Trafford Publishing: MAX Teaching With Reading & Writing: Classroom Activities to Help Students Learn Subject Matter while Acquiring New Skills

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MAX Teaching With Reading & Writing: Classroom Activities to Help Students Learn Subject Matter while Acquiring New Skills

by Mark A. Forget, Ph.D.

267 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1361; ISBN 1-4120-0992-8; US$28.00, C$35.00, EUR22.75, £15.77

Research-proven activities that engage students in active processing of new information, leading to deeper understanding, long-term retention of subject matter, and acquisition of life-long learning skills.

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about the book about the author sample excerpt catalogue info

About the Book

This book is divided into two parts.
Part I presents to the reader three essential components of a complete reading/writing-to-learn classroom. The three components are 1) a three-step lesson framework (MAX Teaching), 2) a three-step skill acquisition model (SAM), and 3) the systematic and formulaic use of cooperative learning (CL). The three of these components combine and are interwoven to provide for and to facilitate student acquisition of both content and skills through daily practice. Each of these will be described, explained, and justified with supporting research based on what we have learned during the 20th century from cognitive psychology, and through the more modern study of the human brain and brain functioning in the learning process.
Part II describes specific classroom strategies that have been developed over the last three decades. Each strategy is introduced, explained, and then presented as a generic lesson plan that could be applied to virtually any given subject area lesson. These lessons have been carefully laid out to include all three components listed above. Each lesson includes step-by-step instructions on what to do and say throughout the lesson to incorporate the use of the MAX teaching framework, a focus on skill development, and important elements of cooperative learning. My work with thousands of teachers over the past 11 years has led me to see the desire for such explicitly outlined lessons. The lessons are by no means the only way to apply a particular strategy. However, each is based on years of experience with students in various subject areas and of various ages. All good teachers know that any given class is alive and changing from minute to minute, and that no formula is guaranteed to work at any given time or with any given set of students. That being said, the way the lessons in part two are presented is meant to be generic enough and flexible enough to be helpful in assisting any teacher to become comfortable with the use of reading and writing to help students acquire both content and skills.

About the Author

Dr. Forget (pronounced forjáy) has been a school teacher from 1974 until the present. He has taught at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. The vast majority of his teaching experience is in the high school (19 years). He has applied the strategies of content area reading instruction in the teaching of algebra, trigonometry, statistics, American history, American Government, geography, earth science, world history, health and physical education, and, as a reading teacher, in many other classes as a guest teacher. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in content area reading instruction for over ten years at Old Dominion University and the University of Findlay. He is the co-author of Reading for Success: A School to Work Approach, published in 1996, and principal author of the accompanying instructor's manual. He also is the author of many published articles on teaching through reading and writing. He is a nationally-recognized staff developer in the field of content area reading instruction.

Sample Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
I am a schoolteacher. Since learning and refining the strategies presented in this book, I have taught classes in many subject areas, including algebra, algebra foundations, American history, earth science, geography, health and physical education, reading, U.S. Government, and world history. The strategies (which, along with a lesson framework and two other procedures, I have named MAX Teaching) have been effective in all of the classes. Through the systematic use of reading and writing as tools, I have seen students become engaged in mastering the content of whatever course they were taking. MAX is an acronym for a three-part teaching framework composed of Motivation to engage in learning, Acquisition of new information, and eXtension beyond the text. This book shows how it works.
Not only are MAX Teaching strategies effective in a range of content areas, they are effective in various types of school settings as well. Frequently, I perform modeling in the classrooms of schools where I'm invited to lead staff development programs. Thus, I have opportunities to teach in rural schools, urban schools, and suburban schools; and I teach all subject areas from 4th grade through the 12th, in both academic and vocational settings. In this range of settings, I've continued to use and appreciate the value of the strategies I want to share with you through this book.
Learning from Experience
My own teaching career, launched in 1974, has been the inspiration for this book. You could say that I first learned how to teach in a student-centered reading and writing classroom, using a book of carefully thought-out lesson plans not unlike this book. But that would not be entirely true. I did not learn how to teach; rather, I learned how to facilitate active learning by students. That's an altogether different thing. But I didn't learn that immediately.
My discovery of student-centered teaching techniques did not take place until my third year of teaching. I tried other strategies before that time. For example, when I first got out of the college of education, I wanted to imitate the best of my college professors who had been able hold my attention for hours as they lectured about their research interests and other topics. My first classroom experience involved teaching the history of the United States. It was a great time to be teaching that subject. The Alex Haley miniseries "Roots" was on television, and there were dramatic turns occurring in U.S. politics. I was enthusiastic, and my enthusiasm carried over to my students. But it was not enough to keep students interested for long. They lacked the discipline of a college student accustomed to lectures. In addition, I had all the problems that any young teacher might have with classroom management and discipline. Results were mixed at best.
The Turning Point
By my third year, I was ready to try something new. At that time, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston had developed an "inquiry curriculum" in the social studies. Each lesson was designed by curriculum specialists at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute to use constructivist principles, leading students to discover for themselves new understandings. Such discoveries would take place through the use of primary source materials to write about, discuss, and set purposes for reading, reading in the classroom, and then writing about and cooperatively discussing student ideas to assist in creating meaning regarding history. Each lesson was written in a step-by-step format that any teacher could follow. If the teacher did so, students were led through a sequence of getting ready to read through thinking, writing and discussion, silent reading from various forms of text, and more discussion and writing that allowed them to systematically construct meaning from written and other sources.
What was great about this method is that it allowed them to become historians—to work as historians do. They would form opinions and make predictions about what other historians would conclude—even before they would read the history textbook. The result was that once they got into the textbook, they had sufficient knowledge and purposes for reading that allowed them to become active in processing text that otherwise might have been much less interesting. A typical lesson from the Holt curriculum might read as follows (I abbreviate it for terseness.):
Pass out to each student the list of laws written in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. Ask students to read the laws silently to themselves, thinking about how the laws reflected the society that existed there.
Tell students to write on their own paper what they thought Jamestown Colony might be like.
Share students' predictions on the chalkboard, making a list of predictions for the whole class.
Ask students to scan the list of predictions they have made to see if they could be organized into a few categories.
Lead the class through a discussion, narrowing the list to three or so categories.
Tell students that now that they have collectively made predictions of what the Jamestown Colony was like at the time, they have become historians. Then introduce them to the next step, looking at the textbook to see what other historians have said about the same topic.

