Getting Students To Do Assigned Readings

Here's a topic highly germane to classroom practice, particularly in Humanities.

So, you have a text that you want students to read. It's good and important content, likely the heart of what you want them to learn.

Yet, you come to class and you can tell, using your well-honed teacher's antennae, that almost no one has done the reading.

What went wrong?

Likely, everything. Starting from the fact that most kids have a ton of things vying for their attention on a daily basis. Whether it is working, sports, music, cell phones, instant messaging, videos, the internet, TV, partying or hanging out at the Mall, young people have more to do, more they want to do and less time than ever.

Just accept and realize this: No matter how long you've been teaching, how stellar your reputation and how brilliant your class lectures, your particular class exerts a very small gravitational pull within their universe. And make that a minuscule pull if you are a new teacher without the bonafides listed above.

So, let's take a look at strategies to motivate students to complete assigned readings.

1. Describe, explain and develop exactly why the reading is important.
2. Put some time in and show them "how" to read intelligently.
3. Put some of your skin in the game by pumping up your interest in the material.
4. Put some of their skin in the game by pumping up how the reading is used on a daily basis in class.
5. Reward good readers by allowing them to use their "notes" on exams.

Let's examine each item in detail.

1. A teacher's job is to clearly lay out a justification for what she is doing, why the subject matters and how it relates to the lives of students. Sorry, but, without making learning relevant to young people, your class will quickly be judged "irrelevant".

I know it's not fair. In the old days, students used to hang breathlessly on every word a teacher said and then run home and memorize every facet and possible angle of the material. When they came in next, a teacher merely had to clear their throat and learning flowed through the room like electric current.

NOT!

Wake up people! Teaching has always been and always will be a giant task of "selling" students on the worthiness, meaning and relevance of the material being studied. It just is.

The reason: the only real way that students master concepts and content is when they create a personal, and passionate, connection to them. The brain is efficient enough to let go of the merely superfluous, yet it clings and effectively stores that which strikes it as most important and meaningful. Usually, this means a personal or emotional "hook", which the brain utilizes to file the learning where it can be retrieved.

So, a teacher has to spend some quality time, hopefully at the beginning and end of every class, really explaining, describing and foreshadowing the reading and why students are being asked to do it. This is largely a sales job: some hyperbole, some poetry, some connections to current events or the student's immediate life. Make it real, make it vital and be authentic.

If you can't create a valid, effective and authentic connection to your topic or content, you are probably in the wrong profession.

2. Early in the course, every teacher needs to "show" students how they can read intelligently. Sorry, this especially applies to those at the upper levels of high school and college.

I know, we see ourselves as above the fray. The "skills instruction" should have happened somewhere else, in elementary school, middle school perhaps, or maybe even at home with Mom and Dad. But, the truth is--and I have had to learn this time and again--much of what we do in teaching is straight-forward skill development. Even at the college level.

If you want students to work more effectively with people, you need to describe, practice, model and highlight those skills. If you want students to be better critical thinkers, you need to describe, practice, model and highlight those skills. And, if you want students to be better readers, you need to put time into developing them.

So, if the textbook is social science, I take a class and show them how the book is structured: chapters, section headings, sidebars, bolded text, definitions, footnotes. I go over all these and explain what they are and how they signal or "cue" the reader.

Then I do a short reading sample and ask students either to highlight or take notes on the content. Then, in small groups, we compare notes about what we chose to highlight. As a large group, we come back and compare across the small groups.

And what gets highlighted?

Three things:

1. Material from the text which the publisher has chosen to emphasize--that is, using the cues that we discussed above, bold text, definitions, sub-headings, etcetera.
2. Material that the student herself has found relevant, important or which can be connected to previous issues, concepts or learning.
3. Material which the professor chooses to highlight and emphasize during class discussion or lecture.

These are all valid areas to keep an eye on and use as guides for highlighting and learning to read effectively. Of these, I value the individual's student connection the highest, and I tell them that. Intrinsic motivation should always be held out as the highest ideal for learning. Why? Because it produces the best results. Hands down.

Teaching the reading of literature is completely different. Sure, you want students to read and enjoy the literature so the idea of "getting" notes from it is problematic at best. But, I do show them how writers subtly include areas where they develop themes or climax out on a topic or issue they've been developing. This kind of reading too is a skill, and in a way, you should be spending a lot of time identifying crucial passages, how they qualify as such, and how easy it is to dog-ear the page where you think you might be onto something rich.

Note of caution: highlighting too much material, or taking too many notes can be a mistake. You can't memorize a text, nor can you master every concept or fact; there have to be choices. Between numbers 1 and 3 above, a student should be encouraged to assemble a reduced version of highlighted material after class if they have been assembling too big a pile of information while reading.

