In Doug Fisher and
Nancy Frey’s Rigorous Reading, they
claim that student learning increases by the simple act of explicitly stating
the lesson’s purpose beforehand and revisiting it after the fact. The practice has become more common in our
classrooms, but I believe we can continue to improve with how we begin our
lessons and how we assign our
texts.
I think we all fear
that moment when a visitor to our classrooms pulls a student aside and asks,
“Tell me what you’re learning today in this class?” I often hold my breath when
the question comes out, not entirely confident that the students know or that
I’ve been clear enough in explaining it.
Still, taking a few moments each day to establish the purpose and how it
relates to the broader ideas of the course is important. I suspect that many of us do this in a
general sense, though fewer of us take the time to write out or read that specific
learning purpose for the day.
This is not to say
that merely having a purpose ensures that students will internalize or even
remember it. However, for many of our
students, especially for those who struggle, making plain the purpose of the
lesson is important. Providing a list or
an agenda is not enough for students to answer the “what are you learning”
question because lists may not provide the actual purpose for the lesson.
Provided here is a
link to a video that shows how teachers in one building have established their
purposes. (www.corwin.com/rigorousreading click on Chapter Resources, Chapter 2, Videos and
then look for “A Collection of Purpose Statements in Secondary
Classrooms.) You will see short clips
from a biology teacher, a math teacher, an English teacher, and a FACS teacher
all going through the process. Notice
that in each case, they have offered two purposes: one related to content and
the other related to language. The first
is related to the concept of the day, but the second relates to the way
students are asked to communicate their understanding of that concept.
Beyond just
establishing the purpose of our classes, I suggest that we do the same for our
readings. My concern is that we
typically give readings to students and simply tell them to read
it for the next day’s quiz. Or
that we offer them a study guide for them to fill out as they read. But we don’t necessarily set up the reading
in terms of what we want them to know, learn or look for. Like a good lesson, we need to explicitly
state, “this is what I want you to look for in today’s, or tonight’s
reading.” Too often, I worry that we
make “finding the main idea” a game, whereby we send our student on a mission
to guess the point of our assignment on their own.
There are a number of ways that we can establish the purpose of our
readings.
First, we can write it out on the board or slide. In writing the purpose, keep it simple and
clear. Avoid writing it as an objective,
which has become the language of teachers.
A well-state purpose is crafted in language that students can
understand, not something that would look good in a curriculum guide.
Second, in some cases, I will incorporate the purpose at the top of the
reading itself. In the times when I do
this, I read it to students or point it out to them so that they see it. I do this specifically because I worry that
they might see it as “optional text” and skip right over it when they go to
read it. If I read it aloud to them, at
the very least, I know that they have been exposed to it at the start.
Third, I might print it off on a separate slip of paper and send it
along with students. This happens in
cases where students are reading from a textbook or something I cannot
manipulate.
Establishing a clear purpose isn’t easy.
While they should be explicit and clear, they also can’t be strictly
literal. In those cases, the purpose
statement doesn’t really provide students a means to think about the text. Instead of stating that the purpose is to
learn about the steps of photosynthesis for example, tell students that the
purpose of the reading is to learn the process of photosynthesis. For fiction, instead of asking students to
look for the moral or theme, I would give them the moral of the theme and tell
them to look for how that moral or theme is communicated. “Class, the purpose of this reading is to
show you the influence of grief on a person’s life. So look for that grief and come prepared
tomorrow for a discussion on examples of grief throughout the story.”
We tend to assume that all students know the general purpose of things
in our classes. For struggling students
in particular, this may not be the case.
Taking just a few moments to set the purpose—both with the lesson and
with the readings—we can provide students with a critical tool to use for their
readings.
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