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Getting Students to Read Without the Threats · Higher Listenings

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I also have two kids in college right now, and they all have these really conflicted relationships with their devices.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one thing we can certainly say to students also listen, it's a different kind of experience.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: When you have this chance to absorb yourself into your reading, embrace that.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It might give you what you actually want right now, which is a little bit of stability in your mind.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: To not always feel you're being pulled in multiple directions by your social media feeds.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's a gift we can actually give to students, right?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: To give them a another kind of experience they have in their lives, as opposed to what they're normally dealing with, all the things that are coming at them all the time.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Reading is one of the last places students, and most of us for that matter, can actually slow down and think.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: No pings, no scroll, no group chat notifications, just a page and a world of ideas.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: But surrounded by constant distraction, reading can feel unnatural and for many even uncomfortable.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in this episode, we're joined by author and educator James Lang to explore how we can help students not just do the reading, but actually experience it and maybe even enjoy it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is: is there a way to get students to read that doesn't involve guilt trips, threats, or wishful thinking?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Higher Listenings.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Higher Listenings, James.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you with us.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: I love to talk about reading, so I'm looking forward to this.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I want to start with the proverbial elephant in the room, at least according to a lot of what's been written of late, both in the mainstream press and certainly in the higher ed press, that students aren't doing the reading, instructors are frustrated, syllabi have started sounding like prenuptial agreements, and still crickets.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, in your view, what's really going on here?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a motivation issue?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is it about ability, attention, or are we missing the bigger picture altogether?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Syllabi like prenups.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I like that one.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good one, Eric.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously, we can look at the big picture stuff here in terms of like why we all feel like the students are not reading as much as they used to, or why even what we're not reading as much as we used to.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we should sort of not ignore the big picture here, which is the fact that the expansion of the things that we can do with our time has obviously grown with all the sort of digital stuff we have access to phones and streaming services and all that kind of stuff.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no question about that stuff has eaten into some of the habits that we had before.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think reading is one of those habits.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've been thinking about this myself.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like at night, okay, I'm tired.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the day is done, and I have a couple hours left before I'm gonna go to bed.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do during that during that time?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Typically, like a lot of people, I watch TV, right?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it requires like a little bit less uh energy for me to do that as opposed to reading.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: A hundred years ago, that wasn't an option.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So people are just have more choices in terms of what they can do with their time.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's true for students as well.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's other things as well.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, education around reading has absolutely evolved in the last few decades.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of those big moments of evolution was things like the common core, in which students were asked to do more kind of short excerpts as opposed to reading longer texts or reading full books or full novels.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're reading short stories, they're reading more nonfiction.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: The sort of reading muscle that we students might have that have developed in prior levels of education has maybe atrophied a little bit.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess the last thing I would say is the pandemic intensified that stuff.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so all these things are definitely coming into play here.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: The big obvious ones, as well as some of these more subtle ones about like the history of their own reading education, could be driving all these concerns that we have about students reading.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Those are all really important kind of context.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: I would say it's presenter readiness challenge for us, another dimension of the readiness challenge.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Students are coming into class underdeveloped in the habit or the ability really to read.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: But there's another dimension to this.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: I know you, like me, would like for students to love to read or at least respect and desire or value the reading that they're assigned.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: But often we find ourselves in the position of having to threaten or force them, giving them a quiz that they'll risk failing if they don't do the reading.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Which is not really where we want to be.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: So is there a way for us to get them to see the value?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: What does it look like in a course to create at least the possibility that they might value or actually fall in love with reading?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think we have to be realistic here.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Again, if me as an English professor who loved reading my whole life, like that, I want them to love reading, but I can't always expect that in every class, like for every subject matter.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we have to set our expectations realistically about this.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I would sort of key on a like three big picture things in terms of what we can do to help students um engage with the reading in the ways that will help them learn.