Overcoming Textbook Fatigue

21st Century Tools to Revitalize Teaching and Learning

ReLeah Cossett Lent

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781416614722
• eBook ISBN: 9781416615316
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Overcoming textbook fatigue means reaching within and beyond the textbook to access all sorts of 21st century tools, the same ones that students will be using in college, careers, and daily life.

Textbook fatigue is a malaise that negatively affects teachers and students. It is the result of scripted programs and step-by-step teachers' manuals that dismiss the individualization of schools, teachers, and students. Because textbooks provide a one-way distillation of information aimed at a broad, generic population, they offer little to engage or pique the interest of the 30 individuals in a classroom.

In this example-packed book, ReLeah Cossett Lent shows how educators can reclaim the curriculum by shifting the textbook from sole source to resource. She also gives advice on using Common Core State Standards throughout the school and in the classroom. Teachers, coaches, curriculum coordinators, and administrators will discover proven techniques that will revitalize teaching and learning in every content area:

*Discipline-specific writing activities that extend and deepen lessons.
*Strategies for using content-specific materials that encourage students to "read to learn."
*Effective vocabulary strategies that work throughout the curriculum.
*Methods to tap into and build background knowledge.
*Fun activities that use relevant life skills to involve and engage students in learning.

Lent highlights what's to be gained from loosening the grip on textbooks and provides practical guidance on how to accomplish that goal, using real-life examples from schools that have made the change. Overcoming Textbook Fatigue is brimming with ideas to restore the joy of teaching and learning and, in the process, boost student achievement.

Lent is a 20-year teaching veteran, an award-winning author, and an experienced international consultant specializing in literacy and communities of practice.

---

Chapter 1

---

Learning
It's All About Engagement

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sometimes referred to collectively as Generation M, M standing for media multitaskers, our students are adept at dealing with multiple stimuli, especially when the stimuli emanate from electronic devices. Not only do they enjoy multitasking, but these natives to the digital world often become impatient with those of us who have to consult the user's manual before activating our electronic gadgets.

Never before have students' lives outside of school been so different from their lives inside the classroom. This generation of students seldom chooses to use paper and pencil; the students' world revolves around visual images, and social networking is not a hobby but a way of life. In fact, Richard Restak in The New Brain notes that the plasticity of our brains responds to the technology all around us. "Our brain literally changes its organization and functioning to accommodate the abundance of stimulation forced on it by the modern world" (2003, p. 38).

Generation M, transported from the womb into a world of technology, tends to shut down when a teacher stands in front of the classroom and lectures using a dry PowerPoint presentation or when she tells students to read a chapter in the textbook and answer the questions. Today's students need to be actively learning, solving problems, and adapting information to meaningful tasks, all of which creates an engaging multimedia environment that draws students into the content rather than a textbook-fatigued environment that requires educators and parents to push kids from behind.

So how does engagement bridge the gap between our techie students and textbook fatigue? Prea Naick, a high school science teacher in North Carolina, knows a few things about engaging students in the text. I watched her students, in groups of three, create a vocabulary graphic organizer for the words from the textbook using the following prompts:

• What does it do?
• What are its benefits?
• What are its problems?
• What would happen if it did not occur?
• Illustrate it.

The students had limited time before presenting their organizers to the class, so they were busily engaged in the task, using their textbooks as a reference. Ms. Naick moved from group to group asking questions, providing additional information, and offering encouragement. One young man called her to his group, where he was in charge of drawing a picture of a lipid bilayer. He had copied an illustration from the text onto the organizer but didn't fully understand the drawing. Knowing that he would be required to explain it to the class and that both Ms. Naick and classmates might ask questions, he wanted a thorough understanding of the term. The teacher gave a clear explanation and he listened intently. After the group's presentation Ms. Naick asked him if he was sure that he got it; he nodded and gave a thumbs up sign. During each presentation, the other students took notes in the vocabulary section of their learning logs.

I can't help but compare Ms. Naick's class with my visit to another teacher's class. This second teacher was a knowledgeable middle school science teacher who stood in front of her class to offer an efficient presentation of cell division, while directing students to follow the lecture in their texts. In contrast to Ms. Naick's students who were actively involved in finding and applying information, the second teacher's students were sitting passively. At least one student was reading a novel that was cleverly hidden inside the science book, which was standing up on her desk.

Why Does Engagement Matter?

