Teaching Backwards
by Jack Farrell
Consultant Teacher
After spending 25 years teaching English at a suburban public high school, including 22 years of Advanced Placement English, I was chosen, along with 4 other teachers, for full-time release from the classroom to work as consultant teachers in a beginning teacher support program. I mentored 15 teachers that first year, spending the majority of the day observing in classrooms and then conferencing with teachers. This was designated as a three-year assignment and so I knew from the outset that I would return to the classroom. I was only on the job about a week and a half when I decided to throw out everything I had ever done in the classroom and replace it with all the effective strategies I was observing. Such is the power of observation. Most teachers from my generation quickly entered private practice, wherein we closed our classroom doors and, except for extremely rare administrative oversight, proceeded to teach in isolation whatever we determined our students needed. The good news, then, is that visiting our colleagues’ classrooms during instruction can change us and opening our classrooms to observation by other teachers can change both them and us. I have been spreading this good news ever since to my fellow secondary teachers. Take one prep period per month, I tell them, and visit a colleague’s classroom. Invite colleagues to visit yours. Start with job a-like visitations but eventually branch out into other disciplines. Some of the best ideas I have encountered have been a result of visiting science, social science, math and physical education classes.
Of course, what I am really referring to here is the continual search for strategies. Most teachers I know take classes, attend workshops and conferences, and sign up for summer institutes, in search of the latest, infallible method of engaging students in learning. Many teachers seem to feel that they are only one cool strategy away from defeating student ennui for good and they are continually on the hunt for such a silver bullet. If that is indeed the objective, then visiting colleague’s classrooms is not only cost and time effective, as opposed to traveling to workshops and taking classes, but it pays richer, longer-lasting dividends. Alas, that is only the good news.
There is a flip side to this hunt for strategies. I am now in my 5th year of mentoring new teachers, after a 2 year return to the classroom, and now work with 26 teachers at 6 secondary schools. I spend my days observing instruction in math, science, social science, foreign language, physical education, as well as English. Over time, my thirst for strategies was sated, and a more sobering glimpse at contemporary teaching practices raised alarms. I began to see a recurring pattern in design, regardless of the discipline, and to see the enormous effect modern research has had on current pedagogy and all this settled gradually into the bad news of this article.
What follows is a brief list of the practices I now call Forward Teaching.
1. Oral Instruction: I had only visited classrooms for a few weeks before I was struck by the oral nature of teaching. It soon became apparent that ‘teaching is talking and learning is listening.’
· There is a reasonable expectation that most direct instruction will be out of the mouth of the teacher, as well as most explanations during some form of guided practice. How else can you teach? But what if there is nothing for which the student is responsible that he does not hear first and last out of the teacher’s mouth? In order to be fair to students, teachers go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that they have explained in great detail everything that will be on the test. Many teachers schedule one or more days of review before a test where virtually everything of any consequence is re-visited or re-taught orally. “If I don’t say it, it won’t be on the test?” has escaped many a teacher’s lips. A student’s protest: “How can you put that on the test; you didn’t teach us that?” is the lurking fear that prompts such meticulous review.
· While direct instruction may be substantially oral in nature, virtually every other aspect of the class is oral as well. The announcements are read over the P.A. system, or by the teacher, or a designated student. Entire chapters of social science and science are read orally, often in some popcorn fashion. Entire short stories and plays, and enormous sections of novels, are read in the same fashion, or by a professional reader on compact disc or audio tape. Many teachers are themselves bored by this and take over reading aloud whole chunks of the material verbatim to the class. Some teachers have followed the research and call these ‘read-alouds,’ a serious misconception of the actual strategy. For a more detailed examination of read-alouds and other oral instruction, click on my website, www.readfirst.net, then on the link: “Professional Educators Click Here,” and then on the article, “It’s Not Scaffolding, If You Never Take It Down.”
2. Permanent Scaffolding: A scaffold is a temporary support offered to a student to help him grasp a concept or master a skill. Since a scaffold is temporary by definition, teachers should be testing continually for independent mastery by removing these scaffolds, much like parents take off the training wheels of a child’s first bike. But everywhere I look I see examples of permanent scaffolding.
· The textbook is the ubiquitous example. All manner of scaffolds are now built right into the textbook in terms of its organization and presentation. But, if features such as colorful icons and illustrations, textboxes and graphic organizers, are scaffolds, then shouldn’t they gradually disappear from the text? I would expect the scaffolding to be removed over the course of the text itself, but that does not happen. Still more troubling is the fact that scaffolding offered to 4th graders is still in place in 12th grade texts. To make this point more dramatically, the scaffolds in Chapter 1 of the 7th grade language arts text from a typical publisher are the same scaffolds in the last chapter of the 12th grade language arts text. Go to your textbook room, pick up these two texts and take a look for yourself. The pages are awash in color and graphical material, the margins are filled with textboxes containing vocabulary words and definitions, and questions about the text, and the culminating activities are virtually the same, as in ‘imagine this story as a movie; form groups and storyboard the scenes in the story.’
· The same 7 step-lesson plan occurs in virtually every lesson taught in each class, all day, every day, at all grade levels. An administrator once told me that he had only seen one math lesson, but he’d seen it hundreds of times. The steps in such a lesson are often attributed to Madeleine Hunter. But even she never envisioned such a rigid structure imposed on all lessons. The 7 step lesson plan, or any reasonable alternative, is itself a piece of scaffolding, meant to be in place only long enough for new teachers to embed the cognitive steps involved in such a lesson. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all template, nor was it meant to be. See the article mentioned under Oral Instruction for a more detailed discussion of scaffolding.