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's ultimately that's our goal, right?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: We want them to re learn from their reading, and we want them to also recognize that reading is a learning tool they can use for the rest of their lives, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we want to have them good good experiences with reading, so that shapes their attitudes going forward.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So let's think about three possibilities here.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is we have to help students understand how to read well, and so I think that part of that is we have taken for granted the notion that we can just assign reading to students.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: They do the reading and we they come in and we just process it or just talk about it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we're have to go further now toward the students by saying, listen, here's how to read well in this discipline.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like these are things you have to do to be a good reader, to learn from this reading.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I that's the first thing I would say is we need to be more helpful about this and think about how do we build in reading strategies, reading instruction, even at the college level.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: You might think about, oh, that's like a thing that students do in third grade or like in high school.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, we have to do this work now, be more helpful in terms of helping students become good readers.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the second thing is building more structure into the class in terms of how students engage with the reading.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so that includes things like social annotation tools that students do outside of class or actual reading activities in class itself.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: For example, like having students read closely with each other in small groups or in pairs or individually with guided prompts.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: So building more structured reading activities in class, I think is another way to do that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, even if they don't necessarily do all the reading outside of class, they still get some structured reading time in class itself.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I've just written a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I titled, If we care about it, do it in class.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is a thing I want to say about reading too.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: But finally, I would say is accountability.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we shouldn't necessarily want to make quizzes be the only thing that helps students read.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, reading is hard.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And school is not always supposed to be a place of just easy learning and fun.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Learning requires work.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think some accountability does help.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so thinking about how do you help students feel accountable to the reading.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that is part of the mix.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big believer that you know we have to mix intrinsic and extrinsic motivations together, which I think is the way that most of us work, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So mixing things together to me is okay.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna appeal to that deep the love of their reading if they have it.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't, I'm gonna give them some other other kinds of motivators as well.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a whole emotional side of reading.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you've touched on this in the webinar we hosted with you recently, but for some students, reading can be a bit of a trigger.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll I'm gonna give you a personal example.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I remember being back in grade school and we would be assigned a book to read, and we had independent reading period, which was great because you had time to actually read in class.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was that was an important thing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if you got the book without pictures, you were considered a good reader.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember this distinctly because if you got the Sasquatch book, which was more of a comic book, you knew you were in the other camp.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the issue with that on the emotional side is everyone else in the class also knew where you stood as well.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do those experiences shape students' reading motivation today?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what can we do to help students actually rewrite those narratives if they maybe started in the Sasquatch camp, as was the case in my early days?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, obviously, when I was a kid, it was like the yellow group, the the blue book, blue group, the green book group, everybody knew what they were.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And they also knew even they tried to hide it, you knew what the kids were in the different groups and what it meant in terms of terms of their reading skills.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: So definitely people, groups that they sort of identified, self-identified as being, you know, not good readers, that's gonna definitely shape their attitudes.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have a different story about this actually.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: When I was in high school, I was uh somebody I read a lot, and so coming into high school, English classes, I had done a lot of reading as a kid.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'd been praised for my reading skills, so this was part of my life.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I remember one day in class, we were reading a poem.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: The teacher kind of threw out one of these questions, but it's like a clearly like a leading question.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: He had an idea in mind, and I guessed it, like one of these things where you sort of guess what the teacher's head is.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was an interpretation of the poem.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and I got the right answer to it.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Oh, yeah, that's right.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Good job.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a kid in the back, and he was a kid who was clearly not a good student.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: One of these kids sort of had like a school is for idiots kind of kid, right?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he sort of just spoke out in the whole class and said, How do you know that?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: He said it to me, like, How do you know that?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I don't know.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I just sort of, you know, I read the poem, and this is I've read a lot of poems, I guess.