Document View

Dunn discusses teaching methods for reading comprehension, including the check and line method, an acronym for the brain-learning process, and students and teachers searching for solutions together.

Our journey began with a mutual need: My Grade 6 and 7 students needed to understand and remember the information presented in their textbooks, and I needed to be a more effective guide in enabling them to do so. I had noticed a trend. Year after year my students seemed less able to process and build on text information independently. I would assign two or three pages of reading for homework and realise the next day that they really hadn't comprehended what they had read. They remembered very little from their readings and were not able to build on the information. Actually the strong readers did understand the text, but even they fell short of the level of comprehension and information processing that I know is necessary to form deep layers of understanding. They simply were not connecting with the text information.

I went through the usual inner tussles: Should I really be expecting them to go it alone? Isn't it my job to reveal the content before they turn to their textbooks? Shouldn't I be showing them films, slides, pictures, something to "set" the reading stage? To some extent yes, but after much soul searching and poring over the research, I realised that what I really want is for my students to be able to survive and thrive in learning whether I am there or not.

From my experience with my own children I know that being able to access the information in a text is very important to achievement in high school. Two thirds of my students are in Grade 7, and they will be moving on to high school next year. So the buck stops here, this year, with me. They need to be able to make good sense out of a textbook and work it in to their learning lives. It's time to investigate reading in the content areas and come up with some workable, independent solutions.

I am lucky. I have a principal who believes in me, and I work for a district that supports teachers seeking answers to their own questions. As it turned out, other teachers were also seeking answers, so it didn't take long before a grant was in place and I found myself on a team of colleagues all asking the same basic question. How do we effectively teach our students to read content material? We met regularly, armed one another with research articles, shared our findings, and headed back into our classrooms with an ongoing smorgasbord of developing understandings to test on our students. This is a winning combination.

A key idea that we all gravitated toward was the need for readers to monitor their own comprehension as they read. After some revealing discussions with our students we realised that many scan the material or "read" the assigned pages without thinking about the ideas being presented in the text. They were getting the job done without mentally attending to the information. This reminded me of driving from where I live in Delta, British Columbia to Richmond and not remembering having driven through the tunnel. I know I must have because I am in Richmond, but I can't remember a thing about the trip. I covered the ground but was not mentally present during the driving process. Surely if I disciplined myself to notice my surroundings as I drove, I would remember the trip. I had to find a way to entice my students to notice the trip through their text as they read.

Conscious comprehension

Together, my colleagues and I decided on a method called the check and line. This wasn't a simple or streamlined arrival and actually was the end product of a lot of blundering trips through more complicated, less efficient systems. The check and line method is quick, effective, easy to teach, and makes sense to the students. Basically, the students monitor their comprehension line by line by placing a light pencil check in the marginal white space beside the line if they fully understand it and a dash or line if they do not. They then continue reading to the end of the paragraph and return to the lines) that stumped them for rereading. Usually the surrounding text clarified the meaning, but if not we instructed them to zero in on exactly what part they did not understand. This usually meant consulting the dictionary or questioning their parents or me to solve the problem. The key is they were mentally aware of their reading and monitoring their own comprehension. This is a process that good readers naturally go through; however, the trick was to encourage the not-so-efficient readers to engage in the same process. I leaned on my instincts and past studies in neuroscience to accomplish these aims.

My instincts told me that the direct route was the most effective: I asked my students if they were concerned about not fully comprehending what they read. They responded with a resounding "yes." Even my turned-off and tuned-out students showed some interest in this question. In looking back, I wonder if they were not so much disinterested as discouraged, and maybe my sincerity gave them some hope.

To convince them to put their minds to work, I relied on my understanding from a recent course in neuroscience, brain function, and learning. I described brain activity on the cellular level by likening each cell to a tree with profuse branching at the top. As we focus our attention, consciously, we "fire" or energise the tree branches, thus preparing the pathway for learning. As we mentally process information by visualising it, asking questions about it, and linking new ideas to old, these energised tree branches send out sparks of electricity that link cells carrying similar information. Thus the bonds of learning become tighter, more distinct, and widespread as we intend to learn and mentally process information (Damasio, 1994; Hawson, 1996; Sylwester, 1995). I drew the trees linked by their branches on the chalkboard as I spoke, but it was drawing students' attention to our combined experiences that really helped them to understand how this process works.

