Take My Advice: Reading Strategies

A bookshelf with three stacks of semi-organized books: left, for class; middle, for research; right, to return. I'm very proud.

I've talked before about how embracing the idea that there are many different ways to start writing, to begin a project, and to write well and consistently can be really useful when teaching. What works for you may not work for others. I recently had occasion to think about how this is true for reading as well.

Reading for classes is a different beast than reading for pleasure, and sometimes this truth can make it hard to get started on reading, or to sustain interest in it. Not only is it specific-- you must read this, not that-- but it's also a different process, one which calls for breaking down language and ideas to fully understand and use them. This is also a process that becomes more critical as one shifts from survey-level undergraduate courses to more discussion-heavy upper-level seminars, where the reading gets longer, more dense, and more deeply discussed during class, as well as plumbed for use in papers.

Like the writing strategies I mentioned in that earlier post, reading strategies can often be presented as a set of maxims, but also like writing advice, they don't have to be used in that way. They can simply offer another set of options for someone to choose from when they sit down to do coursework. Here's a few I like-- I'd love to hear yours in comments. 

Getting Started 

Sometimes the hardest part of reading is actually starting to do it. If a stack of text seems as though it will have no end, there can be little motivation for beginning. Here are a couple of helpful tricks to overcome this:

Throwing yourself in. 

I worked with someone once who worked many more hours than me at a job that I loved, but found very draining. I asked him how he could stand getting up every morning and going, and he told me he just had to not think about it-- to throw himself out of bed, into the shower, and out the door without contemplating what his day would hold, or else it would become overwhelming. This, I think, is especially applicable to reading. If you are afraid to start, just start. Take your book to the pool or to a comfy chair in the park. Don't worry about the notes, the perfect pencil, the right lighting level on your monitor. Just jump in and worry about all of the accoutrements later-- after you have an idea of what the text is about. 

Time based goals.  

If you have to read a certain number of pages, it can be tempting to just say "well, my goal is that number of pages." But for a long reading that might be too much for one session of reading, and it may be counterproductive to fully read all of those pages anyway. Try setting a goal of reading for an hour, or limiting the total amount of time you can spend on  reading for one course to three hours that week. Then when that time is up, evaluate how well that worked. Did you complete everything? Did you get the gist of what the text was about, and a few specifics to back it up? Are there ways you could improve your reading efficiency and get more out of these texts?

Study/reading groups. 

These can be really useful whether everyone is reading the same thing or not—if you invite people over or do a Google hangout get-together in which everyone reads for an hour or so, it can be motivating. Not only does it carry the promise of socializing before or after, if that appeals to you, it also has the benefit of social pressure-- "Everyone else is reading! Why aren't I reading? I should read and not look at my phone." (Citation: Me, on "Why I Do a Lot of Work at Coffee Shops.")
 

How-To's

Just as reading strategies are options you can use or not use to help your own learning process, I like to think of the act of reading as giving yourself options for the future in the form of information, arguments, and evidence for future papers, projects, etcetera-- similar to my thoughts on giving yourself gifts. When there are pages and pages to go before you can say "done," its easy to get bogged down.  But if you focus on looking for specific information about the text, it can ease this reading process. Starting to read a text is then less “I must slog through this text and complete it” and more “I will use this text as a tool to find these answers.”  
 
Focusing on concrete methods for reading can really help. 4 Steps to Reading a Textbook offers some advice for intro-level classes. The argument presented here that one should start with the questions at the back is a compelling one-- it gives you a goal to clearly pursue. Upper-level courses can benefit from concrete advice about reading selectively as well. In this piece on How to Read for History, I especially like the first section because it doesn’t just say “skim,” it suggests specific strategies for dragging a lot of info out of skimming a text’s title, chapters, and sections; and looking for particular sentence structures and placements which indicate key points. Another skimming strategy I sometimes use: the first and last sentence of every paragraph.

What other particulars might we look for? Academic Reading Strategies not only offers a few general reading tips that can be useful; it also suggests that having an idea of purpose (why you’re reading and why the author is writing) can be a good place to start, which I think is related to this idea of using the text as a tool. I also particularly like a handout that Tamara Chaplin used when I TA'd for her (my very first teaching experience!), which included the following outline: 

Level One

• Who wrote this document?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What is the story line?