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I had no idea to answer him, but he was upset.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you know that?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And how do I not know to know that?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: That moment has just stuck to me for my whole life.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I want to reach that kid and say, There's no mystery here.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is this practice?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is sort of understanding like where to look for uh a meaning in a poem.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's to me, is to think about how do we help students from the start?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: As a teacher myself, is one thing I I really wanted to help students to see that, especially the students who came in and were very uncomfortable or felt like somehow they weren't good readers putting air quotes around that.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the idea that I can help you cross from where you are now into another place where you can become a reader that can recognize how to find a theme in a poem or develop a thesis based on your own original idea about this text.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: These things are possible.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: You have to give a commitment to me, and I'll give a commitment back to you.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me, that's the message we have to send to students.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a mystery.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can get better at it, and and I can help you.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: I know there are some issues with the research around this, but growth mindset is once again coming into this conversation as it's really important to help students demystify the things they don't understand as a skill or as a set of skills to develop.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: Bringing this to reading, we talked about the readiness issue earlier, but uh it's a little more complicated, I think, and complicated in part by things you've identified as essential components of reading, obviously, some basic fluency in reading, some background knowledge that you can bring to the text, otherwise it's completely mystifying, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have to have some attitudinal or emotional states going to Eric's question, so some confidence, you have to even have some attitude toward this.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: So the act of reading is really it brings an awful lot to bear into that act.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, how does this complexity shift how we should think about teaching students how to read?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: One of the core things we have to think about as teachers, which is having multiple strategies to help students accomplish something or learn to do something.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a core value for me as a teacher is variety, uh, making sure that we're having students various ways for them to be exposed to the material and work through different kinds of learning activities.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's true for reading as well.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right, the background that maybe requires either me giving them some lecturing them a little bit on the material or giving them strategies to look up things they don't understand, like maybe like digital resources, which they can click on links and see what the things they don't necessarily understand in a text and give some basic background knowledge for things that are maybe getting their way of their understanding.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's also like how do you develop an interpretation of something?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do you make a connection to it from your own personal life that will bring this idea to life?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me, that's the big way to think about this is you can't just have one strategy to teach reading or teach anything, because again, not every strategy is going to work for every student, but even the students that might be open to like lots of possibilities, they're gonna benefit from having multiple approaches to the text.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think the idea is we have to experiment, think about how we help students engage with reading in different formats, different ways, digital in class, how to take notes in their reading.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: All these things will come together to help them develop good reading skills.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about poetry earlier, and I did English in university and I gained an appreciation for poetry.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I still find half the time I'll read a poem in The New Yorker or our equivalent up here, the walrus, and be just kind of baffled by the end of it.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes me feel like you're just not cut out for this.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get it, right?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um because you're suggesting there's actual techniques to you know interpreting a poem.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine the scenario a student opens up their LMS and they find Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of their reading assignments for the week.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then they have another class where they have to read a scientific paper.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: This may or may not be a real scientific paper, but Brood Awakening stimulant beverages as pedagogical interventions in 8 a.m.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: classes.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's that's a pretty different reading experience than reading Robert Frost, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we often assign them with the same approach, right?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Read this by next Thursday, say.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So how would you go about scaffolding on the front end so students don't just read but know actually how to read, how to approach those texts?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I said one of my core principles as a teacher, there's two.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: One is variety, the other is transparency.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so think about helping students understand these are there are differences in terms of what you're doing here versus what you're doing in other classes.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I really try to surface that.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: For example, when this class you're to read a novel or a poem, that's different from reading a scientific paper.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll give an example.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: I co-taught a course last year with a neuroscientist, and she alerted me to this article about how scientists read scientific papers.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it showed those scientists they don't read the papers from the beginning.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: What they said was they read the abstract, maybe the intro, and then they go right to the figures and the graphs and the tables to see what the actual results were.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the discussion, maybe, you know, but not so much.