Anticipating Problems
Richard Branson, CEO of the mega-corporation Virgin, had a difficult time as a student. Dyslexic and struggling with learning disabilities, he was a candidate for never making it through school in the UK. Few who knew him in school would have predicted his future as a corporate mogul and innovator. When asked, Branson credits his success by not being afraid of running hard at a challenge, and reminds us of that basic way we learn as children:
“You don’t learn to walk by following the rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”
The academic year 2018-2019 was my year of trying to “follow the rules” and getting nowhere. I was daily trying to teach students who simply could and would not learn the way I habitually taught. By February, I was beyond frustrated…and so were they. I embraced a student teacher, whose new ideas sparked some of my own. I came to the realization that I could either spend the second half of the year frustrated with my students as we “followed the rules”, or make the decision to change my lessons to meet them where they were.
Change I did…and stumble we did…and little by little there was success. I would not say 2018-19 was my best year in education, but it did remind me that I would NEVER be the teacher whose plans were foolproof. If I wanted a classroom that was relevant, engaging and constructive, I would have to learn to be more responsive to my students and their specific needs.
Needless to say, I began the 2019-2020 year with a new vigor – ready and excited to try to new things, renew “old” strategies with new eyes, and best of all LISTEN to my students. Early on it was clear this was an exceptional group of students – engaged, eager, invested in school. They showed a delight at “stories” and a willingness to trust me with their personal thoughts in writing. However, the energy would instantly drain out of the room the minute I assigned any academic writing (specifically the NYS ELA Constructed Responses). They knew how to write them in a formulaic way, but provided only the minimum of thought beyond translating quotes from the text. As we entered our novel, my questions were:
How can I arm my students with good textual evidence as they read so they can better think and write about a text? Or, more importantly:
What happens to students’ writing when we engage in constant close-reading which focuses less on selecting evidence and more on intuitive prediction?
Guided by the Research
I discovered Anticipation Guides in graduate school at Mt. St. Mary College. Judy McAfee, an amazing remedial reading educator in the Newburgh City Schools, was perhaps the single biggest influence to my pedagogy, as she shared not only amazing strategies but also her incredible positivity in the idea that every child was reachable and everyone could learn. An adjunct at the college, I took every one of her classes and remained in contact with her until her passing in 2014. Anticipation Guides, one of her strategies for close reading, was one I used religiously until the dawn of the EngageNY Modules. After listening to my students tell me repeatedly that they loved stories and yet struggled with completing reading at home, I thought these guides just might be my ticket to a new reading-writing strategy!
I went first to some of my favorite researchers and thinkers on writing, visiting the work of Thomas Newkirk, Ph.D. in Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones and The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Unfortunately, neither led me to an understanding of how to bridge close reading and the more “academic” writing I need my students to perform as part of the state assessment. I greatly value the spirit of Newkirk’s ideals on writing, and certainly use them weekly in my classroom, but his work would not support this particular inquiry.
Perhaps not surprising, I found the best research on how Anticipation Guides could not only engage students, but also promote the dialogue which would lead to great writing in content area articles. One such article was “It Makes You Think More When You Watch Things:” Scaffolding for Historical Inquiry Using Film in the Middle School Classroom” by Adam Woelders. This article, published in the 2007 July-August edition of The Social Studies periodical (Heldref Publications), chronicled a social studies teacher’s use of Anticipation Guides to bridge text and film in history lessons. Woelders touches on the Guides ability to activate prior knowledge, but emphasizes that the real magic happens in his classroom during the “peer to peer interactions” which happen as part of the Guide routine when, “students discuss and revisit their original predictions, changing them according to the information presented.” (149) He goes on to applaud the natural interest that is awakened in students due to the nature of Anticipation Guides. He warns, however, that the creation of the Guide is critical to its success:
“Good anticipation guides should not be limited to black-and-white, true–false statements, but should include statements with less obvious solutions “that provoke disagreement and challenge students’ beliefs about the topic” (John O’Connor, qtd. in Kozen, Murray, and Windell 2006, 196). Good anticipation guides use prediction and controversy to stimulate interest and thinking about a topic.” (148)
Similarly, Jerine Pegg and Anne Adams discussed the connection between writing and Anticipation Guides in their article Reading for Claims and Evidence: Using Anticipation Guides in Science. This article is featured in the October 2012 edition of Science Scope magazine (Vol. 32). Pegg and Adams provide some strong support for using Anticipation Guides as evidence based reasoning, but like Woelders, they provided warnings for teachers when creating the Guides. They warn that teachers must create statements which will provoke controversy and deep thinking, yet avoid frustrating students who before reading (which would work contrary to the purpose of an Anticipation Guide).
“…model examples for students where evidence supporting or disputing the statement is not directly stated in the text. Choosing a statement and discussing this with the whole class prior to students working independently can model this process” (77)
Pegg and Welders suggest careful grouping of students or using partnerships to discuss and justify predictions, especially before writing. They also suggest encouraging students “to clarify their arguments by including qualifiers regarding their decision to agree or disagree with the statements.” (77)
Anticipation Guides
There are many forms of Anticipation Guides used by teachers. Based on my research, I decided to take Judy’s idea and develop my own protocol which would encourage not only predictive thinking, but interactive discussion, negotiation and ultimately end in some writing. Before reading, students read through a series of statements (some true, some false) about the upcoming text. Because my students were very introverted this year, and in an attempt to build classroom community, I decided to have students read them aloud in class. Then, I invited students to share their predictions on whether each statement was true or false. They also had to share with the class WHY they thought this (justify), inviting others to agree or disagree. A guided class discussed took place daily before reading.