Level Two

• Why was this document written?
• What type of document is this?
• What are the basic assumptions made in this document?

Level Three

• Do I believe this document?
• What can I learn about the society that produced this document?
• What does this document mean to me?

Switching It Up

Some people have one method and stick to it. The people who are in the business of giving mandates about studying tend to smile upon this method. "Find a method and stick to it," they say. "This is the key to success in college."

I personally tend to be a bit more variable, and really always have been. I work best when I switch between a variety of settings-- from office to home to coffee shop-- and change up the format of my reading depending upon the form of the text and the significance to whatever I'm doing. I might take detailed notes in a separate document for one article, and scribble notes and underlines in the margins of another. I might read one on my Kindle in the park and one at the library with a pen. Don't be afraid to change tactics if you find yourself distressed or bored by the one you're doing.

For especially difficult times, you might find that varying the method of intake may help break down the challenging wall between you and the text. You might find that listening to a work can be easier than sitting down to read it. It is a bit harder to get the details this way, but not so bad for getting the gist. Many PDFs have searchable text, which means they can be read by a screen reader or other text-to-speech tool like TTSReader. These are not always perfect (ever hear this thing read a footnote?), but they can be a way to get through a reading block.  Some course books can be found as audiobooks, or you can find some authors talking about their books on podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, which can help you get some of the main ideas. This is not a replacement for reading the text-- an audiobook won't help you when you have to cite page numbers in a paper; a podcast summary will be relatively unhelpful if your instructor really wants to talk about chapter 3 in detail-- but it can be a way to jump-start your reading, fill in gaps on stressful weeks, or allow you to engage in a discussion that you might not have attended otherwise. 

What reading strategies do you use or recommend? I'm always looking for more options.

Current Project: Time Travel and Crucible Critique

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group. 

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller? 

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage. 

I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history? 

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference. 

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two. 

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group. 

Project sheets and rubric are here. 

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory. 

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.

Enough About Me: Social Networks as Teaching Support

Table laden with laptops, phones, and stationery items. By Marvin Meyer on Unsplash.

There are a few really good gifts we can give ourselves in life, and one of them is learning how and when to seek out advice. Social media offers a lot of opportunities to do this with relatively low investment: we throw our question, minor or major, out into the world and see who might be willing to try answering it.

I was inspired to think on this when both I and a colleague of mine posted teaching related questions on Facebook within a few weeks of one another. I appreciated all the suggestions for video games that deal with American history that I had received in response to my query. When fellow Illinois PhD student in History Taryn Vaughn asked a question online about helping students build vocabulary, I noticed the variety and quality of answers she received and contacted her to chat about social media as a tool for teaching support. We decided to share our thoughts in a blog post (her words are italicized throughout). Along the way, I reached out (in a Facebook status, naturally) to see what others might be moved to say on the topic. So, join us in taking a break from scrolling to consider some benefits of the Internet Ask:

It gives you variety

Personal networks are extremely powerful, and it's likely that (despite constant fretting that we all live in monocultural echo chambers) you have connections to people with a broad variety of experiences. Asking for teaching help online has the potential to draw a wider variety of respondents than you would asking around your department/workplace/family mansion, especially if you're trying to find unexpected sources or ideas. I recently used Facebook to ask about video games that deal with historical subjects for the course I'm planning and was pleasantly surprised at the flood of useful responses I received-- some from other historians, some from people I hadn't talked to since high school. Taryn appreciated this aspect of the Internet Ask: "Any of my friends or followers or what have you can see my post so I can get advice from that friend who’s studying law, from that one high school teacher I haven’t thought of in years, from that poet friend I haven’t seen in a while, all without having to specifically search them out." This variety of respondents helped me feel as though I wouldn't miss anything that would seem too glaring to the students-- I'd hate to have my class say halfway through the semester "Why didn't you pick this game for our class, it would have been perfect!" and have to respond "Uh, because I live under a rock and have never heard of that one."