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we taught Cote at this class, so there were some scientific papers that were assigned in there, which I read myself.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: My impulse was to just go to the discussion because I can't really understand the tables and the figures and the graphs.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: So she helped me understand.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: No, you have to look at these things more carefully.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: You have to, and she taught us how to like read the graphs and the you know, the figures and that kind of stuff.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, the students need to understand that.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so in science, this is how we read a paper.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: These are the key things that you look at in a scientific paper.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: You should look at the other parts, but you know, this is a your focal points are gonna be here.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: When you read a poem, again, in my class, I'm gonna say, okay, listen, you've got this long poem.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of words here.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It might look strange to you, but I'm gonna try to help you see there's certain key points typically in a poem that you can pay attention to.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I call these like meaning hot spots.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are the hot spots in a poem that we should pay a special attention to?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes those are the opening lines, the closing lines of a poem, strange language, things like assimiles and metaphors.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: As an expert, those spots grab my own attention.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to help students see put your eyes there first.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, read the poem as a whole first, but then go back and start putting your eyes on these particular places because those places, if you put them all together, typically are gonna build up a possibility for you to understand what this poem is talking to you about.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: I like the idea of sort of meaning hot spots in a text.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: So as a teacher, I maybe haven't necessarily thought about that in that particular way.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: If I can help other teachers see, okay, what are the meaning hotspots of your disciplinary texts?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: How then will you guide students to those spots?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: How you tell them this is where the meaning lies and give them practice in doing it.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually will have my students like use a worksheet in class and they just write out what are the first couple lines, what are the last couple lines, and write down any lines that you see are strange that don't that you don't understand.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's a strange word or like a phrase that is like weird.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Just put them all together and then just look at them.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: What do you see there?
• 16:40
  unknown: Right?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm giving them practice working through that process.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise, scientists might say, okay, here's a paper.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do the abstract together, get a talk sense of what that means, and then let's look at the figures and see what happens there.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Then we'll go back and see what else we should look at to understand maybe what these figures mean in terms of like limitations for the or like the methods they use to create this experiment, that kind of thing.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the thing I would say about this.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be transparent about it.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Tell students that we do things differently in this class than what you might do in another class, and then give them practice noticing the places where meaning is going to emerge from a particular kind of text.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, it looks like I got a few poems I'm gonna go back to now with that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the other thing I would say about poetry, though, is yeah, I would say about poetry also, you know, don't be yourself about too much about not expecting to find a meaning in every poem.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Some poems like just have like, you know, it's an experience.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: You just read it.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's all.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, don't kill yourself to find a meaning in every poem.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's good.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: My my ego feels a little bit better with that advice.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for that.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: In the spirit of small teaching, maybe, is there something that I can do if I know I'm gonna give my students a reading assignment this week, and I just have not had a great deal of luck in getting my students to read and read well and make that productive for us all?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is there something I can take into the class, something simple that might make a difference?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love you know simple things.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think taking one passage from something you've just assigned and not expecting the students to come in and be ready to discuss it or just sort of absorb it, or um, you're gonna refer to the in the lecture.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, doing a real close read of it as a model for the students, and then asking them to do it on their own.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that might be a paragraph from a textbook, and just say, okay, let's look at this together.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: I want you to circle the most important words in this these three paragraphs, and we're gonna talk about them.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: What I've found in my own teaching experience is if you do that with like a novel and like show students like one page.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a one page of this novel.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone circle the three most important words or phrases in this one page.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna put them on the board and we're gonna see what emerges here.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: And always something interesting emerges from that process, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they start to see, okay, actually, what I'm actually trying to do here when I read this thing is find the cool phrases and words is that kind of will help me notice something, especially I'm trying to develop my own interpretation about this work.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: But even like a, you know, uh anthropology text or a philosophy text, like what's one way to get together as a group, notice things together, and then see what they mean and build up an understanding of what this text means or this passage means or this paragraph, what it means.