Choosing What Matters for Adolescent Learners

In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd reminds readers of the challenge of making choices that would really make a difference: "The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters" (2001, p. 47). As national attention focuses on what matters for adolescents, I think it is essential that we become critical consumers of those who would package quick fixes for the adolescent literacy problem in this country. Some districts have turned to research, and others have tried to find programs that offer a cure. In spite of these well-intentioned efforts, we still have thousands of students who struggle with reading and writing and thousands more who don't choose to read or write. So what really does matter for adolescents? I believe our professional efforts in discovering and embracing what matters will fall into three broad areas: knowing adolescents, knowing the resources, and knowing the research.

Knowing Adolescents

While most teachers begin the school year asking their students to complete some kind of interest and learning survey, effective teachers have a range of strategies for assessing the changes students make throughout the year. I often wondered if students resented filling out all those beginning-of-the-year surveys, but in Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students, the students in Cushman's study (2003) reported appreciating teachers taking the time to get to know their students' interests with surveys and questionnaires.

These surveys can then serve teachers well in knowing how to use what students know to help them craft lessons for what students need to learn. For example, a resourceful chemistry teacher I know used students' knowledge of gangs and their characteristics to build their understanding of the elements in the periodic table of elements. Given the critical nature of the data that are collected, I believe we need to solicit this information, often using a range of instructional strategies: exit slips, student self-assessments, academic logs and journals, dialogue journals, and group writing that sheds light on the ways that adolescents change each day.

Early in my teaching career, I fell into the trap of deciding what my students needed before I knew who they were or what they knew. I enjoyed engaging in the research process and reading research documents, but I finally realized I was on the wrong track by focusing solely on the writing of accomplished adults instead of asking students what was getting in the way of success for them.

For more than 20 years now, I have been surveying and interviewing adolescents. I always begin my interviews with a simple question: What would make kids readers and writers? Amazingly, the patterns of responses are relatively unchanged in over two decades. Regardless of region of the country, socioeconomic status of the respondents, urban or rural school setting, or age of adolescents, I find that students are eager to tell adults what would make a difference in their literate lives. Out of respect for space, I have narrowed their extensive list to the five most cited areas that students highlight as places where it is time for a change:

Having choices about what to read, having interesting books to read, and being able to choose how to respond to reading.
Teachers need to be readers, and they need to read to us new and interesting things they find--not the same old stuff all the time.
Giving us time to read.
Showing us how to read hard things, not just assigning us to read them.
Getting "crap" out of the system and replacing it with stuff we need and can relate to.

While students are critical of things that need to be changed, they are always quick to highlight that teacher who has made a difference in their literate lives. The only way we can know what is and what isn't working is not by following someone else's script, but by responding daily to what we learn about adolescents and their needs.

Knowing the Resources

Whenever I do presentations, I'm always asked how I know so many titles, and my response is always the same: I read. In general, most people are hoping for a web site with titles organized by ways the resources can be used. I always read at two levels: at one level appreciating the beauty of the language or craft of the author and at another level filing ideas for possible ways I might use a portion of the text in a reading or writing lesson. For example, I recently read the following books: Finn: A Novel (Olshan, 2001), Heartbeat (Creech, 2004), Idiot Letters: One Man's Relentless Assault on Corporate America (Rosa, 1995), If (Perry, 1995), and Love, Ruby Lavender (Wiles, 2001). I noted that I could use Finn as a parallel text if reading Huckleberry Finn, or I could use it as the core text if teaching a unit on journeys. Heartbeat offers readers a novel in poems and so could be used as genre study, but it also offers a great poem on the use of footnotes and one on the use of a thesaurus. Idiot Letters is a humorous collection that could be used to introduce business letter writing; If offers a great way for students to do imaginative writing; and Love, Ruby Lavender has beautifully descriptive writing that could make the basis of a writing craft lesson.

I've just described five books that could form the basis of strategy lessons on reading and writing. In addition, these books are now a part of my reading repertoire, so I can recommend them to students for their independent reading. I certainly read reviews of new books, visit web sites and look at published lists, and am addicted to Amazon, but I also spend many hours reading so that I have a personal knowledge of the right book when a student says, "There's nothing here to read."