The variety of respondents to a query can result in a corresponding variety in the answers offered, which can be useful not only for getting a big pool of ideas in order to pull out a few, but also for situations in which you want to be able to show students a variety of options. Kateri Smith, a foster care specialist at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, has used social media to accumulate a variety of responses to questions she later asked as part of trainings for teenagers in foster care: "A lot of what I do is about getting kids to think in an out of the box way about big, emotional subjects like family, success, & healing. When I first created the curriculum for one of the sessions, I asked people the same questions I would later ask the teens. This gave me a great variety of answers from different demographics so I could put some on a worksheet to demonstrate how not-black-and-white the topics could be. I think it was really important that the teens could see how people from across the country of different ages, races, and backgrounds had dealt with some of the things they were feeling." Students are wide-ranging, and can benefit from an instructor's attention to and appreciation of that truth.
 

…But not too much variety

Conversely, social media appeals for information can be limited in useful ways. I've occasionally participated in a Facebook group designed for instructors who use Reacting to the Past games in their classrooms to ask questions and to share tips, which not only keeps the secret twists and turns of each game from public eyes but also connects me to people guaranteed to have at least SOME idea of what I'm talking about. Using groups can also save you some time and effort by cutting down on extraneous advice. Sarah Morice Brubaker, Assistant Professor of Theology at Phillips Theological Seminary, uses a Facebook group to post her questions in order to maximize useful suggestions and minimize unhelpful comments. "Even though not all of the suggestions offered would work in my own classes -- because of theological perspective of the school, grad v. undergrad, and other norms specific to the institution -- I find it a lot more helpful putting an appeal there than putting out an appeal to Facebook or Twitter at large. Especially Facebook. There's a small but enthusiastic share of my Facebook friends who seem derive pleasure from giving advice the way a beagle dog derives pleasure from barking. And, er, it tends not to matter to them whether they have the requisite knowledge base or experience to offer useful advice." So, for specialized questions or if you just need a few good answers, groups can be a great way to limit responses. 

Others can see it

When you put a question out into the big wide world (or the small limited group), others can also benefit from seeing the post. I think this is especially useful for making what we do as teachers reach wider audiences. It draws broader attention to the topic being discussed-- you never know who on your friends list might decide to pick up a book or check out a website because of someone's suggestion. It demystifies the teaching prep process: no, the curriculum doesn't all come out of a textbook-- we're working to make it here, together, right now! It also helps other teachers, as Taryn notes firsthand: "I’ve posted on Facebook asking for advice on a specific teaching issue in the hopes of getting a wide variety of different perspectives on the problem. Before actually posting myself, though, I also saw my other teaching friends post their own questions on Facebook. I found it really useful to read the responses that people gave them. Sometimes the questions and answers spoke to questions I already had, but had not yet asked, sometimes they spoke to issues I hadn’t even considered before, but either way, seeing what other teachers are asking and the solutions their Facebook friends provide is just as useful to me as posting a question myself."

It gives you confidence

Taryn noted something that I hadn't appreciated: perhaps paradoxically, asking others for advice in this way can help you to trust your own instincts. As she put it, "I think the most valuable thing that I’ve gotten from social media in this regard is the advice that actually confirmed ideas that I had already had. When someone recommends something that I had already considered doing, it helps me trust my own instincts as an instructor. I’ve only just started teaching and before I reached out on social media, I felt paralyzed by my own lack of experience. I had no idea what I was doing. I had ideas, sure, but how was I supposed to know if they were any good? I convinced myself that they probably weren’t. Then I asked my Facebook friends and while some pointed me to resources that I had never heard of or considered, many of my friends suggested the very ideas that had been floating around in my head. 
Furthermore, just the simple act of asking for advice helped me to start thinking of solutions to my own question. It was as if putting the question out there helped me to separate myself from the problem and view it more objectively, whereas before, my fear of personal failure had stopped me from even wanting to think about it."
 

You can ask about almost anything without figuring out who to ask

There are some times when you want specific answers to a question. What games relate to US history between 1600 and 1920? That's a pretty rigid boundary. But other times, you're thinking broadly, or you're not sure what kind of responses you want. Maybe you want to get a sense of what other people think about a topic or a genre of thing. Maybe you have a question for which you know there is no solid, single answer, or maybe it's on a topic that you know so little of that you don't even know who might know of good answers.

