I also reached out to Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School, to learn how he has dealt with this challenge. He has cut back on the number of reading assignments, spending more time on each one. His goal, he said, is to develop both reading endurance and analysis skills. The texts he uses are already challenging, he notes. For example, his history of science course includes Plato’s Timaeus. To better help his students understand how to read these works, he might have them upload a photo of a page they are annotating, and correct them as needed. “I’ve had to become much, much more hands-on with modeling.”
“They still have the ability and motivation to learn,” he said. “They recognize that it’s a problem. And a significant percentage when I present them with tools and some structure, they do make progress. But maybe they aren’t ever going to end up where they would have ended up if their education had been different.”
Sophia Sarafova, an associate professor of biology at Davidson College, who has been teaching for 18 years, wrote in to say that she, too, has found that she spends more time “giving the students tools to organize knowledge and interpret information as well as break down tasks and information into smaller pieces.”
“At the start of my teaching career,” she wrote, “I could reasonably expect the majority of students in introductory biology would be able to synthesize information from several lectures on a general process, where three detailed examples were given, into a summary table that would allow them to compare and contrast various aspects of the process and extract general principles that would apply to an unknown to them example. Not anymore. We spend a lot of time learning in class and during recitation how to identify categories of information in the text, how to organize them in a table, and how to shift perspective such that we can observe a pattern.”
She has noticed other problems as well. Many students no longer come to college knowing “how to determine whether a piece of data can be classified as providing necessary vs. sufficient evidence to support a hypothesis. This makes building an argument for or against a hypothesis difficult and forces us to teach skills instead of using them to interconnect information and synthesize knowledge.”
Finally, she said, it’s no longer sufficient to simply tell students what they need to do. “Note-taking now requires specific instruction on what to write down and how to organize it. Also, a lot of students are unable to rephrase a statement without changing the meaning, often in drastic ways that clearly contradict the core of the statement. To me this means that during their K-12 education, tasks like retelling a story or writing a book report, or even taking notes, let alone building an argument in essay format, were never emphasized or practiced much.”
Theresa Dolan, an assistant professor of English at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, wrote in to say that she has seen an alarming decline in reading skills over her 23 years at the college. As a result she no longer assigns books, but instead turns to shorter texts, like poetry, literary excerpts, graphic novels, and films.
To address her students’ lower reading-comprehension skills, she wrote, “We read aloud from the texts or read the entire poem together in class as a precursor to our group discussions. This helps them to process meanings and to see that there is plenty to gain from close reading and critical analysis. They respond well, and usually, when I request a volunteer to read a text or excerpt in class, students readily do the reading. If no one in a particular class volunteers to read, say a difficult poem, I will read it aloud before we launch into our discussion. This shows them that it is possible and perhaps even pleasurable, which it certainly is for me as a word/language/reading/teaching lover.”
To help build her students’ vocabulary — and curiosity — she wrote, “I encourage students to keep a running list of new words and synonyms for them in their class notes and to practice using them. This is just one tiny aspect of my teaching that I’ve built into classes in recent years to try to draw more students’ interest to reading and learning about what they’re encountering in our course texts and in their lives.”
Discussion board alternatives
We’ve also asked professors how they‘ve adapted to the threat of ChatGPT and other AI replacing human writing on discussion boards. Interestingly, some of those solutions also address the core challenges professors described above: getting students to become better thinkers and writers. I’ll report on more of those responses in a future newsletter, but highlight one here.
Julie Fromer, a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at Ithaca College, wrote in to say that during the pandemic she switched to using Perusall, an online annotation app that allows students to comment on assigned texts and respond to each other’s comments.
“What I value the most about the way my students have been using Perusall is the process of discovery that they go through. It allows them to record that process as it happens. I start the semester assigning them a specific goal for their first few readings — to choose a word from the text, look up the definition/s that they think are at work in the text, post that as a comment, and add an analysis of why they chose that definition: how they think that connotation helps them understand that passage in a way that they hadn’t considered before, and why they think the author chose that specific word. Sometimes it’s a word the student didn’t know, but other times it’s a word the student did know, but learned a new aspect or nuance to it that they hadn’t realized was part of it. That then helps them analyze and interpret the passage in a new way.”
“Then, other students respond — sometimes adding a different connotation from the definition of the same word that further expands interpretations of the passage, sometimes adding a definition of another word from that passage that connects to and extends the analysis of the first word. It’s a collaboration that’s teaching them how to analyze, how to discover new ideas, and how to communicate those ideas in writing.”
I asked Fromer how this process compares to a traditional discussion-board post, in which students are given a prompt and are often asked to respond to other students’ responses.
She wrote that the process is less formal — more like writing a draft, but she likes that. “For me, that’s part of the pedagogical goal — to allow students a space to develop those ideas, discovering insights along the way. They can get pretty excited as this process happens. And honestly, it’s led to some of the best close writing I’ve seen in 20 years of teaching.”
Discussion prompts can often feel pro forma to students, she noted. “Instead, I prefer to start with the text — guiding students to explore words and definitions and ‘why’ and ‘so what’ questions to discover new ways of understanding the details of the text. And the Perusall app has really facilitated that — in ways that I can see both in our classroom discussions and in their more formal writing for the class.”
Have these responses gotten you thinking about your approach to developing students’ critical reading skills? If so, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your insights may appear in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com
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— Beth
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