Making Learning Meaningful

When encouraging readers of history, we have several broad goals for our students as readers and as learners. We want them to leave their reading with some knowledge of content and to be able to discriminate among ideas for significance, bias, point of view, and perspective. We would like them to think about what they learned and how they learned it, acknowledging the value of talk and others’ opinions and ideas when they are forming their own opinions. We would also hope the study we’ve done would prompt them to ask new questions that lead them to further reading and study. At this stage in their lives, these readers have assumed the reader role of “Text Critic” as they analyze, synthesize, apply, and extend their learning into independent learning and historical expertise. Many of us have enjoyed students who see themselves as historical experts. On Christine’s first day as a social studies teacher, before the bell had rung to allow students to enter class, she encountered her first expert in her new students, Stephen:… “So, you’re going to be my U.S. History teacher. What do you know about Patton?” “Do you mean George Patton from World War II?” “Yes. If you’re going to expect me to learn from you, you better know your World War II stuff. And, you’re going to have to have seen the movie. Have you seen it?” “Well, no. But if you have it . . . “I have it right here with me. Watch it tonight and we can talk about it tomorrow.”… Christine had found her first expert—and her first ally. This is the kind of student we hope we foster as we are planning curriculum and instruction throughout the year. In Ways That Work: Putting Social Studies Standards into Practice, Tarry Lindquist expects these outcomes and plans for them at the beginning of the unit. “Whenever I plan a unit, I first brainstorm ways my students can acquire knowledge, manipulate data, practice skills, and apply their understanding through group activities” (1997, 101). As a result of the time Christine and her students spend working on questioning, thoughtful and careful reading, exposure to multiple texts, and sharing ideas with others, the satisfaction of those goals is evident in her classroom.

Building Foundations for Reading Success

At a time when districts have mandated coverage of elaborate lists of content standards, most teachers are feeling the challenge of covering so much material with students who come to class lacking the interest, background knowledge or content language necessary for reading historical texts. An additional challenge affects our instructional decisions when we also must work with students who have no sense of the time and place in which they live. Christine’s 8th grade classroom offers us a great example of how difficult it is to teach, or even to know where to begin, when this combination of problems occurs. Christine and her students had just begun a unit on Colonial America, and Christine worked with her students to generate a list of information they would need to find in order to be experts on what life was like in one of the three Colonial regions. After generating their lists, students used three sources to create their descriptions of life in Colonial America: A History of US, the district-adopted textbooks, and related supplemental trade books. Imagine Christine’s surprise when one group of experts reported that colonists traveled by whores and communicated via cell phones! On days like this, we are reminded of how important it is to build background knowledge with students before asking them to read, write, or conduct research. Even our best students struggle to understand concepts that seem far removed from their lives, and our most struggling readers are often so overwhelmed they do not even attempt to read their assignments. As content teachers, we have four broad tasks:… • Assessing the knowledge base students bring to the study • Providing students with experiences that give them a rich and memorable context for their reading • Anticipating words and concepts that may make reading difficult • Helping students develop questions they would like to answer so that they have a purpose for reading… As we were writing this book, Christine reminded me just how important it is simply to ask students what they already know—before beginning teaching. She said she often starts class by writing the following statement on the board: “What do you already know or think you know about ___________?” She then records students’ answers on a chart or transparency.

Best Practice in Reading History

Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde remind us of the goal that keeps many of us in education—the hope that we can create independent, self-motivated learners. Moving students from the views of history they hold when they come into the classroom and to those highlighted in this goal is a monumental journey. Joel was one of those students who challenged the depth of Christine’s resources in making that journey when he entered her room on the first day of school last year…. “I’m allowed to fail one class every year. And, every year, it’s history.” “Welcome to our class. Choose any seat.” I quickly learned that Joel wasn’t kidding. I asked his other teachers and, indeed, he had failed history every year. In our first class discussion about why we study history, I learned the root of Joel’s problem with history classes. “Come on, Miss. It’s not like these are real people or anything. What’s the point?”… After many frustrating days with the Joels of our classrooms, we all hope for a comment such as the one Christine finally heard: “Yo, Miss L. History makes sense to me now. I mean, we can’t let anything like this ever happen again (referring to the Holocaust).” The essential question for us as teachers is what kind of curriculum, instruction, and assessment will get more students to that goal. Which are the practices we should increase and which are those we should decrease if we want to help a student like Joel move from seeing history as useless and irrelevant to believing that reading history changes our behavior and our world? In What Really Matters for Struggling Readers, Allington says, “The search for any ‘one best way’ to teach children is doomed to fail because it is a search for the impossible” (2000, 22). While there may not be any one best way, I do believe there are effective practices that create a foundation of support for making our study and reading of history accessible, informative, and enjoyable.

Providing Ongoing Support

When adults talk about reading history, most of us think of a range of history- related texts: historical fiction, periodicals, biographies, diaries, documents, reports, and documentaries. Yet, when I talk with students about reading history, they immediately talk about reading history textbooks. This leads me to believe that our task as teachers is twofold: expanding the range of reading that students define as reading history and increasing students’ ability to comprehend that range of texts—including their textbooks. Much of the comprehension support we provide during reading is focused on helping students negotiate a range of texts. For many students, obstacles to comprehension occur when they are presented with a diverse range of text types. Several aspects are involved in supporting students’ comprehension in reading history, because comprehension is always a complex issue. Nagy highlights the complexity of comprehension with this statement in Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension: “Reading comprehension depends on a wealth of encyclopedic knowledge and not merely on definitional knowledge of the words in the text” (1988, 7). While lists of vocabulary words are often introduced to students prior to assigning reading, it is clear that comprehending reading assignments is about more than defining words. In order for students to comprehend the diverse types of texts they encounter in reading history, they must know how to use and when to employ a wide range of independent reading strategies. Those challenges to comprehension include, but are not limited to, the following text-related reading issues:… • Diverse levels of readability are represented in a single text. • Texts present multiple concepts in a short amount of space (concept density). • Knowledge on how to use text supports to support reading is lacking. • Ability to break the language code (specialized vocabulary) is required. • Comprehension is predicated on significant background knowledge. • Sophisticated study/memory techniques have to be employed to organize and retain information. • Monitoring techniques have to be employed so important concepts aren’t missed. • Knowledge of what supplemental resources (atlas, map, almanac) can provide is necessary. • Knowledge of how to read supplemental resources is required. • Texts may not hold or capture reader’s interest so readers must be selfmotivated. • Multiple texts must be held in memory for comparison, contrast, and discovery of patterns.