9/24 Schoenbach (2 and 4): Texts, Thinking, and Modeling Vulnerability

9/24: Chapters 2 and 4

After explaining what a Reading Apprenticeship classroom might look like, Schoenbach, Greenleaf & Murphy (2012) state that “many teachers acknowledge that the shift to a metacognitive classroom requires important reframing of their role and increased trust in students’ potential” (p. 131). As a student, I have been in classes that are the antithesis of RA—no time to share my thoughts with a partner or small group, no collaborative discussions, and no feeling of safety about showing confusion.

And what were my thoughts after every session? Only that the teacher obviously did not care about our opinions. Or worse, that it was assumed we had no original thoughts on the topic. If we instead help students engage in metacognitive conversations about many types of disciplinary texts, then we help them recognize the complex and valuable ways of thinking that each person has to offer.

While working as an assistant in a middle school a couple years ago, I had the opportunity to periodically confer with students in an 7th grade Language Arts classroom about their personal reading and writing strengths, interests, and goals. I saw that trying to articulate what they were thinking seemed to improve their written work. Hence, when I was later working in 8th grade geometry I tried conferring with students about their reasoning in proofs. One student complained, “ugh, this is like LA in math class. Why?!” I can’t remember my specific answer, but I suspect that I missed an opportunity to highlight the importance of math literacy.

This week, I tried while reading the chapters to insert the word “math reading” in place of “reading” to envision how it might apply within my particular discipline. Sometimes this was a challenge because the examples for “texts” in mathematics usually include the textbook for a given course, graphs, the coding of the symbols themselves, and word problems. I am grateful that chapter four in Schoenbach gave a detailed example from Teri Ryan’s geometry class of Thinking Aloud about a passage on inductive reasoning. Still, the usefulness of the textbook as an example of precise mathematical language is a function of the textbook’s quality. One book might have more textual supports but not contain as much rigorous mathematical reasoning. Or you might have come across explanations like this:

Well, probably no high school textbooks would look like that, and your college professor might argue that being an active math reader involves trying problems like that for yourself. However, I like the idea of bringing outside proofs like the one on the Birthday Paradox in Lee & Spratley (2010) as texts for geometry students or above. Also, I think that part of math literacy should be learning how to apply mathematical reasoning to texts that don’t immediately seem to belong in mathematics. For instance, Dan Meyer has various “3 Acts” videos, like this one on elevator v. stairs, to help guide your students in finding problems to solve from an open-ended scenario and then using math from there. Perhaps a brave thing to do would be welcoming outside texts so that your students can “stump” you, as mentioned in Schoenbach.

On bravery, a teacher’s willingness to model his or her own metacognitive processes is incredibly important. I found the example of the literature teacher Doug Green, who often found himself explaining his interpretation of a story instead of his thinking, particularly striking. I imagine his ability to overcome this discomfort helped normalize struggle within his classroom. And as his own self-efficacy improved, I’m sure his students’ did as well.

Have you seen that modeling your thinking when reading a text has helped students make better sense of what they read in the future? Have you had any teachers that did this? If they had difficulty doing this well, did that help/hinder you? In terms of math, I think it is easy have the same dilemma as Doug Green. Sometimes we focus on the decoding aspect by saying what symbols mean or we jump to what technique should be used when instead we could be carefully explaining how our thinking develops with each new expression.