May “APUSH” exam by re-reading as much of the text
and their notes as they can. But MBE research shows that re-reading is an
inefficient study technique compared to, say, retrieval practice or writing
responses to sample questions.
So, back to the academic study
results cited in your post: When you can teach in a manner consistent with how
most students say they prefer to learn when reading, that’s a happy alignment.
It’s certainly how I’ve taught History and Social Studies for thirty years:
content in the form of still or moving images, maps, graphs, tables, and a mix
of primary sources in addition to engagingly written, nonfiction text.
MS:
It looks like that NCTQ pamphlet breaks down the six suggested teaching
strategies into three subgroups. What are they?
JW: To answer that question, I’ll shamelessly draw from one of
my wife’s books. Because chemical elements are invisible, they’re abstract to
many students. But a student who reads Sarah Albee’s Poison: Deadly
Deeds, Perilous Professions, and Murderous Medicines comes across the story of the “radium girls” in both text
and image form.
These young women were hired after
the World War I to paint watch dials with the element radium, which everyone
thought was safe. The radium made the watches glow in the dark, so people could
easily see the time at night.
While working, the women inhaled and
ingested lots of radium. Only after they began breaking bones and even dying,
it became clear radium was poisonous. It’s a tragic story that links the
abstract (a dangerous chemical element) with the concrete (the suffering of the
women) via effective expository text. You might even use it to teach another
abstraction: the need for government regulations.
MS: So are all six of the “proven practices” in the pamphlet applicable to
expository nonfiction reading and teaching?
JW: The
linking of students’ free reading preferences with evidence-based teaching
strategies can get tricky when we get to the “remembering” category. Recalling
content is a critically important part of learning because typically new
learning builds upon old.
But how much do teachers want to
hold students accountable for recalling what they’ve read independently, even
if it is in school? If the answer is “highly accountable,” then teachers could
certainly apply the two suggested “remembering” practices: distributing
practice and assessing to boost retention. But if the point of free reading is
mostly to encourage students to read books they find interesting, then the
answer may be “not too accountable.” In that case, teachers might decide to apply
the remembering strategies elsewhere. But they can still remain confident their
students will recall the content of books they themselves chose to read.
MS: These are very interesting ideas,
Jon. Thanks so much for giving educators something to think about and perhaps
try out in their own classrooms.
Fascinating post for teachers and writers. TY.
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