A few decades ago, engagement was not a term used in conference sessions, in professional book titles, or in most classrooms. Teachers taught, students followed instructions, and if engagement was part of the equation, so much the better. Students who were diligent and compliant generally passed the course. And if someone didn't pass, it was hardly the teacher's fault. Now with a focus on drop-out rates, especially in the United States where graduation rates are lower than in many other countries (OECD, 2011), engagement seems to be the new buzz word. Books, articles, and research extoll its benefits.

Guthrie and Wigfield (2000), for example, found students' engagement in subject-matter reading to be the mediating factor in improved student outcomes. More recently, John Guthrie made an even stronger case:

Reading engagement and reading achievement interact in a spiral. Higher achievers read more, and the more engaged those students become the higher they achieve. Likewise, lower achievers read less, and the less engaged decline in achievement. The spiral goes downward as well as upward. In fact, continued low engagement is a precursor to dropping out of school." (2008, p. 3)

Brozo, Shiel, and Topping report that engagement in reading had the third largest impact on performance (after grade and immigration status). "Keeping students engaged in reading and learning might make it possible for them to overcome what might otherwise be insuperable barriers to academic success" (2007, p. 308). If we want students to achieve in all content areas, engagement is critical.

What Does Engagement Look Like?

I can feel the energy in an engaged classroom. In such classes, the textbook is seldom the center of the learning universe. Instead, the students' quest for understanding guides the process. The textbook or Internet may be a necessary component, but the content alone is powerless without an engaged learner. Allan Collins and Richard Halverson talk about just-in-time learning, a term that means "whenever you need to learn something in order to accomplish a task, you can find out what you need to know" (2009, p. 14). We have all experienced that phenomenon. We avidly read a sports story when our team is playing, we read every word of an insurance policy when a storm has damaged our roof, and we find the perfect recipe online for our Saturday night party. Engagement turns any text from a boring treatise into something that is alive with the possibility of finding what we need to know. Ms. Naick's student needed just-in-time learning about lipid bilayers, and when the text couldn't meet that need, he turned to another source. Too many students read the text without any sense of needing to know; they find enough information to satisfy the teacher or to fill in the blank on the worksheet and continue to the next page, unengaged and more convinced than ever that the content is boring.

How is it possible to instill curiosity for learning, that bright spark that permeates some classrooms? More important, how do we engage students in texts that they may find irrelevant or boring? There are no easy answers, but John Guthrie's model for engagement in reading is a great place to start. See Figure 1.1 for help.

---

Figure 1.1. Guthrie's Model for Engagement in Reading

Principle of Engagement: Set Mastery Goals

Description of Principle: Students want to reach goals for intrinsic understanding rather than for a grade or reward.

Classroom Practices:

• Make tasks relevant.
• Use hands-on activities.
• Provide reteach opportunities.
• Reward effort over performance.

Principle of Engagement: Provide Students with Control and Choice

Description of Principle:Students take ownership over their reading.

Classroom Practices:

• Provide options for how to learn.
• Give students input into curriculum.
• Allow students to select knowledge displays.
• Include inquiry projects.

Principle of Engagement: Infuse Social Interaction

Description of Principle: Students work collaboratively.

Classroom Practices:

• Allow student-led and open discussions.
• Provide time for collaborative reasoning.
• Relate to students as individuals.
• Develop partnerships.
• Scaffold social motivations over time.

Principle of Engagement: Encourage Self-Efficacy

Description of Principle: Students believe they can read and are determined to succeed.

Classroom Practices:

• Recognize gaps between students and texts.
• Locate texts matched to students' abilities.
• Build confidence through goal-setting.

Principle of Engagement: Cultivate Interest

Description of Principle: Students feel that the text or topic is appealing.

Classroom Practices:

• Make real-world connections.
• Extend intrinsic interests.
• Create self-expressing and puzzling tasks.

Source: From Engaging Adolescents in Reading (pp. 133–134), by J.T. Guthrie (Ed.), 2008. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Adapted by permission.

---

As teachers, we all want to promote intrinsic motivation so students want to know more about the topics we are teaching, but there is much truth in the saying about leading a horse to water. Unfortunately, we've all seen a lot of horses that simply aren't thirsty. This chapter will provide a variety of practices for engaging students in learning from texts as well as from each other.

