Own Research—Practice Connections?
Disaggregating facets of comprehension that benefit from explicit emphases is especially beneficial. Scholars such as P. David Pearson, Michael Pressley, and their colleagues have described proficient reading behaviors; strategic thinking that can be teased into the open and talked about. Instructional strategies can prompt and support such behaviors. For example, I have found the work of Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and their associates (Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997) to be a powerful vehicle for reworking classroom questioning so that questions begin to mirror ones students can ask themselves. As teachers model fundamental queries like “What does this author want me to understand” “Why is the author telling me this” “What does this author expect readers to already know” and “What am I wondering about what the author is saying” students began to adopt an inquiring approach to texts, to view reading as an interaction with an author as they grapple with the author’s ideas.
The next research phase on questioning seems to be identifying discipline-specific questioning protocols. For example, what are the questions historians raise when reading texts typical of the discipline of history Shanahan and Shanahan’s (2008) recent work with disciplinary literacy seems to be an especially promising direction for fleshing out how an effective generic classroom strategy like Questioning the Author can be extended and refined to mentor students into thinking like experts within academic disciplines. One such example is the Thinking Like a Historian project in Wisconsin, which is a joint venture of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater History Department, and the Wisconsin Cooperative Educational Service Agency. History teachers are encouraged to focus questioning around the following five core themes:
1. Cause and effect (“What happened and why”)
2. Change and continuity (“What changed and what remained the same”)
3. Turning points (“How did events of the past affect the future”)
4. Through their eyes (“How did people in the past view their lives and world”)
5. using the past (“How does studying the past help us understand our lives and world”)
When comprehension instruction is conceptualized as assuming somewhat different forms depending on the specific academic discipline, content teachers began to see a convergence between literacy practices and the essence of teaching their subject. Continued research on discipline-specific literacy practices seems to be an especially fertile ground for determining how to mentor students to read, write, and think through the lens of a mathematician, biologist, musician, historian, artist, novelist, and so forth.
DWM: How do you promote students’ and teachers’ own research—practice connections
DB: Developing an action—research mentality through classroom debriefings is a good way to promote independent research-practice connections. For instance, I show how to incorporate metacognitive conversations as Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, and Hurwitz (1999) have described into regular debriefings, or deliberations, about learning course contents. If students are to become increasingly independent readers and learners, then they need to inquire into and talk about how they are thinking as well as what they are thinking.
I also make sure that teachers have similar debriefing opportunities as an essential component of literacy workshops. I center discussions on how the use of specific literacy practices might help—and have helped—mentor students into becoming more accomplished learners within a discipline. I ask teachers to continuously examine how a strategy might assist students in becoming not only more knowledgeable but also insightful in what it means to be literate in different academic contexts.
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