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I would just say pick something like a meaty, a meaty thing that you've asked them to read, model it a little bit, and give them an activity to do either on their own or in pairs or small groups, and then process it together.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is part of that demystifying process, but also showing them there is more stuff here than you realize.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's really some great practical advice for the classroom.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking a bit more too about the motivation and the inspiration side of things because a lot of times, at least in my experience, it was read chapter four to seven, it's due by Monday because we're going to be talking about it in class.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't find that particularly inspiring or motivating.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, how would you think about or go about reframing reading assignments so they actually spark maybe a bit of curiosity instead of eye rolls or dread, as the case maybe.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes I'm pretty open to students saying, listen, the reading for next time is gonna be challenging.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: I want you to just give yourself plenty of time.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: I want you to sit down and make sure you're taking notes because that'll help you keep focused.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it is challenging, so don't feel bad about it if you find yourself wanting to not do it.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it's important for the class because the ideas you're gonna find here will really help you achieve this particular learning goal that we have, or help you write your paper, or do really well in the final exam, whatever it might be.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm trying to make like multiple appeals here, but also making them see that yes, the challenge is normal here.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: This text is difficult, and even reading this much amount of text is challenging too.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so all those things I can make I can be empathetic about.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: I can help them see that this thing you it's important to do, but we're gonna struggle with it together.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that first of all.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: I also want to make sure I embed the reading itself assignment in like a larger arc.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for example, but you're trying to achieve this one thing in the class.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: You you have a goal for yourself.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have a goal for you.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is like a way to help us get to that goal, and so make and create some suspense around what they're gonna find that reading, spark some curiosity beforehand.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about this particular particular issue, and we couldn't figure out why.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this reading will help us see actually one possible solution to this problem.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Or we've all struggled with this particular thing in our lives.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: You're the reading that we're you're gonna read for next time will maybe give you an idea of why we struggle with this and some ways we might think about how moving forward with it in our lives.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: So building some curiosity around it, showing them how it might help them in some way.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, I would say accountability measures again are not a bad thing.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, I want you to make sure you get through this.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I will ask.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Just respond to it in class or have some way to check that you've engaged with it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So all the things I think are on the table in terms of what we can do to inspire students.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: Again, as someone who's taught uh English literature for a very long time, we want them to love reading, we want them to see that reading is a good thing for their lives.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: We also understand that reading is challenging, they have to do a lot of it in class and for their courses, and we have to be realistic about what we kind of accomplish any particular individual, any class in any single day.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny because as an English major and father of two now university students, uh, I would agree I've had to modulate my expectations to around reading over the years.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I met students that I loved.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: They were great students, and after the class was over, they would say things to me like, Listen, I only did about half the reading in that class.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I had no idea.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like that, you know, and I was like, All right, this is a good kid.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, I I enjoyed having that student in class, and they say they didn't do it, didn't do all the reading.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So like, okay, you're not necessarily a bad person because you didn't do all the reading.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, so that's fine.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: It feels to me like that's one of those sort of we all know this because the course load that students take today, on top of the workload and the life responsibilities they have, it's an impossible demand on time.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's just not possible to do it all, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so, to this point of transparency, I do think that the expectation or the need for us as educators to be transparent and to actually seek to help students make a connection between what we're asking them to do and what matters to them.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we can't just expect them to do it because we said so.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they they want to know why it matters.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think to the degree that we can go beyond read chapters four to seven by Monday, there's going to be a quiz, the more that we can connect that to something that matters to them, I think the the better the likelihood that they'll at least feel bad about not being able to get to the reading, as opposed to like, I'm not doing this, you know.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think I always say one of the things about this, which is that I do feel like the students today are craving experiences that are a little bit different than the ones they have, like on an everyday basis.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, being surrounded by social media, being on their phones all the time.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've I also have two kids in college right now, and three before that who are in college, and they have all told me they all have these really conflicted relationships with their devices.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what we can certainly say to students also listen, it's a different kind of experience.