I got hired for a new Job yesterday. I'll start next Monday and I spent yesterday signing (and of course reading) Confidentiality and Proprietary Information legal documents.
Reading this article felt like reading those documents. I know they're important, that I'm to be held accountable to them, and thus it's important to read them in their entirety. I'm committed to doing that (I'm even a pretty good reader) and yet when I did it, I found myself getting to the end of a paragraph or page and realizing that I'd read every word, but I really didn't have a handle on the content; I'd gotten lost.
This is what it must feel like for my students who are second language learners when they are struggling to read a text for class. They know they need to get it read, they know they should understand it, but when it comes down to the wire, they're at a lost to explain their understanding of what they read. This is the first time I've really struggle like this with reading a text as a student. The image partway through the text was immensely helpful in helping me to understand what Dervin was talking about.
If I were going to teach this to students I would make a heavy front loading effort. Maybe even go so far at to create my own summary document and have them read that. I would also probably have them work in groups to unpack their reading the way we will in class on 9/28. I would also make sure that I really emphasized the idea that it’s ok to struggle with a text, and they shouldn’t get down on themselves.
Edited on 9/28 after class: I wasn’t surprised to hear in class that someone (Devorah maybe?) looked up Dervin and said that she was a technical writer. This text felt very much like a dense set of technical writing.
This is being posted late to the Homework doc because I had originally saved it as an unposted draft blog because I was unhappy with my progress through the text. However, after class I discovered that I had been holding myself to a standard of perfection that was unnecessary.
TAGS: 731, HW, Dervin, Sense Making
Reading this article felt like reading those documents. I know they're important, that I'm to be held accountable to them, and thus it's important to read them in their entirety. I'm committed to doing that (I'm even a pretty good reader) and yet when I did it, I found myself getting to the end of a paragraph or page and realizing that I'd read every word, but I really didn't have a handle on the content; I'd gotten lost.
This is what it must feel like for my students who are second language learners when they are struggling to read a text for class. They know they need to get it read, they know they should understand it, but when it comes down to the wire, they're at a lost to explain their understanding of what they read. This is the first time I've really struggle like this with reading a text as a student. The image partway through the text was immensely helpful in helping me to understand what Dervin was talking about.
If I were going to teach this to students I would make a heavy front loading effort. Maybe even go so far at to create my own summary document and have them read that. I would also probably have them work in groups to unpack their reading the way we will in class on 9/28. I would also make sure that I really emphasized the idea that it’s ok to struggle with a text, and they shouldn’t get down on themselves.
Edited on 9/28 after class: I wasn’t surprised to hear in class that someone (Devorah maybe?) looked up Dervin and said that she was a technical writer. This text felt very much like a dense set of technical writing.
This is being posted late to the Homework doc because I had originally saved it as an unposted draft blog because I was unhappy with my progress through the text. However, after class I discovered that I had been holding myself to a standard of perfection that was unnecessary.
TAGS: 731, HW, Dervin, Sense Making