Interacting with Text (Part 2)

At the first CalADE meeting in Anaheim last month, Chris DeBauche and Sylvia Garcia-Navarrete of Southwestern College reiterated the need to select reading materials that are relevant and beneficial to our students as well as the need to paraphrase read ideas in clear and complete sentences. They also offered more ways to make reading worthwhile. For example, they advised against using multiple-choice activities and advocated designing high-quality, thoughtful prompts such as:

• create a headline that you think expresses the main idea of the reading
• select the one sentence you think is the most important in the reading and tell why you selected it
• ask a question to the author or someone in the reading that you would really like an answer to
• state why you think this reading was written
• state in your own words, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate certain vocabulary or concepts in the reading that you need to understand better
• identify what you think is the most important conclusion the author comes to in the whole reading (not just the last paragraph)
• state what you think should be done to deal effectively with the issue or problem being presented in the reading
• state ideas or answer questions about the reading as if you were the author himself

The two presenters demonstrated strategies designed to help students understand what they read as well as bring learning alive in the classroom:

• semi-circle seating arrangement
• name tents (used also to take attendance and assign random seating)
• popcorn reading (i.e. ask students to just read without being called upon)
• silent reading (done simultaneously by both the students and the teacher)
• think-pair-share
• jigsaw reading (with home groups and expert groups)
• focus on a few well-chosen concepts
• require the use of a "speaker's voice"
• require the addition of "yet" after the common answer of "I don't know"
• use Zynergy Chimes signals

One of the several quotations that the presenters shared really conveyed their teaching philosophy: "The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think than what to think."

Once again, if you need a copy of their handout, just let me know.