This is a repost of an article I wrote for the Achieve3000 online magazine in November of 2020. The magazine appears no longer to be available online, so I thought I'd post it here for quasi-posterity. It focuses on topics covered in earlier of my blog posts and in PD sessions and keynote speeches I used to deliver under the umbrella title, "Teaching for the Stretch."
“Believe me, my young friend, there
is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply
messing about in boats.”
Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows
We all want our students to read and grapple
with interesting texts, but how do we know whether a text we assign will be
interesting …whatever that means? Do we look at the topic? The genre? The
author’s use of language? The font size?
Well, all right…maybe not font size. But what can
we rely on? What do we do when only some of our students (or none of them!) are
engaged by the material we bring to them? Some people argue that we need to
change the curriculum to make it more relevant to our students. Others argue
that we need to make the students care more about the curriculum we already
have. Don’t read this book; read that book. Don’t cover this topic; cover that
topic.
It can be incredibly difficult to find reading
content that is equally compelling and fascinating to every single learner in
your classroom. But looking for that single, magic text is actually a mistake.
The fact is, nothing in this world is inherently, by-it’s-very-nature
interesting. Things are interesting only to the extent that we bring our
curiosity to them. Our investment of interest is what makes things interesting.
This means, I think, that ANY piece of text can
be compelling; it all depends on what we do with it, and what we let students
do with it. When students see a text as a series of tasks to complete—an
assignment that well-behaved students will comply with, regardless of how they
feel about it…well, just writing those words makes me feel depressed. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can
move from compliance to compelling—from chore to play.
When I say “play,” I don’t mean that we need
to gamify our lessons (again, whatever that means). I mean that we can find meaningful
things for students to explore and tinker with in a text—opportunities to play
with language, with structure, and with ideas, instead of simply responding to questions.
As the historian, Johan Huizinga, writes, everything we think of as culture
originates in some form of play. We are homo ludens—a species that
learns through play. The statistician and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, says
much the same thing in his book, Antifragile: our
understanding of the world comes first from tinkering, and only later from
scholarship. For us as educators, a text can be more than a thing to read and
respond to; it can be a playground for students to mess about in.
The Accordion
Are you aware of how many fractions exist between the
numbers 1 and 2? The answer is: an
infinite number. Even if you only divided things in half, you could go own
halving numbers forever: first between 1 and 2, then between 1 and one-half,
then between 1 and one-quarter, then between 1 and one-eighth…on and on it
goes, literally forever, into the inconceivably infinitesimal. A number line
can be an accordion, opening up and playing notes you’ve never heard before.
Can a text work like this? I can’t claim a news article can be
plumbed infinitely, but there is certainly more in even the simplest piece of
writing than most of us tend to make use of. There is abundant raw material to explore
and play with, from the whole text to an individual paragraph, to a single sentence
and even a word. When you’re working with students on a text within Achieve3000
Literacy or ActivelyLearn, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it.
The Whole Enchilada
Thinking about the text as a whole is where many teachers
focus their attention: what is the article or story about? What is the main
idea? What is the tone? When we dig into details, it’s often to evaluate in
what ways, and how successfully, they support the main idea.
If we wanted to give students opportunities to tinker with
the text at this holistic level, what are some things we could do?
One of my favorite ways to get students to understand a text is to do what I call, “changing the givens.” Changing or removing some underlying fact or structure of a text can sometimes help students understand the importance of that structure or fact. Here are a few examples at this whole-text level:
- If this text had to be 20% longer for some reason, what could you add to it, to improve it?
- If this text had to be 20% shorter for some reason, what could you take out, that wouldn’t detract from its power or effectiveness?
- If the piece has a definite viewpoint or perspective, how could you convey the same information from a radically different perspective? If it argues a particular point, how would you argue the opposite point (but make it feel like it was the same author, writing it)?
- Could you rewrite this text in a different genre, but keep the tone, main idea, and the important information intact? How would you transform this article into a story…or a one-act play…or a poem? What does the transformation tell you about the power of the genre in which the original was written?
The Paragraph
When we have students analyze non-fiction paragraphs, beyond
how they support the main idea of the article or essay, we usually ask them to look
at how the author supports and expands upon the topic sentence. What evidence
do they bring to bear? How well do they explain and use that evidence?
- Here are a few other interesting things you could have students do with paragraphs:
- Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for a younger (or older) audience.
- Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for an audience predisposed to disagree with the author.
- Have students try to support or defend the topic sentence with entirely different evidence or arguments than those the author provided.
·
The Sentence
In my experience, sentences receive very little attention,
especially once basic grammar is taught. We focus on paragraphs, on essays, on
stories--and yet, the sentence is the real workhorse of any writing--the
smallest unit of an idea. Middle and high school teachers who struggle to have
students write more beautifully, or powerfully, or even cogently, often labor
to mark-up entire papers, when it’s really the inability to craft an excellent sentence
that lies at the heart of poor writing.
The “Sentence Composing” approach created by
Donald and Jenny Killgallon is one way to help students craft better sentences,
but why not also let students tinker and play with sentences they find in stories and articles they’re reading in school?
- What is your favorite sentence in the entire article? Why do you like it?
- Is this a good sentence? How do you know? What makes it “good?”
- Is it beautiful? Powerful? Why? Where does the beauty or power lie?
- How could the sentence be improved if it’s not very good?
- How could you improve the sentence with a single word, or with a single structural change?
- If it’s a compelling sentence, what words would you change, or what structure would you reorganize, to weaken its power?
- If you wanted to state the opposite idea, or make a contrasting argument, what would you write?
The Word
When we focus on individual words, it’s often to teach
students new vocabulary—words we’ve decided they need to know. We give them
definitions, or we ask them to look up definitions. We may ask them to write
sentences using those words. The approach is usually to take words at face
value and simply know them. But if we believe that real “knowing” comes
from playing and tinkering, what are some things we could ask students to do
with new words they encounter?
- What’s your favorite new or unusual word in the article? Why do you like it?
- How many different forms or versions of that word are there? How many different ways can it be used? Can you write a paragraph using EVERY form of the word?
- How many times can you use that word in conversation from now until our next class period? Keep track!
- Where does the word come from? (Here’s an online tool students can use to do that research).
- If you look at the origins of all of the words in a phrase or a sentence, how many different times and places contributed to that grouping of words?
Taking the World Out for a Spin
All of these activities and exercises take time, and
certainly no one is going to use all of them, all of the time. But if we want
students to own what they’re learning—to know things deeply and completely—we
need to give them opportunities to “mess about” with the content we’re giving
them.
After all, when you buy a Smartphone, you don’t just leave
it on the desk and say, “Well, there it is.” When you go shopping for a car,
you don’t simply look at the statistics and then hand over a credit card. You
take the car out for a test drive. You put it through its paces. You see what
it can do.
Our language has tremendous flexibility, beauty, and power.
Getting control of it, through fluent reading and confident writing, helps
students take control of their lives in innumerable ways. If we believe that
this language is a gift, we should treat it like any gift we give to children,
and encourage them to use it, abuse it, toss it around, bang it up a little
bit, and find out just what it can do.