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: It may feel uncomfortable at first, but when you have this chance to absorb yourself into your reading, embrace that.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it might help you, it might give you what you actually want right now, which is a little bit of stability in your mind to not always feel you're being pulled in multiple directions by your social media feeds, by the friends that are texting you all the time, or your parents, even that are texting you all the time.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: This need to always be online and to be connected.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they will welcome that.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them will, and I think we can make the case that this is a different kind of experience that you're normally having, and it's good for you.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think you'll enjoy it if you can really commit to it.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: I notice this too, because I'll watch some TV in the evening and then I'll usually read before bed.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that transition, those first few minutes into a book feels sluggish and things aren't just quite gelling, but then if I give five minutes or whatever, next thing I know, I'm not thinking about the act of reading anymore.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just sort of absorbing what I'm seeing on the page.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's absolutely again the idea of this sort of which we can calm our brains down a little bit by pushing away.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: All these things are happening in our around us all the time.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think reading is a great way to do that.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's a gift we can actually give to students, right?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: This idea of if I can help you become a reader or help you even in class itself, give me some experiences, just focusing on a text on your reading.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's a gift that will help them.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the more that we can do that and show them you can do this on your own too.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a gift to give them a another kind of experience they have in their lives, as opposed to what they're normally dealing with, all the things are coming at them all the time.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love that.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Especially for fiction, the invitation to escape into something, I think, is welcome, especially as an antidote of sorts to the technology experience, which is exhausting in the ways that you've talked about.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I know you to be a very experimental creative educator.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is there something you've tried or that you've come across that you think is particularly unconventional or surprising as an approach that has paid well?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think the social annotation of text actually is a one sort of surprised me when I first saw it and thought, actually, this is a good idea.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I like the idea of having notion of having students read and communicate community with each other and helping them, helping each other notice interesting things in the reading.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that actually is a really good way to give a different kind of experience to students, as opposed to like again, just sitting in your chair and trying to focus on a text with a print copy of a book, which I like, but still giving again the variety of different kinds of experiences.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: To me, social annotation for a text is something that I think is a worthwhile experiment if you haven't tried it so far.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: We have some instructors at Notre Dame, which I think are doing it really inspirational ways that I've seen the comments that students are making on the text and responding to each other.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, well, this is actually a really good example of students really being engaged in a text and actually asking good questions and prompting each other to notice things.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think so, again, I think social annotation is a really cool way to think about expanding strategies as a instructor might have, if you're not using that already.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: The other one I would say experiment sort of experimental is again reading a class.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a big believer in again, class time, not only for structured activities that when students are talking to each other, analyzing the reading, but actually reading it in class itself, like not only reading out loud, like me as the instructor, we're having students' experience of listening to reading out loud, but silently reading in class.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's there's been some interesting things in the crack of higher education about instructors experimenting with that.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: But giving some students a little bit of time in class, do a little reading to me, it seems revolutionary, but also at the same time, I think it's maybe something we need to think about a little bit more.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, that's the way I think we can sort of experimenting in class and social inditation is a way for we can experiment outside of class.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Has there been a moment in your teaching where a student or maybe even a whole class like reconnected with reading in a way that moved you, that made you feel like, ah, mission accomplished, something that r reminded you of why this work matters so much?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the moments where sort of stood out to me are when students uh see themselves in a text.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think oftentimes those are the students who maybe are not necessarily coming from typical traditional academic backgrounds, like who are we rewarded for being great students in high school, who come into a class and read a poem, for example, by an author who's describing their experiences of being marginalized or not being good at school.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're able to see themselves, you know what?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, what I'm experiencing right now, in this in the maybe in this school right now, is not necessarily abnormal.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Other people have been through what I've been through, or they've been shut out in the ways that I've been shut out.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I to me, that helps me see like, okay, yes, what reading can actually do for people is they can see themselves in texts that in ways that sort of support them and open open up pathways for them to keep going forward in their education.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's the biggest, uh, the most inspirational moments for me as a teacher.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Jim, I knew this was going to be a rich and wonderful conversation.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you so much for your time.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you bets.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Great conversation.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 29:31
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