Engagement Through Mastery Goals

Mastery goals are not the same as performance goals, which often are the predominant goals in schools. Daniel Pink offers this distinction: "Getting an A in French class is a performance goal; being able to speak French is a learning goal" (2011, pp. 121–122). A mastery goal for a student in middle or high school studying vectors in algebra, for example, would be that she wants to understand the concept deeply if she aspires to go to college and major in engineering. A performance goal would be that the student completes an assignment to get a good grade; she may not care whether she understands the concept as long as she passes the test.

In an elementary math class, the first activity of the day for Christy Adams's 3rd and 4th graders was to vote on their favorite something (might be a soft drink, animal, holiday, or color). Then, Ms. Adams showed them how to make fractions based on the voting results. The students wanted to understand fractions because they were interested in seeing how their own preferences stacked up against their classmates' favorites. The teacher successfully helped students acquire mastery goals for learning fractions.

Douglass and Guthrie reported on a study where the researchers found that "Teachers who promoted performance goals had students who reported high levels of boredom, a lack of joy, and disinterest in their daily lessons" (2008, p. 24). Any time we can change performance goals into mastery goals, our chances of engaging students and increasing their understanding of our content are greater.

Mastery Goals and Relevance

What we believe about the nature of our abilities, or "self-theories," as Daniel Pink (2011) calls them, has everything to do with mastery; just as self-efficacy, our beliefs about our abilities to succeed at a task, has everything to do with engagement. When students develop a mastery mindset and believe they can accomplish a task because it matters to them, they are setting their own learning boundaries and will often exceed our goals for them. Student engagement boils down to this question: "Why does learning this content matter?" or in student vernacular, "Why do we have to do this?" Students have a right to know the answer. To ensure that you can answer their questions, think through the following before you begin any topic or chapter and share your answers with your students.

• How is this particular topic, information, or chapter relevant to this group of students?
• Why does this topic, information, or chapter matter?
• How can this information be used by my students?
• What connections can I make from this topic to students' lives, interests, or needs?

Engagement Through Control and Choice

Pink contends that three factors contribute to motivation when learning: autonomy, purpose, and mastery. If we think of autonomy as the opposite of being controlled, we can see how it would look in our classrooms. In the traditional classroom the teacher is in control of everything: the content, the method of delivery, the assessment, the seating arrangement, the type of materials to be used, the amount of social interaction, and perhaps even the temperature of the room. Pink renames autonomy "self-direction," a characteristic necessary for 21st century learners. "It [autonomy] means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others" (2011, p. 90). And, he points out,

Autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavior science studies … autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being. (2011, p. 90–91)

The students in Ms. Naick's class may not have had autonomy over everything, but they could make choices about the kind of graphic organizers they wanted to use and how they presented their charts. Providing choice as often as possible in terms of content, tasks, texts, partners, delivery, due dates, or assessment may be the key to engaging students, especially for those who have become disconnected with and disinterested in the content.

For those of us who are habitual control freaks, take it a step at a time. Perhaps start by allowing students to do just one of the following:

• Select a section of the text to read and then jigsaw what they learned.
• Choose from various assessment formats the one that they feel will best demonstrate their knowledge.
• Choose supplemental text (books, articles, websites) related to the topic and use class time to engage them in reading the materials.
• Take turns providing a prompt for journal writing or a word problem related to the topic. (See Chapter 5 for more information about journals.)
• Choose among various graphic organizers or note-taking strategies and use the one that makes the most sense to them.
• Use class time to finish reading, complete an assignment, or talk to a classmate about the topic. As students complete their assignments, allow them to choose among activities such as working on a writing assignment for their portfolio, reading a book related to the topic, or doing online research.
• Find an example in the text (or in real life) to support an inference or fact.
• Write questions they would like to ask about the chapter or topic.
• Choose due dates for assignments, especially projects; supply written excuse if they can't make the deadline. (See Chapter 6 for more information about redoing assignments.)

Fillman and Guthrie wrote about a math teacher who was frustrated because his students did not complete word problems, even when he assigned only half a page. He finally gav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Learning: It's All About Engagement
• Chapter 2: Background is Knowledge: The Glue that makes learning stick
• Chapter 3: Vocabulary IS the Content
• Chapter 4: Reading to Learn
• Chapter 5: Writing to Learn
• Chapter 6: Assessing for Learning
• Chapter 7: Give It Up for Text Sets
• Chapter 8: Going from Textbook Fatigue to Invigorated Learning
• Appendix A: Book Study Essentials
• Appendix B: Lesson Study Essentials
• Appendix C: Action Research Essentials
• Appendix D: Co-Teaching Essentials
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright