My first classroom teaching experience was at a community college in Baltimore, MD. I taught several sections of a first-year composition course. As is typically the case with community colleges, especially ones situated in urban locations, I had a diverse student population. I taught both traditional-aged college students and non-traditional aged students. My students also had varied and diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, and many students were non-native English speakers. I also worked with students who needed learning accommodations. I taught in various classrooms on-campus, some of which were better than others, but their shared characteristics included the following: they all contained either a whiteboard or chalkboard, ample seating, and adequate lighting. None of the classrooms that I taught in were what I would term “dedicated” classrooms in the sense that the space didn’t belong to a particular department, so these classrooms were very non-descript. As a new teacher, I had a particularly difficult time teaching reading strategies. Much of the time, students “missed the point” of assigned readings, and I couldn’t figure out how main ideas escaped them. Having critical reading skills is always important to any assignment, but was essential to our required unit centered on the argumentative essay. Oftentimes, students would have a difficult time understanding what authors were arguing in their reading assignments, and because they had trouble identifying arguments from our texts, they had trouble making them in their argumentative essays. I thought that by teaching students reading strategies, this would help them better understand and effectively complete the assigned readings and writings for the course.
I hand-wrote a list of reading skills that I thought they needed for this unit since I couldn’t find any free resources that quite matched what I wanted them to learn. I also included definitions of the various strategies on this list. I then converted it into a pdf and distributed this handout to students. We went over the terms, and then applied the strategies to a text from the course textbook. I asked if anyone had any questions, and because they didn’t, I assumed that my job was complete—my students now knew how to dissect moderately complex arguments and could apply these skills to any argumentative text we encountered—obviously, I was quite naïve.
I knew my lesson hadn’t “sunk in” because during class discussions of reading assignments, all of my students still struggled to identify the main argument from the text, and they couldn’t see how the authors’ writing choices/moves impacted their argument both positively and/or negatively. My lesson was further proved ineffective by the low-quality argumentative essays that I received. Many of my students only made one claim out of the required three, and usually any they did make were not sufficiently supported as to be convincing to a reader. This was of course, a very frustrating outcome for me.
Upon reflection, I am now able to identify some of the issues that contributed to the difficulty I experienced when teaching reading skills in relation to the argumentative essay unit. The biggest mistake I made was that I failed to model reading strategies as in-depth or as frequently as I could have (in fact, I didn’t even know much about reading strategies at that time, let alone how to teach them). I also didn’t have students spend enough time practicing critical and close reading skills, and I didn’t model the writing process for the argumentative essay as comprehensively as I would’ve liked to. In short, I made the students aware of the reading strategies, but they weren’t able to effectively employ them in their own reading due to poor modeling on my part and a lack of practice, which was partly attributable to the limited amount of time we had to cover all of the required material. In many ways, I was expecting novices to become masters of these concepts on their own and quickly, which is never a recipe for success. This experience made me a better educator, and moving forward, I would make the reading and writing connection explicit, discuss genre and genre conventions, effectively model all assignments, and dedicate more classroom time to practicing reading (and writing) strategies.
Kelsie Endicott, Salisbury University