Motivating High School Students to Read

  By Michelle Brantley

Last year I found myself in an interesting position. Every morning I worked for my mother at her preschool, Little House Enrichment Center, and every afternoon, I taught twelfth graders at Middle College High School in Memphis.

When I worked at the preschool, I frequently had the opportunity to teach the four and five year old groups who were "getting ready for big school," as they so proudly stated. In crafting age appropriate curriculum for these children, we focused on making sure their environment was rich in literacy and that the children were immersed in the words and worlds of books. The motivation our children had to read and hear stories excited me; they viewed reading as a special prize, and longed to be read to story after story after story.

As each morning came to an end, I began the process of shifting gears, both physically and mentally. High school students had been my first love, and I welcomed the challenge of motivating these students to read in the same way that the preschoolers were motivated. For those of us who work with high school students, we often ponder what happens between later elementary and high school that moves children from abundant wonder and curiosity to apathy and boredom, especially when it comes to reading. How many of us would be rich if we had a dollar for every time a teenager said he or she did not like to read?

Last year I was determined to reunite my high school students' interest in reading. I wanted their senior year to be about more than Beowulf, Macbeth, and an inquiry paper. I wanted to find a novel that would mirror my students' experiences and echo their collective voice. I chose Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall. This national bestseller is the raw but true story of the author's indirect journey to college and a successful career as a journalist. McCall is very frank in talking about the darker sides of his youth. He, like many African American men, struggled with finding his place in a world that he viewed as the antithesis of himself. McCall's description of his life offers readers some pills that are hard to swallow, like the realities of racism and sexism. McCall eventually goes to jail for theft, and it is prison that he begins to re-examine his trouble youth and vows to make positive changes. The text gives a truthful testimony to the power of education to transform a wayward life, for it is education that brings McCall from prison to a job at the Washington Post and a professorship at Emory University.

I knew that McCall's coming of age experiences would ring true to my students. I knew they would be able to see themselves directly or indirectly in McCall's work. And I knew this was the first essential step in motivating them to read: choosing a text that said to them their teacher understood and respected who they were and where they were. As educators, we subscribe to a host of scholarly journals and education weeklies, but how often do we pick up Vibe or Source magazine, which are music publications whose readership is predominantly between fourteen and twenty five?

Motivation to read has to begin with student interest, and we as educators must be deliberate in learning what our students' interests are. One of my former students, April Blair said it best in a article featured in the school newspaper, "Just as adults trust teens to read Shakespeare and other celebrated classics, people should trust kids to read Makes Me Wanna Holler. . . Let students read what they want; reading contemporary literature that deals with real life situations has the same value as reading [the] classics." As April's comment clearly states, in order to have students, particularly unmotivated students, analyze text for it deeper meanings or have the skills to conduct meaningful research, we have to first engage them in text that speaks to them.

However, it does not stop there. The most effective literacy strategies I have used with my high school students are the same one many elementary teachers use. For instance, elementary school teachers give time and attention to pre-reading strategies because they are often creating schema rather than simply activating schema. As a high school teacher, I seldom placed emphasis on creating the foundation that students needed in order to enter text. But my students still needed to practice the skills of understanding context and references. I realized I had to give them more support.

Before my students touched Makes Me Wanna Holler, I spent time focusing on developing schema. We listened to and analyzed Marvin Gaye's songs, which inspired McCall's title and images and which were popular among my students. We also connected the messages in Gaye's lyrics to the messages found in many socially conscious rap lyrics. We looked at the music as a social and historical commentary of the 80s and 90s, the time period of the text. The music was a strong factor in motivating students to read because they love music and because they were given the chance to learn through music. The music also strengthened the bond of my classes; we were singing together, rapping together, but still learning.

Literature circles, interactive reading journals, and read and think alouds within reader's/ writer's workshops also helped my students gain deeper meaning and understanding of the text. Given the variety of reading levels represented in my class, using think alouds was most important. My students needed to see how I arrived at conclusions or the thinking behind some of my written responses to text. I also challenged my students to share their process of understanding text metacognitively with each other.

Too often these strategies are left behind in elementary school, but I found them very valuable in supporting literacy in my high school class, especially in terms of giving lower readers support. I also found that when it was time for the senior inquiry paper, students had more tools in place to conduct research. They were required to work with difficult text, but it was less of a challenge because using many of the strategies they needed had become almost second nature.

