Bird's Eye View: The Use of Meta-Instructional Practices in Reading College Texts
Matthew Blake, Hunter College
Bio
Matthew is an adjunct instructor at Hunter College. His courses include EDUC 250: Urban Education, EDUC 260: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, and ENGL 120: Expository Writing. A former English teacher in the DOE, he's thrilled to have the opportunity to teach both the combination of literacy and pedagogy. It's his hope that participating students will go on to become teachers themselves. In his spare time he participates in local book clubs, writes and performs poetry, and is a competitive baker.
Course Setting
EDUC 260: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy takes place at Hunter College on Saturdays from 10:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. Students are self-selected into the course based on their interest in pedagogy and pursuing education degrees post-graduation. EDUC 260 is centered on curriculum and instruction; students learn how to write curriculum in the form of lesson and unit plans then apply their instructional understandings to deliver their curriculum as a final assessment.
Problem of Practice
Incoming students often struggle with text comprehension and conceptualizing college-level texts. While they are able to decode individual sentences and paragraphs, they have difficulty in discerning how these constituent parts fit together to make meaning. As such, this becomes a compounding issue over time, as texts build conceptually on one another in a sequence. Subsequently, the window to access ideas in the course, and the ability to engage in fruiting discussion, continues to shrink. Without intervention, students are still left unable to comprehend texts, grow increasingly frustrated, and ultimately resign from course participation. How might I enhance students' overall comprehension and ability to construct meaning from a text?Strategy
The strategy for intervention in the PoP is explicit reading instruction to teach self-organizing and labeling the parts of a text to then examine the larger whole. Specifically, students conduct a close reading of individual paragraphs and sections. While doing so, they follow an annotation protocol or questioning, explaining, and synthesizing ideas. Once completed for a specific section, they then label the portion of the text, and continue until they have completed the reading. Once individual portions are labeled they are tasked to "rename" the text to fit their own understanding. Subsequent follow-up assessments are students engaging in discussion, either in the classroom or through Google discussion board posts, positing their understanding, and then defending with their own annotations.
Course readings are formatted by converting PDFs of academic articles into Google word documents. The document is then formatted into two columns, wherein the left side column contains the body of the text, and the right side is reserved for annotations. As students label, they are encouraged to use the "Heading" feature, which then allows them to create a Table of Contents. The Table of Contents serves a dual function in both aiding their own understanding and organizing the text for easier accessibility.
Documentation
Initial Article Annotation
At the start of the semester, students attempted annotation of an academic text, "Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy", using the methods they were previously taught. This sample demonstrates highlighting of significant portions of the text, several lines, with corresponding notes in the margins. While the portion of the text is significant, the annotations do not evidence discernment of the author's purpose or connect to other ideas within the text.
Final Article Annotation
Toward the end of the semester, students attempted annotation using the protocol of organizing the text into sub-sections. Shown in the image is the student creating their own section headers, and then organizing them into a table of contents, for easy accessibility and also inferential notes.
Measuring Impact
Discussion Responses
Discussion responses were coupled with the assigned readings, and students were tasked to utilize their evidence and understandings sourced from the readings to respond to the discussion question. The essential question overarching the semester was, "What is school for?", and the student ties in evidence both from the primary academic article but also supplementary articles from the New York Times.
Following the initial discussion response, students again responded to the question, this time informed by the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings. The response illustrates a more in-depth and critical understanding. Further, it also ties in higher tier-texts that thematically connect, such as the work of bell hooks.
Grade Trends
Discussion responses were graded on a standards based learning scale, from 1-4 with 1 being inadequate, and 4 being exceeds standards. In the initial round of discussion responses the majority of students fell between 1-2 on the scale. By the final assessment of discussion responses, students shifted on the higher end of the scale to 3-4. A potential limitation of this scale is the attrition of students, beginning with 24 and ending with 20.
Analysis
The strategy was successful in giving students an access point to understanding college-level texts. Students had a marked increase in in-class discussions and had stronger writing samples overall that incorporated textual evidence and their own interpretations and analyses. Initial hurdles to overcome included the labeling of text sections. At first, students were inclined to summarize text sections in 1-2 sentences. An intervention for this included explicit grammar instruction on clauses and sub-clauses. This instruction further revealed a lack of background knowledge on the elements of grammar. Direct instruction on this topic provided a benefit in enhancing their writing, but also making their section titles more succinct and aligned to what they would traditionally see in an academic article.
Secondary challenges that emerged included technological fluency. Prior to this approach, students interacted with Google docs only as a vehicle for capturing ideas. There needed to be explicit instruction on how to format the text, where to access settings for headings, the purpose of headings, and how to insert a table of contents.
Overall, students emerged from the semester with increased reading comprehension, and a new skillset in both self-organization, syntax, and digital literacy.
Recommendation
For future iterations of this practice, I strongly recommend instructors dedicate time to explaining the how and why of the approach. During the first iteration, students followed along because they were obligated to; however, they didn't understand the implicit meaning until they noticed results. Explicit instruction surrounding the purpose will increase student buy-in. The strategy is also further enhanced when coupled with tech tutorials and syntax instruction.