And so it went. Students were engaged, the teacher was empowered to let students learn, and students routinely used literacy skills to perform higher order thinking about topics important to understanding who we are as Americans.
Coaching and Active Learning
What I learned from the pre-planned lessons created by Holt Reinhart Winston and the Carnegie-Mellon Institute was that students actually learn better when they are coached through a process in which they are active in trying to make sense of something. It is the opposite of the lecture wherein students struggle to perceive what the teacher has on his or her mind. It is also the opposite of what occurs when students are provided worksheets designed to help them learn the details of subject matter. What really occurs with most worksheets is that students simply decode the "correct" answer to fill in the spaces on the worksheets. Rarely do they get to mull over important ideas relating to what they are learning. I had now seen firsthand what works and what doesn't work if learning (in the best sense of the word) is to take place.
But then I changed jobs. I moved away from that teaching position to another state which presented the challenge of a different curriculum. I no longer had the pre-planned lessons I had found so effective in leading my students through the discovery process. My new job was to teach U. S. and Virginia Government. Although I had a reasonably good textbook, the instructor's manual did not provide for the same level of student engagement. Again, the teacher was "on stage" for most of the class. Students learned, but they learned what was on the teacher's mind rather than being led through a thought-provoking discovery of how our governmental systems work. If the teacher had a limited understanding of the topic of the day, then the students were doomed to the same.
In my fourth year as a government teacher, I was first exposed to the idea of using reading and writing to help students become engaged in their own learning. I had the opportunity to attend a summer staff development experience that taught me several strategies (many of which are included in this book) to use within a three-step lesson framework that helps students become actively engaged in learning virtually any subject matter. The three steps of the lesson framework that I learned that summer were "anticipation, realization, and contemplation" (Estes & Vaughan, 1986). Through the facilitation of a knowledgeable teacher, classroom students could become engaged in virtually any subject matter in such a way as to be ready for confronting new ideas in text, be equipped with strategies for gathering new information while reading, and be able to construct their own understandings so that they could think critically about the ideas afterward.
Strategies that Work Anywhere
No longer did I need a "canned curriculum" such as that from which I first learned that student-centered learning works best. Now, in any subject area, I could help students use text to become engaged in learning subject matter that probably wouldn't have interested them otherwise. I was immediately struck by the potential of these new strategies. And I saw what happened as soon as I put them into action. When I employed reading and writing in such a way that students became engaged in their own processing of new information, they became motivated to learn. On a daily basis, they all learned much more than I could have told them through lecture and note taking. Why? Because each student was involved in first processing the new information in his/her own unique way, followed by discussion with others, and then coming to an understanding based on collective analysis and interpretation. What had occurred in my third year of teaching—student-centered active engagement in learning from print and from each other—was now happening in my government class, even though I was designing and facilitating the lessons myself rather than following a prefabricated published guide!
It is more fun to teach in this way, and it is more fun to learn this way. I quickly made that discovery. I found that students in my classes were actively engaged and therefore not causing problems related to discipline. But an even more significant result was occurring: while my students were better learning my subject matter, they were also becoming better readers and thinkers, attaining knowledge and skills that would enhance their lives forever. They were learning to learn—and they were learning how to learn effectively.
What's Different about This Book?
Most content area reading textbooks focus on theory, offering only very brief descriptions of specific reading and writing strategies, while leaving the details up to the practitioner However, many teachers want something more. The vast majority of the thousands of teachers with whom I've worked as a staff developer say they would be interested in specific and detailed lesson plans that are complete in their presentation. They want some specific guidance. When they hear about strategies such as those I'm presenting here, they find themselves thinking,"Yes, this seems like it would work, but I'm uncertain about how exactly I might perform a given strategy in my own classroom. What if I don't do it right? Will I leave out an important component of the lesson that causes it to fail?"
This is a handbook designed to meet that need for guidance. What makes it different is that it makes teaching content area subjects easy by providing a detailed lesson plan for many of the most effective and commonly used content area reading and writing strategies to date.
Part I of this book also attempts to paint a picture of why the use of reading and writing to learn is so powerful in developing students in subject-area expertise while helping them develop as learners at the same time. Part II, on the other hand, takes the classroom reading/writing strategies and breaks them down into a detailed, easy to follow lesson-plan time line for each strategy. A teacher can have the strategy lesson plan on the desk to refer to during the class period.
In other words, this book provides a generic version of the sort of detailed lesson plan that helped me to become a facilitator of active student learning rather than a teacher in the conventional sense of the word. As I described earlier, in my third year of teaching, I was given specific lessons to go with specific readings, but what I am presenting here goes many steps beyond that. MAX Teaching differs from that "tailored-to-specific-text-readings" approach, because each of the strategies chosen for this book is applicable to text or other learning experiences in a wide variety of circumstances. The strategies are not limited to specific portions of text only.
The strategies described in part II of this book are of various origins. Some are mine, and some were created by other authors that I'll be referring to at various points. It is possible that, in the case of a particular reading/writing strategy, my interpretation of exactly how to carry it out may differ a bit from the original authors' specifics; yet, the strategies are presented as I and others have used them successfully in many different classrooms and subject areas.
It is my hope that, by having such detailed lesson plans to follow, teachers who use this book will find it helpful in getting past the anxiety of trying something new. I also hope that teachers who use this book to assist them in their own development as reading/writing-to-learn teachers will change or adapt the strategies as they see fit in their own classrooms in the future. The literature contains hundreds of research-proven reading/writing-to-learn strategies, and this book does not pretend to address all or even most of them. But what I do hope is that it will assist in easing teachers into using reading and writing as a tool to (a) help students learn their subject matter and (b)develop lifelong literacy skills. I also hope that teachers thus prepared will seek out other reading/writing strategies to further enhance their students' development.
Using This Book
This book is designed to be used by a teacher who wishes to have a simple, easy to read blueprint for employing a variety of specific strategies for reading and writing in the classroom. It is primarily a handbook for complete lessons using reading, writing, cooperative learning, and a skill development procedure that coaches students as developing learners. Any teacher who only wishes a clear and detailed blueprint for specific lesson plans may wish to skip part I and go directly to any of the strategy descriptions.
The set of generic lesson plans that are provided can be used as blueprints for complete lessons that truly engage students in the active pursuit of knowledge through reading and writing. Teachers who choose to use this book as a "how to" manual may want to skip part I, which provides a rationale for using reading and writing in the content area classroom. Instead, they may skip directly to a particular strategy to find a timeline of a lesson that follows a systematic three-part paradigm designed to
engage students in active pursuit of subject matter understandings,
provide students with guided practice in life-long learning skills, and
help students use cooperative learning to construct meaning from various forms of text.