As a high school teacher, I admit that I often viewed the worlds of preschool and elementary far removed from my world. However, working with preschoolers reminded me that even in unmotivated high school students there remains a natural joy in reading; it may simply be lying dormant. Tapping into student interest is key in awakening the motivation. In addition to student interest, paying close attention to how elementary teachers equip students with strategies helped me to deepen literacy instruction within my own classroom. These are certainly not all of the answers, but definitely a good starting point.

Michelle Brantley is an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school designer. To read more about her experience teaching McCall's book, read her chapter in the Expeditionary Learning book, Literacy All Day Long.

The Expeditionary Teaching of Literacy

By Barbara Waxman

Over the last several years, Expeditionary Learning has embarked on a quest to integrate the teaching of literacy into expeditions. Could literacy teaching reflect the practice and values of Expeditionary Learning? Could the teaching of literacy be improved in the same way that Expeditionary Learning practices elevate other aspects of teaching?

Expeditionary Learning brings meaning and context to learning by studying a topic in depth, and by searching for implications of that topic in the community, in history, and in our own lives. It is also about building community, fostering empathy and compassion, and bringing a sense of adventure and challenge into as well as out of the classroom.

Luckily, there are experts and resources such as Ellin Keene, Stephanie Harvey, and The Strategic Literacy Initiative, who suggest ways of teaching literacy that are congruent with our model. Expeditionary Learning embraces these practices, and adds context and meaning by infusing them into expeditions which, in turn, create authentic reasons to read and write.

Expeditions are built around the idea that learning happens best when there is emotion. Literature has the power to engage our emotions and make learning come alive. Choosing a powerful novel, biography, or narrative can enrich and center an expedition by raising moral issues and multiple perspectives, and by hooking students into dilemmas and controversies as only good fiction or narrative can. The well-chosen novel or narrative or biography gives students a chance to identify with the main characters, live inside the expedition's theme, and develop imaginative compassion for another time and place. This piece of literature becomes the anchor text for an expedition, and is used for a read-aloud.For an expedition on industrialization, how much easier it is to learn about factory workers and the beginning of the union movement when it's presented in a narrative such as Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, where we can identify with the plight of a young garment worker in the 1860's.

Expeditionary Learning students come to expect that intimacy and compassion will characterize their time in school. The Readers' Workshop is a structure that can promote both intimacy and literacy. (See Literacy All Day Long for descriptions of the workshop) The workshop begins with a mini-lesson where the teacher explicitly shows how to use a reading comprehension or decoding strategy. Students practice that strategy individually, in pairs or in small groups, helping each other to pay closer attention, and to realize how social the construction of meaning is. Finally, the class comes back together to share how they used the strategy, to discuss any problems, and to reflect on how the strategy helped them understand what they were reading. Asking students to share their own experiences and connections and strategies with each other allows intimacy to flow throughout the classroom. This sharing creates an intimate circle of belonging, trust, and imaginative compassion

The think-aloud is a terrific instructional practice for the mini-lesson portion of the workshop. Not only does it help students become conscious of successful reading strategies, but it also reinforces an expeditionary classroom culture. In a think-aloud, the teacher makes her thinking visible and shows how she uses a strategy to understand a piece of text. It is the place where the teacher shares her life experiences and connections. In this way, the teacher models not only a strategy such as making connections, she also models her own humanity. When teachers share their own thinking, emotions, and memories, students are drawn into a tighter web.

Teaching reading in this way involves adventure, exploration, and character development for the teacher herself. In order to prepare think-alouds, teachers must explore their own ways of reading and understanding, as they make conscious their own reading strategies. Doing think-alouds, responding to reading journals, forming literature circles -all these require that teachers practice, consult with colleagues, and reflect, in order to improve these instructional practices.

This explicit, conscious exploration of each facet of reading is also the way to address Lisa Delft's (1995) famous concern about progressive education in that it assumes students come in either knowing a great deal about print and meaning-making, or that they will just pick it up on their own by being in a print-rich environment. Teaching literacy in an expeditionary way means teachers are actively finding out what students know and do not know, and are building lessons based on that information. It also means forming flexible groups to address specific needs and conferring with individual students to provide more guided assistance. It is worthy of note that both reading researchers and Outward Bound instructors use the same phrase for this kind of teacher assistance - 'The guided release of responsibility' and similar metaphors n such as teaching a child to ride a bike, first by modeling, then providing lots of assistance and coaching, and then gradually backing away and letting the child take off.

