AVReading Newsletter May: Obstacles

          Expecting students to be motivated or engaged is a big ask.  When it comes to students who have struggled in school throughout their lives, it is especially difficult. And as those students progress through the system, it becomes more and more difficult to help them overcome self perceptions and beliefs that have been reinforced and ingrained in them for a significant portion of their  academic lives. For these students, the question is what can I possibly offer this student that will be different from what has already been tried with them in the past?  To address that question, we have to think more deeply about these obstacles to motivation.

            As indicated above, the most common obstacle is past experience.  As students have met with repeated set-backs and disappointments with reading and school, they begin to accept a couple of beliefs: school and / or reading is not really that important.  Another obstacle can be the hypercompetitive nature of our classrooms and schools.  Students are quite aware of the academic pecking order. They know who is in gifted / talented classes, who is in the intervention and special needs courses. They know who does well or poorly on standardized tests and who does well or poorly in class.  These subtle and not-so-subtle scoreboards develop a system where schools categorize students by perceived abilities and where students ultimately accept and embrace those categorizations.  

            Based on these experiences of the past, students are constantly weighing their options. They are thinking, “Is the amount of effort I have to put into this really worth the outcome?”  Using all of the available tools at their disposal, teachers struggle to convince students that the investment is well worth it. 

            To better promote motivation and engagement with students who have struggled in the past, you might consider some of the following. 

            Open Inquiry Learning.  One option to giving students more agency and self-efficacy in your classroom is to allow them to be the expert on a given subject.  This is extremely difficult for me.  It means that my curriculum is constantly changing to meet the interests and expertise of my students, and it means that I enter fields and topics outside of my comfort zone and expertise.  However, in doing so, I allow my students to find topic domains where they feel more engaged and empowered.  We typically do one or two inquiry units a term, each lasting three to six weeks depending on whether I tie it to a book or not.  We brainstorm inquiry units as a class, pair down the list to our top three or four, have discussions about which is best and what types of things we could study with them, and then we have a final vote.  In recent years, we have studied paranormal activity, psychopathology, space, and most recently the apocalypse.  

            Leveled Texts and Tasks.  Building efficacy means that I put students into books and activities that are appropriate to their current abilities and needs. This is not easy.  Finding books that are written at a 5th grade reading level typically are written for 5th graders, and putting a high school student into a book that is marketed for a much younger audience can shut down a student pretty quickly.  Investing in high-interest / easy reading books unique to teenagers is important.  It is also quite time consuming (finding titles, securing funding, maintaining the library) and expensive.  The goal should be about 250-500 titles on the shelf with a good balance between fiction and non-fiction, independent reading choices, lit circle choices, and whole class choices.  

            Working with Younger Students.  Giving older students the chance to interact with really young students is a great way to foster self-efficacy as well.  My experiences with taking high school students into kindergarten and first grade classes have been nothing short of transformative.  We have done children’s book visits, where the older students have chosen a children’s book related to tolerance or diversity and read to a younger student while completing a reading activity with them (predicting, questioning, summarizing etc). But we have also converted children’s books and stories to readers theatre and performed them for younger audiences.  We have also connected our students to non-literacy events like elementary kindness retreats (facilitated by an outside organization that requested high school volunteers).  These opportunities happen from time-to-time, and generally the school will turn to students from the National Honor Society or student counsel.  However, when possible, I advocate for students in the literacy class who are just as capable of working with these children and perhaps bringing a different type of gravitas to the occasion, as their voices are typically under represented in our schools.  It does require a level of trust with your students, but I will say that my classes have always risen to the occasion, surpassing my expectations and often creating these transformative moments for themselves, the young people they encounter, and for me.

 

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