All that a teacher needs to effectively use a reading/writing strategy is included in the description listed for that strategy. No prior knowledge is assumed for any of the strategies described. Therefore, this book can be used to accompany any of the principal content area reading textbooks. On the other hand, it doesn't have to be used in concert with any other text. It stands alone. And once a teacher has made up his/her mind to use content reading in the classroom, this book is all that is required to design powerful and effective lessons—lessons that will help students deeply learn course content in any subject area while at the same time practicing important learning and communication skills.
Once a teacher is comfortable with using reading and writing to learn, s/he can more easily go to other sources for new ideas. The number of actual reading and writing strategies in the literature is in the hundreds. This book by no means attempts to be all encompassing in that regard. The strategies described present a broad selection of those that are my favorites. Having used many different strategies in my own classes over the years, and having rejected many, I have found that students respond very well to the ones described herein. I can recommend them without hesitation.
In choosing the learning strategies described in this book, I used five criteria:
frequency of inclusion in content reading textbooks,
reported frequency of a strategy's use by teachers
perceived effectiveness of a strategy as I experienced it in my own classes over 14 years
lifelong learning/study skills that a particular strategy teaches
applicability of a strategy to the greatest number of disciplines

I can assure you that there are enough strategies in this text to teach for many years without ever having classes that are boring and predictable. I am not suggesting that you don't explore further—just that you will not need to.

Catalogue Information