Approaching reading in this manner helps us hook the smaller picture of literacy learning to the bigger picture of Expeditionary Learning. Connecting the strategies taught during the reading workshop to other aspects of the expedition, such as fieldwork, or a writing project, helps make learning feel cohesive. Teaching literacy through workshops, sharing our own reading processes with students, finding texts that illuminate expedition themes-all these techniques create a way to do Expeditionary Learning all the time.

Barbara Waxman is an Expeditionary Learning school designer in based in Seattle, Washington.

Book Review: Literacy with an Attitude

By Roslyn Blache

Can it be true that we Texas educators are not educating students to be literate? Are we not empowering students to be lifelong learners? Are we widening the gap between those who have power and those who are seeking to obtain it? The 2000 RAND study of Texas education found that the gap between black and white students' literacy has increased from 1994-1998. One possible cause is the pressure to raise test scores. Teachers in low-performing schools report spending more time on test preparation than teachers in high performing schools. Often, these low-performing schools include large populations of low-income and minority students. Seeking some answers to this perplexing situation, I began reading Literacy with an Attitude.

In his book, Finn asserts there are two kinds of literacy education available in schools today. First, there is empowering education, which leads to powerful literacy, the kind of literacy that leads to positions of power and authority. Second, there is domesticating education, which leads to functional literacy, literacy that makes a person productive and dependable, but not troublesome. It is this second kind of education, Finn believes, that is fostered upon the working class, and to some extent, the middle class.

Working class children are denied access to powerful literacy because powerful literacy can assist the disenfranchised in their struggle for justice. Finn arrives at this conclusion after considering his own background as a working class child, and judging his own teaching and the teaching of his colleagues in New York. He realized that those teachers who were deemed successful were those who were teaching students to do as they were told, not teaching students to think. After researching the work of Paulo Freire, a professor at the University of Recife (Brazil), Finn understood that powerful literacy for the working class would be dangerous to the status quo.

Finn turns to Jean Anyon's study of schools in northern New Jersey to see how schools distribute powerful literacy. Anyon found in the schools she studied that education could be classified into four distinct categories: executive elite, affluent professional, middle class and working class. The two that were most disparate were, of course, the executive elite and the working class.

These two categories had their own identifiable teaching strategies. The majority of teachers working with working class students presented segmented facts and made little attempt to connect these facts to students' lives, environment, or broader context. Students learned that following prescribed steps was more important than whether the answers were right or wrong, and they were rarely allowed to participate in lessons that required them to evaluate anything or make decisions.

In contrast, knowledge in the executive elite school was academic, intellectual, and rigorous. Teachers taught more difficult concepts and valued reasoning and problem solving. These schools held up the rationality and logic of mathematics as the model for correct and ethical thinking. Lessons geared to understanding the students' environment, the economy, and other essential systems were an integral part of the learning. A direct correlation could be made between the skill and habits these students were expected to achieve and the strategies their teachers employed to teach them.

If this all sounds hopeless, do not despair. Finn assures that educators can use strategies to address these deficiencies and help students acquire the most powerful form of literacy. Finn discusses four levels of literacy. The lowest level, "performance level," is the ability to "sound out" words and turn sentences that are typical informal face-to-face conversation into writing. The second level, or "functional level," is when the students demonstrate the ability to meet the reading and writing demands of an average day of an average person. The next level is the "informational level," the ability to read and absorb the kind of knowledge that is associated with the school-writing reports, examinations. The highest level of literacy, "powerful literacy," involves creativity and reason-the ability to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize what is read. Powerful literacy, if utilized, can become a tool for liberation and justice for all students. Consider the use of the essay, the writings of Ghandi, the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Patrick Finn believes we can educate all students for "powerful literacy." Literacy with an Attitude has several directives that could bring justice to our schools. He suggests that students need authentic experiences that are challenging, focused on issues of concern in their communities, utilize their creativity, are geared to their interests, include time to reflect, include time to critique their work, and requires them to use their initiative and inquisitiveness. The community and parents need to collaborate to insure that all students are educated for powerful literacy. Does any of this sound familiar? If you work in an Expeditionary Learning school, these should all be goals you are working toward and/or are achieving already.

Roslyn Blache is an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school designer based in San Antonio, Texas.

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