Thinking of the Missing Link: A Report from the 5th CalADE Annual Conference (Part One)

"Our students do not demonstrate strong critical thinking skills." That is a sad comment on the state of our teaching, which I sometimes hear from teaching and tutoring colleagues alike. As I attended the CalADE 2014 Annual Conference this weekend, my intention was to focus on new ways to strengthen that missing link. I found three breakout presentations that were interesting:

1. Infusing Impactful Reading Strategies into Basic Skills and ESL Classrooms, presented by Mark Manasse (Miramar College) and Dr. Sarina Molina (USD)
2. OUR READING TOOLBOX: The Reading/Writing-Thinking Connection, presented by Dr. Sylvia Garcia-Navarrete, Dr. Joel Levine, and Yuki Yamamoto (Southwestern College)
3. Framework for Evaluating and Selecting Readings for Developmental Courses, presented by Dr. Aja Henriques and Jennifer Escobar (Mt. San Jacinto College)

The point Mark Manasse makes seems right on. Our students are empowered by reading and responding to well-chosen socially transformative texts, along with a pedagogically sound developmental ed model. For his intermediate level ESL reading course, which is three levels below English comp, Mark does not use a traditional textbook. Instead, he chooses 3 Mike Rose's blog posts that address the issues relevant to his students. To make the authentic materials more accessible to his students, Mark utilizes USD's free service called Teaching Studio to create three adapted versions for each chosen blog entry using Flesch-Kincaid reading levels. He then sequences his assignments in a way that moves from less to more difficult, building the students' skill sets one on top of another.

He spends the first half of the semester, preparing his students to handle reading as a writing mentorship. The students define concepts and issues and summarize what they read, with tons of group discussions. Any grammar errors are addressed in the context of what the students produce, not simply as a discrete component of the course.

When it comes time to read Mike Rose, Mark discreetly put the students into various high, mid, and low groups based on his pre-assessment of them using leveled-reading tests. Each level receives the appropriate Mike Rose article to read and interact with. Therefore, there are three levels of interventions. Mike also adopts the methods of Reading Apprenticeship and has his students read through 4 lenses: a summarizer, a quote finder/analyzer, a question creator, and an illustrator.  These roles are the heterogeneous tasks in a homogeneous level.

Then, Mark further empowers the students by means of the jigsaw technique where he switches the student reading circles to the heterogeneous levels (high, mid, and low) with the homogeneous task (i. e. all the summarizers together, all the quote finders/analyzers together, and so on). A product of this phase is a poster presentation by each group. In his view, this approach provides multiple access points where the students can interact with the text in a deep way.

The reading project culminates in the students posting comments on the read Mike Rose's blog entry. I would say that Mark's presentation was the best of the whole bunch as clearly I see the results of an engaged community, not just ESL students passively learning discrete skills. Although the reading selections have been adapted, the issues remain authentic and the thinking and communication skills are practiced in an enhanced way. I can see why Mark and Mike Rose were so happy to hear the students' voice. Mark also comments that this approach is suitable for an accelerated model.

If you would like to read a summary of Mark's experiment dubbed "Mentor Text (squared)" and to download three files that Mark uses for his class, just click here.