Using diverse informational texts is challenging. Real-world
informational texts – e.g, newspaper articles, court decisions, and scientific
abstracts – often are very long, have difficult vocabulary, and include
material not relevant to instructional goals. Moreover, teachers working in
classes with a large number of or composed solely of students with special
needs may worry that their students cannot negotiate the challenges of this
kind of material.
However, we firmly believe that all students, with sufficient support, can succeed with challenging informational text.
Susan’s recent experience working with an English class in
her school validated this belief. The small class of just five classified
students was studying Lord of the Flies,
and the teacher agreed to co-teach our lesson that uses a New York Times
article on a scientific study of male aggression in fruit flies to prompt
student thinking about the violence in Lord
of the Flies. We published a version of this lesson for The New York Times Learning Network, and
the full-length version is featured in our volume Connecting Across Disciplines.
While classified students may sometimes be given low-level
work and material that does not challenge them, fortunately, that is not always
the case. This second-year teacher consistently has his students grappling with
rigorous texts, and he welcomed the opportunity to incorporate a new
instructional model into his practice.
The teacher began the class with a do-now prompt asking
students what kinds of issues or situations annoy them and how they respond.
One student’s response offered a perfect segue into the main focus of the
lesson. He admitted that he sometimes struggles to control his emotions:
“that’s just how my mind is; my body runs really hot.”
Susan and the teacher then moved into the lesson by showing
the short, fun video created by the New York Times that accompanies the article on the fruit fly study. We first
played the video straight through, then played it again, stopping several times
to discuss and check for understanding. Though our students are always
absorbing media, we know they sometimes do so passively, so multiple viewings
of a media clip, perhaps with prompts for what to look for as needed, are key
in using media clips to hook student interest successfully.
The teacher had prepared the students for reading the article
the previous day by working on the vocabulary exercises for the text (in our Connecting volume). The value of this
work was evident when we began reading the article; students were confident in
their comprehension of the words they had studied the day before – e.g.,
hypothesis, neuroscientist, suppresses – and seemed to be quite willing to
tackle other challenging words in the article that they had not learned
previously.
During the 46-minute lesson, we read and discussed the
excerpted version of the Times fruit
fly article aloud as a class, using the sidebar questions designed to prompt
student thinking about the text. Excerpting and using sidebars are key elements
to our approach. We use excerpts and cut anything from the readings that might distract
students from our instructional goals. And we create sidebar questions that prompt
active reading: scaffolding for students the process of thinking and asking
questions about what they are reading along the way.
As we worked through the text, an interesting trend emerged.
When we asked students high-level questions about a particular phrase or
sentence of the text (e.g., “The article indicates that Anderson and his
colleagues identified ‘a tiny group of neurons ... that can control
aggression.’ What is the idea here? Why would scientists be interested in
studying aggression? Why would they care that a small group of neurons control
aggression?”), they were engaged and willing to think out loud.
However, when we approached a fairly long paragraph in the
article, the teacher clearly became concerned about keeping students engaged and
turned away from the sidebar questions to ask students easier comprehension
questions (e.g, “What is substance P?”) as we read the paragraph aloud. But when
asked this kind of low-level comprehension question, the students tended to
look at the text for a few seconds, make a guess, and then clam up in
frustrated silence.
This of course was the opposite of what the teacher
intended, but such a result makes sense. Basic recall or identification questions
are often harder than they seem, especially for students who struggle with
reading comprehension. If the answer is not explicitly stated in the text
exactly the way it is framed in the question (“Substance P is ...”), a struggling
student is likely to stare at the long block of text that contains the answer
somewhere and then guess. If the student isn’t supported by the original question
or follow-up questions to think about how the language in the relevant phrase
or sentence works, the student’s guess is likely to miss the mark, no matter
how long they stare at the text. What seems like an easy comprehension question
to a teacher can often be perceived as a more challenging question to a
student.
And the higher-level question, which promotes deeper
engagement with big issues, can in fact be easier, even when a student has some
basic reading comprehension problems. Just because a student might struggle
with reading words on a page, that doesn’t mean he or she can’t think. The key
is to craft questions that simultaneously supply what is needed to support students’
thinking about ideas and language and remove any unnecessary barriers that might
impede that thinking. Getting students who have difficulty with reading and
writing to talk and supporting them in thinking out loud are essential to helping
them improve their reading and writing skills.
Though we much prefer thought-provoking, open-ended
discussion and writing opportunities, we also use multiple-choice questions as part
of our working through a reading for two main reasons. First, they are an
inescapable part of our students’ reality, so we feel obligated to give them
low-stakes opportunities to tackle such questions, especially in the often very
challenging two-part formats posed by the Common Core-aligned and other
high-stakes assessments. Second, they are a relatively quick way to check for
understanding.
So, after our successful reading of The New York Times article excerpt, we grappled with a few multiple-choice
questions, talking through them aloud as a class, during the last few minutes
of the period. This gave us an important opportunity to not only check for
understanding in anticipation of moving on to written responses to the article
the following day but also to reinforce effective test-taking strategies and
build confidence with the kinds of questions our students often struggle with
on standardized tests.
The students were game for tackling these questions after
reading the article and discussing the sidebar questions, especially after we
explained that we would do them together. We asked what strategies they used when
attempting multiple-choice questions. They said they would eliminate obviously
wrong answers first; they also said they would plug the answers into the
question to see if they fit. We used process of elimination to answer the first
part of the main idea question. The students quickly identified the main idea
of the excerpt: “Studying aggression in male fruit flies may help us understand
aggression in humans.” We then asked the students what they would expect to see
in a piece of evidence that supported our answer. They said that a strong piece
of evidence would talk about studying aggression in male fruit flies and
aggression in humans. We then used these criteria to select the three best pieces
of evidence from the quotes given in the answer choices. After successfully
completing this task, we reiterated to the students that whenever they see a
two-part question, they should use the second part to help them check their
answer to the first part.
We were so pleased by the students’ level of engagement and
demonstration of high-level thinking throughout the class, we were very eager
to build on our success the next day.
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