610 Blog 2/3/10/10
Kogon, Magic: Learning To Teach How To Teach
“The Reader’s Apprentice: Making Critical Cultural Reading Visible” sounds like a magical work, and, it would be magic if I knew how it worked. Metacognition, the process of knowing what you are thinking while you are thinking it, is a skill I can barely demonstrate while not speaking my thoughts out loud. Teaching this concept is the beginning point in including high school students in the world of deeply understood text. How to know how to teach them is beginning point of my exercise here.
Linkon demonstrates how teachers introduce students to the text by using background information including the historical frame of the piece, the point-of–view generated by this context, the literary form and genre of the text, and, the she tops it off with genre placement and critical interpretation. We all understand the problems in student work generated by this in-and-out process: they paraphrase or go off on an undesirable tangent, and they do not make effective use of their outside research or the content resources we give to them (253).
So how do we incorporate the solution to what we know will happen with what we want to happen? The Experts vs. Novices challenge is a good place to start. We’ve learned that experts differ in how much they know, how they categorize this information, and how readily accessible their facts and analyses tied to their prior knowledge are. Modeling basic strategies while prereading, reading, and rereading texts allows students to acquire and access the skills to decode the work they are reading.
One of the links on the Visible Reading Project website links to a poster by Randy Bass of Georgetown University: http://cndls.georgetown.edu/applications/posterTool/index.cfm?fuseaction=poster.display&posterID=154 In the middle column is a paragraph titled “Learning Activity Breakdown.” Click on the link and you will see a table on: “reading a text to generate researchable questions.” It is a two-entry notebook graphic that allows for three levels of reader accomplishment. The strategies and their correlating obstacles form the basis of what we know and what we would like to know. Now, if I could only do that in my head without talking aloud.
I actually don’t think talking aloud is so bad. We’ll see how/if it works out tomorrow in class, but the idea behind the practice is worth considering: by talking through a problem we’re solving, we make visible all those tiny cognitive jumps we make without ever realizing. And this is something, I’d argue, we need to demonstrate to our students…how complicated and muddled our thinking is. Even when the final product glistens and gleams, the path there was circuitous and full of difficulty.