Knowing the Research

Many research studies offer educators data that would inform instruction, but one that provides a comprehensive research base is Langer's study, "Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well" (2000). This study continues to be an important frame in our professional development focus in the schools where I work. The study highlights six areas that move a middle or high school from being a typical school in terms of student achievement to a school where students are beating the odds: skills instruction, test preparation, learning connections, enabling strategies, conceptions of learning, and classroom organization.

In the "beating-the-odds" schools, skills instruction is separated from a meaningful text or experience, examined, simulated, and then integrated back into something that is meaningful for the students. For example, if we want students to learn how to write effective description, that instruction would be taken out of a descriptive passage and modeled for students so they could have anchors for their practice; then students would be asked to write something descriptive that is meaningful for them. In the typical schools, the instruction was dominated by a single approach rather than the combination of approaches described here. I believe this pattern is connected to the pattern of enabling strategies in the same way. In the beating-the-odds schools, students were explicitly taught strategies that showed them how to approach and plan for learning, organize ideas, and reflect on when and how the strategies might be used. In the typical schools, these strategies were not overtly taught.

Two of the patterns relate to how learning is perceived and how it occurs. In the beating-the-odds schools, connections were made between and among grade levels, content classes, and students' lives and their learning, as well as across a variety of texts. This learning took place in a community in which students were given the opportunity to collaborate in order to strengthen the depth of their understanding. In the typical schools, knowledge and skills were taught as isolated learning events, and students learned in isolation.

The final two patterns relate to standards and test preparation. While many educators know that standards form a frame around best practice, there are also those who use the standards as a rationale for not meeting the needs of students. This approach is often accompanied by test prep classes that are separate from meaningful learning. In this study, the beating-the-odds schools used the standards as a floor rather than a ceiling; educators were always looking at ways to extend the standards and learning goals to more in-depth levels. In addition, test preparation strategies were part of the ongoing instruction in classrooms where students were challenged to examine ways to approach demonstrating learning in a variety of formats, including standardized test items.

Research has much to offer the refinement of the art and craft of teaching. However, the research base used in planning for meeting the needs of adolescents in any school or district should meet several criteria:

Are the study and its results applicable to your student population?
Does the study give enough details for educators to apply the research?
Are time and support provided for educators to design curriculum and instruction consistent with the research?
Are multiple assessments in place for schools and districts to document the impact of the instruction?

Choosing What Matters

As educators, we are inundated with all the ways we can change, from boxes of graphic organizers to scripts we can follow. I believe that we have to ask ourselves whether the curriculum and instruction we are choosing really make a difference in our students' lives. I don't think that I can choose for other teachers what matters with their students any more than someone could have discovered that for me with my students. So as you begin your year with the students in your care, I leave you with the words of one of the writers in Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach: "I cannot remember a stitch of content from my tenth-grade year. Nothing from freshman English or junior history. What I do remember is what a success felt like or when I brushed against self-awareness because of solid and dedicated adults" (Douglas, 2003, p. 16). This is where the hope is for adolescents: the "solid and dedicated adults" who choose to spend their days helping every adolescent experience the gift of a literate life.

Dr. Janet Allen is an international consultant recognized for her literacy work with at-risk students. Allen taught high school reading and English in northern Maine from 1972 until 1992 when she relocated to Florida to teach English and reading education courses at the University of Central Florida. The author of numerous books and articles on reading, she is currently spending her time researching, writing, speaking, and conducting literacy institutes across the country.

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References

Creech, S. (2004). Heartbeat. New York: HarperCollins.

Cushman, K. (2003). Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students. New York: The New Press.

Douglas, L. (2003). In S. Intrator and M. Scribner (Eds.), Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Langer, J. A. (2000). Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well (Research Report No. 12014). Albany, NY: National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement.

Kidd, S. M. (2001). The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin Books.

Olshan, M. (2001). Finn: A Novel. Baltimore: Bancroft Press.

Perry. S. (1995). If. Venice, CA: Children's Library Press.

Rosa, P. (1995). Idiot Letters: One Man's Relentless Assault on Corporate America. New York: Broadway Books.

Wiles, D. (2001). Love, Ruby Lavender. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.