Get Students to Read (and Think) Like Content Specialists

Kerry Griswold Fitch

A new type of learning has occurred in my 9th and 10th grade global studies classroom: reading, writing, thinking, and speaking as if students were historians. As a secondary teacher, I know firsthand how much we can love our content. We are not just science, math, history, art, or English teachers; we've been trained to think like scientists, mathematicians, historians, artists, or writers. As educators, we can spread our enthusiasm for the content by encouraging students to read like specialists in our disciplines.

I want my students to read like historians by learning how to understand bias and how to interpret primary source documents. For instance, when students read a speech of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, an Iranian religious and political leader of the 1980s, they also need to understand his bias, rooted in Islamic fundamentalism, and the reasons for it. By doing this, students will be reading to learn instead of having their eyes merely touch the words.

It is important for elementary and middle schools to teach this way to prepare students for their secondary and postsecondary schooling. This instructional approach will help students unlock content. More importantly, if students understand the material, they can then share their thinking in meaningful dialogue. And if they can discuss it—like a historian or a scientist—then they can write about the material with more understanding and precision.

Interacting with the Text

As educators, some of the most rewarding moments of our careers come when we hear echoes of our teaching coming from students. This may occur during classroom discussions and when we read lab reports or writing responses. Students write exactly as they speak; they often parrot what they read. Consequently, students need to be able to interact with the text. They need to be able to lift it and manipulate it. They will learn to do this by practicing reading comprehension strategies, such as visualizing what they read, making connections (with background knowledge), inferring, questioning, determining importance, and interpreting vocabulary.

Students will not innately know how to do this; we must model to them what we are looking for. We must think aloud, which is one comprehension tactic Stephanie Harvey and Ann Goudvis (2007) discuss in their book Strategies that Work: Teaching Strategies Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement. When I think aloud, I read aloud and then pause and say when I've come to an inference, a question, or an important vocabulary word.

In another strategy, students leave "tracks" of their thinking on sticky notes or within a graphic organizer, making them well-equipped to discuss the material. When students take notes to document their thoughts on the reading, it forces them to commit to a thought (e.g., a reaction, question, or association) and place it on paper. Once they do this, they have ownership, and they become more confident during class discussion, because they've formulated a thought and prepared to share it. Taking notes also becomes a way for students to monitor their own comprehension, so that I, as a teacher, and they, as students, know where their thinking broke down, or where misconceptions with content began to occur.

Such cognitive rehearsal, or thinking ahead, of how to use a discipline's vocabulary is essential to student success. In my instruction with students, I've found it effective to target one specific strategy at a time, using repeated exposure. Over time, the explicit instruction will foster understanding so that students recognize independently when to use each strategy.

Connecting Reading, Discussing, and Writing

A heavy emphasis on decoding vocabulary is the root of producing literate thinkers, but distributing a list of words to define will not teach students. Meanings may resonate for a bit or students will memorize them, but students will not truly learn them until they can manipulate and use them across units and themes. In order to learn vocabulary, students need to preview and harvest the text as a class to create a class list. Harvesting is a way for students to connect the new information to known information and create background knowledge.

After this, move students to small groups. Once you discuss the list—in small groups and as a class—students have a better idea of what they will read about. Comparison between groups leads to a rich discussion. With the onus of the material is placed on students, chatter is contagious, forging further connections. Main ideas make more sense when essential terms have meaning attached to them.

For example, my sophomores could not stop discussing Joseph Stalin or the perils of communism (if you know teenagers, then you'll understand the desire to talk about communism is not typical). Out of students' deeper conversation grew deeper meanings that developed deeper respect and appreciation for the content area, which focused on economic systems—a topic in the New York Regents Exam. In turn, the sophistication of students' writing grew tenfold, so that they went from being unable, at the start of the school year, to identify an essay's thesis statement to being able to explain and analyze communism, the roles played by its major figures, and its causes and effects.

If students can learn to make connections among class content, other texts, and the world, the content areas will not seem so fragmented. The 21st century holds an increasing need for sophisticated literacy skills to comprehend, evaluate, and synthesize information from multiple sources. Students who may one day work in a collaborative environment will need to put literacy skills into practice to solve complex problems, and those who've learned to think like a specialist in a field will have the edge of independent thinkers. Teaching students how to read to learn, instead of just looking at words, is where we can all begin.

Reference

Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement (2nd ed.). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Kerry Griswold Fitch teaches 9th and 10th grade social studies at the Penn Yan Academy in Penn Yan, N.Y.