Then, rather than work through text-dependent questions as we read, our class read aloud in class the text of the day (either as a whole class, or as a group-read). We did not stop to answer questions nor discuss. Although this was new to me (I love to stop and discuss at key moments of a text), I wanted my students to experience some “reading flow” without stopping. I also wanted them to think about the whole text as they read, an not just one section at a time.
When the reading of the day was completed, students would work in groups to complete the bulk of the guides. They would re-read the statements, and determine if the statement was indeed true or false. Often, this involved some negotiation at the table, as many of the statements required some inference to answer correctly. They’d have to include the page number where they found the information, which also made them re-read sections of the text. Finally, they had to go back and correct any false statements, making them 100% true. This required thinking about key elements of the text and also often included negotiations within the group. As they worked on this, I would circulate, listening in on conversations, and guiding groups that struggled to come to a consensus. Anything not completed in class had to be finished as homework.
Finally, I always added to the end a “thinker” question at the end – one that required inference and deeper understanding of character development, social issues in the text or author’s craft. These writing assignments graduated from simple response sentences, to formal Constructed Response questions in the 8th grade ELA style.
Anticipated Results?
After using these (15 in all) for the entire study of the refugee experience and dynamic vs. static characters through the poetic novel Inside Out & Back Again, I was highly encouraged. I felt students were highly engaged with the activity throughout the phases of close-reading. By Guide # 4, I had to limit the “talk” around the initial predictions because so many wanted to participate in the debate on the veracity of the statements. By # 10, I used my popsicle sticks, because I was hearing grumpy murmurs about “always picking the same people” to respond. All of this was music to my ears, especially from a group that began the year so reticent to speak at all.
The scores the students received from the Anticipation Guides were great, definitely providing some with higher averages than I would have anticipated given their reading level scores from September. This I attributed not only to the guides helping students frame their reading ahead of time, but also of the group negotiations that occurred after reading. These conversations, all done with and between students (without teacher leadership), allowed even my weaker readers to converse meaningfully and with confidence about the texts read. Best of all, I saw students responses to academic ELA-style writing prompts increase greatly. Some of this, I am sure, came with repetition of this style of writing, and my guidance through writing conferences/ comments. However, I was encouraged that they seemed not only more fluid with their writing, but more impassioned, as well. Students used the Guides to practice their thinking/ discussion, and then were more able to expression this same thinking on the page. I even went so far as to increase the difficulty of my academic writing/ thinking to introduce compare and contrast writing (key element on their NYS ELA exam in the spring) as the novel drew to a close:
Ultimately, however, I was committed to LISTENING to my students. I wanted to see if my student valued this type of reading as a scaffold to thinking and writing about the text. Was it useful? Enjoyable? Is it a practice in which they found value? Should I continue this strategy, or change to other tasks for future readings? So…I decided to ASK THEM! The results of my survey are in the document that follows:
To summarize, students anonymously responded:
- 89% found the Anticipation Guides usually easy to use
- 73% reported that they used the group conversation surrounding the Guides as a key element in being successful
- 97% found the Guides useful in understanding at least part of the text
- 92% found the Guides useful in writing about the text
- 97% reported that the Guides encouraged them to read the book
- 94% voted to continue to use the Guides for future readings
Anticipating the Future!
Moving ahead with my year, I’ve now shared my results with my co-teacher as well as the two other teachers in 8th grade ELA who chose to use my constructed Guides in their classes. All have expressed an interest in not only continuing to use the Guides, but to meet up to discuss how the Guides could better incorporate more writing and critical thinking skills for students. We are meeting up soon to begin this work on our next big novel, the classic To Kill a Mockingbird. All three other teachers voiced similar experiences in their own rooms: engaged students who felt success and participated in meaningful conversation and writing about text.
For my part, I’m eager to continue not only the use of the Anticipation Guide, but also using my ears to listen more carefully, and respond accordingly, to the students in my class. In the words of the great Peter Elbow:
“I’ve come to suspect that whenever any ability is difficult to learn and rarely performed well, it’s probably because contraries are called for – patting the head and rubbing the belly. Thus, good writing is hard because it means trying to be creative and critical; good teaching is hard because it means trying to be ally and adversary of students; good evaluation is hard because it means trying to be subjective and objective; good intelligence is rare because it means trying to be intuitive and logical.” (Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching)
Yes, Dr. Elbow, good writing, good teaching and good intelligence IS hard…but it’s so worth the effort!
RESOURCES:
Pegg, Jerine and Anne Adams. (October 2012) Reading for Claims and Evidence: Using Anticipation Guides in Science. Science Scope. National Science Teachers Association: Volume 32, # 2.
Woelders, Adam. (2007) “It Makes You Think More When You Watch Things”: Scaffolding for Historical Inquiry Using Film in the Middle School Classroom. The Social Studies. Heldref Publications: July/August 2007.
ECLInstitute - HVWP 2019-2020 