Teacher Resources: Classroom Practices - Initial In-Class Work on a New Reading

Consistent with our idea in 101 that reading and writing should go hand in hand, you should always assign some "reading question(s)" for students to consider as they begin a new selection from The New Humanities Reader; a question or suggested focus that will encourage students to begin "making a mark" on the text, and to begin writing a response to the text so as to make meaning of it. For suggestions on these reading questions, see the Link-O-Mat or the questions that follow each selection in the reader. With such "pre-writing" in hand, students will be prepared to participate much more productively in the ensuing class discussion of the assigned reading.  Even if you only ask students to write a list of their own questions as they read, they will come to class more ready to make sense of the text than if they were simply to read it "cold."

It's important to establish early on that the class as a whole—rather than the teacher alone—is the source for understanding the texts.  You may choose either to engage the entire class in a discussion of their responses to a question about the text, or you may divide the students into small groups to discuss their responses or to explore some textual issue.  In the latter case, the small groups may spend twenty minutes or so on an issue before they report back to the class as a whole on their findings.  An especially important focus of these discussions is the need to refer to the text at hand, and in particular the use of quotation, which is a crucial feature of the formal writing the students will do. Teachers have invented a variety of strategies for reading and writing about passages of text in the classroom. One successful strategy is for the teacher to copy a pair of quotations from the reading onto the board and have small groups or individuals construct paragraphs that explore and connect these two passages.  Since the best student essays are those built around such textual "connections," the benefit of this work with quotations can't be overstated.

Throughout this process, students will often find that, as one question is answered or one problem resolved, another question or problem—often a more complex one—emerges.  This trial-and-error or exploratory method of conducting class discussion is messier than lecturing to the students, or simply answering their questions as they arise, but it has several advantages over lecturing.  Not only does the exploratory method usually cover the same textual issues that a lecture would, but it also raises important issues that you yourself might not have thought to raise.  The exploratory method also models—and gives students practice in—learning as discovery, rather than as "delivery" of understanding from teacher to student.  Finally, the exploratory method gets all students—not just those who are already comfortable talking in class—involved in the text's understanding, especially when small-group work precedes full-class discussion.

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