I reminded them of the times when they bite into an orange or see a treetop waving in a strong wind and find themselves reliving a summertime holiday experience at a seaside cottage. The waving treetop seems unrelated but this visual experience triggers brain cells having like memories to energise and fire. They do so because of the intensity of the emotion of the original experience. The cells are stimulated or energised because the original experience registered deeply in the brain, but the subsequent taste of the orange or sight of the tree shifts us back in time to the original experience. Additionally, we begin to "story" or daydream about the original experience. The waving trees blossom into a memory of swimming in the ocean with a dog or drifting with the tide on a log. This reliving the experience is a result of sensory cues stimulating the brain to take a mental trip along cellular pathways (Demasio, 1994). My example of the mental links between experiences and memories stimulated a host of like experiences from my students and we spent the next 20 minutes sharing, "Yeah, I remember whens." But it was the next step in the teaching-sharing process that gave us all a strategy to lean on in the future.

An acronym for alertness

My students now understood how the brain works in its learning capacity. I asked them to help me to streamline this mental process, to come up with a tight and comprehensive way of remembering how to put all of this understanding to work when they are reading content text material. We all brainstormed ideas while I wrote them on the chalkboard. The chatter level was high, and the information coming from students was not crystal clear or absolutely accurate, but this brainstorming and recording session gave them an opportunity to see and build on one another's developing understanding. It gave me the opportunity to shape and guide their understanding by seeing what they had understood and where the gaps were. Gradually their understanding of the brain-learning process sharpened. At this point I began to press them for a clear, simple, working definition of this brain-learning process. It was Tavish (pseudonym) who blurted out an acronym we could all live with.

I had asked them to work in their foursomes until they had something that they "knew" worked. Their heads were together, faces animated and voices ringing on top of each other, when finally Tavish said, "I know: GMR!" His group nodded approval and supported his claim with, "Yeah, GMR works!" So I quieted the class and gave Tavish the floor. He said, "G stands for go back, M stands for motivate your brain, and R stands for reread." He went on to explain the process that he and his group had come up with: "Notice those times when your brain drifts away from the page, go back to the place where you last mentally engaged in the information, motivate your brain or tell yourself to pay attention to the ideas coming at you, thus energising brain cells to receive and retain information, and reread the parts you missed by drifting off-GMR."

GMR really worked for us. At recess a few of the kids stayed in and made us a poster of GMR so we could have it around the room as a reminder. We referred to it throughout the year when we found our brains wandering away from a task or idea. GMR became the shared "buzz word" for mental alertness and positive action.

Students search and solve

My students didn't all use this method with the same degree of intensity, but their ability to make sense out of their textbooks and build on the understandings therein did improve significantly. In looking back I think there were three specif is keys to our success.

1. We searched for solutions together because we agreed that we all had a problem. The kids were with me. Content reading acuity was not something that I did to them but rather something that we were all committed to achieving.

2. We engaged in open dialogue throughout the entire process. When T didn't understand why a certain strategy didn't work (and there were many instances of this), I asked the students for help. They always knew why something did or didn't work and were remarkably astute at communicating this to me so that I could understand their perspective. If I didn't understand I pressed them for clarification. This open dialogue was instrumental in narrowing my search for new and more accurate solutions.

3. We processed our growing understanding through reflection. I required that the students put their analyses of what works and what needs work in writing. This served two purposes: It gave them the time to reflect on their learning experiences and deepen their personal understanding, while providing me with hard data.

In closing, I want to encourage you in your own search for answers. Whatever is worrying you and your students, there are other professionals who share your concerns, some of whom will be willing to embark on a search for solutions with you. And, most important, when you and your students enter into the search side by side, you really have an entire classroom full of researchers all striving for the same goal. Even if you don't get the results that you expected, it's bound to be an enlightening and memorable trip for all.