With the Developmental English Redesign in full effect this semester, I have been faced with transforming the entire curricula I have become accustomed to for the past seven years. The new Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) associated with the redesign combines and streamlines the implementation of reading and writing skills to improve students’ success. In the past, the reading courses were taught separately from the writing courses (I personally believe that reading and writing are intertwined). In restructuring my courses, I have been reflecting on my own practice and my own thinking process as well as questioning the course content and student learning. What stood out the most from reading The Reader’s Apprentice was our role and responsibility as teachers of reading and making our thinking process visible to our students.

According to the article, “Most of the time, we teach these skills (“craft of reading”) and ways of thinking through demonstration.” Modeling might be engaging and exciting, but they can leave our students believing that the process of analyzing cultural texts is effortless, because teachers/experts can perform these tasks easily. When these same students are asked to emulate the modeling that was taught to them, both the teacher and the students end up disappointed. This is in part because, “Students may succeed on the level of explication, but they encounter difficulty when asked to position texts in their cultural and critical context, to apply theory or use critical sources to deepen or complicate their own readings, or to generate their own inquires.” Students need to be taught skills of interpretation. Students also need to be taught “ … (The) multiple habits and practices – inquiry, considering multiple positions, self-awareness, examining the cultural context, revising the text and one’s own ideas (slow and recursive), and making connections (connective) – together constitute the practice of critical cultural reading.”

I saw many of my developmental English students in this reading assignment. My students appear to have engaged in little thinking of their own in their final papers and research assignments. According to The Reader’s Apprentice, some of the problems stem from how we teach, but some are rooted in students’ prior learning and students’ preconceptions. Other problems have to deal with timing, “The problem stems from lack of understand about what it means to write about cultural texts.” Another problem, which I also observe in my students is, “We tell students to ‘do research’, but they may not know what to look for, or even why reading critical articles or related primary materials would be valuable.” Even though it is easy to place the blame on the students, we as teachers need to learn and transform. “We need to provide alternative models of reading and writing, in part b making our own cognitive processes more visible to students, but as my discussion of students’ assumptions and habits suggests, we also need to guide students through the reading and research process more carefully.“

The Problem of Expertise section goes back to our earlier reading of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Due to teachers’ expertise, their thinking process remains invisible. If we are not aware of our own thinking process, then how can we make it visible to our students? It suggests, “The processes of thinking are often invisible to both the students and the teacher,” yet “cognitive strategies are central to integrating skills and knowledge in order to accomplish meaningful tasks. They are the organizing principles of expertise.” I can relate to this personally. I am currently teaching the same developmental English courses that set in motion my own college education. As a developmental English student, I perceived my teachers as experts who never experienced any challenges in reading and writing. In my view, my teachers were not able to empathize with my struggles, because they never had to struggle themselves. I now observe the same mentality with my developmental English students. Most of them hold the same views about me until I share with them my own experiences as a struggling reader/writer. This common understanding and my ability to empathize with them help us work as a unit to ensure their success. It is crucial to be able to understand how we think and then make our cognitive processes visible to our students. According to this essay, visibility is not sufficient without allowing our students the opportunity to practice. “We developed our facility with critical cultural reading through years of practice, with some direct coaching from our teachers…” Now, we need to provide our students with the same opportunities. I strongly agree with “transferable cognitive skills” mentioned in the section Apprentices in the Library. We need to teach our students not just the important content of the course, but the transferable cognitive skills that go along with it that they can apply to future courses in their college education. This is what my primary goal in teaching developmental English courses; to teach my students transferable cognitive skills, which they can apply to other college courses to help them become successful.