3. Passion. You have to be authentically excited about the reading if you expect students to do it. Go back and read item number 1 a second time.

And, yes, you do have to make this "personal". Believe it or not, you as teacher are the leader of the free-world in your classroom. Where you lead, they will follow. And Nature abhors a vacuum. So, yes, it is your job, your responsibility, and hopefully your mission, to invest personal interest and feeling in the fact that the readings you are assigning, and which you want them to drop everything else to do, are really, really COOL!

4. What you do with the reading in class is the lynch-pin of this whole system. You have to have real activities, real discussions and attach real results to student performance around the assigned reading.

I do not recommend surprise quizzes, though some teachers use them to great effect.

And I certainly do not recommend study guides, which probes for exactly the wrong kind of information: shallow, febrile and lacking in meaningful hooks.

Here's what I do: I assemble my cooperative groups of three. (I use groups all the time, so the level of familiarity, skill and effectiveness of student participation in these is fairly high.) I devise three key, "big-picture" type questions from the reading, sometimes more.

The questions are large, theme-like issues for which specific examples and evidence are needed in order to create a good answer. (Yes, I describe, practice, model and highlight how to do this "skill" early on in class, too.)

Every group-member must switch off: one student does the writing, one facilitates the discussion, one becomes the spokesperson on that question. Next question, each student takes on a different role. I really insist on this, and enforce it without exception.

But, in every case, the key is that the students work together in developing their answer. You see, it's the collaboration, the comparing, the arguing which actually produces the most learning. Someone who sees only dimly the connections to a topic will really have their mind and eyes opened when a peer comes in with insightful thinking.

I do this for every reading assignment. Religiously. Consistently. Students come to class knowing that if they haven't done the reading--and some still will not have done it--they will be judged a lousy group-member, and it will cost them in the one thing that matters most: the esteem of their classmates.

Oh, they still participate. They still hang in and record the group's answer or dutifully explain it to the class when they are the spokesperson. And, before you condemn me for letting a student off the hook or penalizing the ones who have done the reading, let me explain something:

The ultimate goal is to expose the material.

That's what my mission is as a teacher; to give everyone a good shot at learning. By being part of the group, each student is getting rich exposure, reinforced through both written and verbal expression.

And the ones who have done the reading and must carry the burden for the others? They learn more than anyone because explaining and teaching something is what "locks it" into your brain.

Oh sure, occasionally I will start class by asking who has not done the reading, and then I create groups where only the students who have done the reading work together. The other students I ask to sit outside in the hall and do the reading.

Usually though, I only have to do this once a year, and my point is made clear enough that students follow through on the reading.

5. Finally, the real reward for doing the reading is that you should be allowed to organize and utilize your reading notes on the exam.

That works for me because my exams are not about discrete answers, true or false questions, or word-for-word definitions. Nope. My exams ask the students to apply their understanding of the concepts to real situations; to, in a sense, demonstrate real learning by solving a problem or writing an essay applying a concept.

To do that, of course, they need access to the discrete material and information we have studied, and I allow them to pull that up in note form.

I truly believe that critical thinking, creativity, making connections and collaborative people skills are much more important than is simple mastery of content. In my world, students who have done the reading and prepared the material in some fashion can bring that to the exam and use it. It's a great chance for them to see if their reading and organization process has worked or if they need to make adjustments.

In any case, students with notes can use them. Students without notes from the reading can, well, try to do their best. I get very few complaints on this. And when parents hear that their kid could use notes on the exam and still did very poorly, all eyes train on the real issue: the student's study habits.

I should say at the end that I generally get very good results in terms of students coming in prepared, having done the reading and expecting to have a graded discussion. The process I described above is also an excellent discussion format, leads to high participation rates and generally gets the content out on the table where I can add my ideas, sand off rough edges, and continue to make connections between and amongst previously learned content.

It does result in extra grading, I admit that. But really, its only one paper for every three students, though it is essential that each question be graded scrupulously, with comments made to direct that group toward better insight and technique.

Feedback is crucial and really helps students understand and adjust their efforts. Here is the big reward for reading: getting the paper back with substantive comments and a big fat grade. Students absolutely value this, and it is rich, informative feedback on how they are doing.

In any case, assigned reading has the potential to be a disaster for new teachers. Even most veteran teachers and professors seem to sidestep the issue by plowing ahead into lecture or letting students off the hook by not holding them responsible.

To my mind, that is not effective teaching, and it certainly is not effective learning. What works will vary from teacher to teacher, but, the best ones use some combination of the five principles above. And the best ones, in my opinion, use all five strategies in concert.

Weigh in on this, will you? You've at least been a student before. Any opinions?