None of that matters in the Internet Ask! It's your rodeo. Ask away. Any of these kinds of questions have the potential to be answered. Taryn notes that she thinks she'll continue to use social media for teaching questions and may in the future expand from more specific queries to murkier, harder-to-approach questions: "The last time I was looking for resources (like apps or websites) and/or class activities to help students improve their vocabulary. What I didn’t ask in my last post, but what I think I’ll ask about in my next one if I can figure out how to word the question, is how to structure a class that I myself will be comfortable leading. Newbie that I am, I’m not really sure what my teaching style will or should be when I attempt for the first time to teach history. It’s not simply that I’m not sure how to help my future students understand the material (though that is certainly one of my concerns). My question is: how can a pretty introverted and shy person like me engage students without exhausting my limited social endurance? How do I structure a class that draws on my strengths instead of preying on my weaknesses? I want to teach in a way that’s sustainable for me, and in a way that allows both outgoing and shy students to learn and participate."
 

It can lead you in directions you didn't expect

I'll conclude with a brief recounting of both my and Taryn's experiences at seeking teaching advice from social media, which should illustrate the broad pathways for action that this can open and reinforce some of the other benefits mentioned above.

When I asked for video games, I got suggestions from a wide variety of comers. I looked up several of these and decided to add one or two to my syllabus (it's still in flux, as it will be until the moment of truth on day 1, probably-- there's always something that could be BETTER, right?). However, another of the suggestions I hadn't yet played. Assassin's Creed III had been on my Steam wishlist for some time, but it had not been on sale. I had already been in touch with a librarian about the gaming initiative for the final game of the course, Valiant Hearts. So I was aware of the existence of the gaming center, but hadn't yet been down there. My curiosity led me to find the disc (on a separate floor of the library); bring it back to the gaming center; check out the key to the gaming center, the Xbox controller, and the headphones; put it all together-- and sit and wait for the Xbox to download some necessary piece of the game. I never did get to play Assassin's Creed III that day. But I did learn how to use the gaming center, and prepare students for any issues that might arise when they try to use it to play Valiant Hearts or any other games I might assign in future. (And Assassin's Creed III went on sale on Steam just a few weeks later-- kismet!) Even though I likely won't assign that particular game due to time constraints, the suggestion led me in a helpful direction that I couldn't have predicted.
 
Says Taryn: "The last time I asked for advice on social media, I was able to cobble together a workable teaching style from the varied advice I got. I had asked about vocabulary building and most of my friends stressed the importance of context. Students need to see words in context, they need to use words in context. One of my Facebook friends, who also stressed the need for context, is a Spanish teacher at my former high school. When he commented on my post it reminded me of the Spanish class I took in my junior year of high school. Every day our teacher would come to class with a list of vocabulary words or structures (phrases that highlighted different grammatical rules) and we would use them to make up stories. Each student would get a turn to speak and sentence by sentence, we would create a story, usually ridiculous, using the vocabulary for the day.
 
I decided to take that strategy and modify it for my own purposes. Instead of a spoken exercise, like it had been in my Spanish class, I turned it into a written one. I made note of the words that my students had difficulty with, and the next day I came with a list of words, announcing that we would write stories, no matter how ridiculous, using that day’s vocabulary. I wrote too, [which] allowed me to warm up each day to the prospect of speaking in front of a crowd because writing and reading my own silly stories for them was somehow less terrifying than just talking. It allowed me to show them my personality and allowed them to show me theirs. It gave the outgoing ones a chance to share and the shy ones a chance to participate without exposing themselves to scrutiny. And it was everyone’s favorite class activity.
 
I never would have thought to do it if my high school teacher hadn’t commented on my post, and I never would have thought to ask him for advice otherwise… the fact that social media allows you to address many different people from many different backgrounds all at once is its biggest strength. If I had limited myself to what I could pick up in the TA office, I wouldn’t have hit on a strategy that suited both me and my students."

Have you used social media to help your teaching, or have you learned anything from others' queries?