3. Front-loading prior knowledge: The latest research has extolled the virtues of prior knowledge, asserting, rather simplistically, that students can only learn a new concept if it can be incrementally an extension of what they already know. This makes a sort of common sense, but seriously trivializes learning in practice.
· Heeding this research, and the way it has been interpreted by McREL and other educational think tanks, teachers perceive their role as the agents who activate the prior knowledge of the students so that new learning can take place. Warm-up activities, which have replaced the anticipatory set, now serve this function in countless classrooms on a daily basis. However, fearing that the students may not, in fact, possess the prior knowledge, these activating activities have begun to supply the knowledge itself, not merely activate it. In the hands of many practitioners, this has led inadvertently to an endless series of remedial lessons. I have seen the same language arts lesson on short story construction on successive days in a 4th grade classroom and then a 10th grade classroom. Also, on consecutive days I have seen the same lesson in fractions and percents in a 5th grade classroom and in a 12th grade classroom. One of the reasons curriculum calibration verifies that curriculum flattens out after approximately grade 6 is because, in fact, it does.
· This need to supply and then activate prior knowledge has led textbook publishers to front-load difficult vocabulary, academic language, subject-specific terms and even the main ideas of passages and stories. All manner of thematic material and predicting questions are placed in front of the story, partly in the service of activating prior knowledge, but also to reduce frustration and guarantee a smooth reading of the passage. Ironically most of these passages will then be read orally to the class by a student reader or the teacher himself. For a more detailed description of prior knowledge visit my website and click on the link “Professional Educators Click Here,” and then the article: “What Exactly is Prior Knowledge?”
Forward teaching asserts the primacy of the role of the instructor in the learning process. Regardless of the class, forward teaching rests on a set of premises:
1.
The
teacher is the source of all learning: This
may be true in certain situations.
Certainly a tutor working one on one with a student relies extensively
on direct instruction: telling, showing, demonstrating, checking for
understanding. Typically, though, in the
regular classroom, no student is ever tested on anything not directly instructed
by the teacher and not subjected to a thorough review.
2.
A
frustrated learner is to be absolutely avoided:
Most of the permanent scaffolding, including the front-loading of
vocabulary, subject specific terms and thematic material, is designed to grease
the wheels of learning and prevent students from sinking to the frustrational
level.
3.
Any class
of students contains multiple learning styles:
The effect of
The end result of forward teaching has been a steady decline in skill levels for today’s students and an alarmingly high wash-out rate at the university, in spite of an enormous commitment to remedial education by post-secondary institutions. This decline is often linked to modern cultural changes, such as the rise in television viewing, the distractions of the computer and the internet, and the allure of video gaming. Though these are all factors I would not discount, the main fault lies with modern pedagogical practices, with what I describe as forward teaching, which has had the unintended consequence of replacing the primacy of text in the learning process with a reliance on oral communication. Researchers have convincingly demonstrated that students can learn this way and if, by learning we mean concept acquisition, I would have to agree. However, I would argue that how we learn is at least as important as what we learn.
The remedy for this problem is what I have termed ‘teaching backwards.’ This theory is similar to inductive, or discovery learning, or what some have termed an inquiry approach. But it is closer in design to the specific kind of inquiry promulgated by the Great Books Foundation. The problem with this manner of inquiry is that the work with great books becomes just another strategy employed periodically in class. Teaching backwards demands a daily shift in the way content is delivered and can be applied to nearly any text-based class.
What follows are the premises behind teaching backwards:
1.
All
learning begins in text: Not only
should all learning begin in text, but nearly all learning should begin in
authentic text, which I define as black font on white paper, following basic
manuscript conventions. Most textbooks
are not, in fact, books of text, and what text they do possess is not authentic,
either in content or presentation. If
you were to remove all extraneous material from a modern textbook, what is
mostly eye candy anyway, the remaining text would only fill a small tome, small
enough to be disposable, with the ancillary advantage of allowing students to
mark them up. The textbook of the future will probably only exist in
cyber-space, wherein publishers would sell site licenses. Teachers and students would use such licenses
to download content which they could print themselves. In such a world, the student would encounter
ideas in authentic text first.
2.
It is the
writer’s job to engage his reader and activate his prior knowledge: The most pernicious result of the
anticipatory set is the implication that writers fail more often than not as
communicators. This is a wholly negative
model, which I reject. In advance of
such a failure, teachers rush in to engage learners, usually with some warm-up
activity or motivational set, which also combines to activate the student’s
prior knowledge. Anyone who has ever
read an article recognizes how keenly aware writers are of engaging their
readers and activating their knowledge base.
Writers should have first crack at readers; teachers are there when the
process breaks down. More often than
not, if the text is grade-level appropriate, the writer will not fail.
3.
Multiple
readings of academic text should be routine: As I mentioned before, most
forward teaching is directed at a successful first reading, whether oral or
silent. The fear is that cold first
readings will lead to frustrated learners who will then give up, not only on
this activity, but all subsequent ones.
Again, this is a negative model which assumes that cold readings have a large
risk of failure. But academic text is
seldom mastered on a first reading.
Indeed, the success of the 2nd reading is often a result of
the prior knowledge of the first reading.
Why do we have such a fear of a failed first-reading? Why are we so afraid of frustrating our
students? A modern academic spends most
of his professional life alternating between long bouts of daily frustration
and brief moments of liberating insight.
I would argue that a frustrated learner stands in the doorway to such a
life. We should train our students, in
all disciplines, to encounter new ideas in text first and to be prepared to
give each text multiple readings.
4.
Independent
mastery of text is crucial for academic success: I have already conceded that students can
learn in a largely oral model. If you
have sat through as many hours of class as I have, there is no doubt that
students can master concepts and content this way. The real danger is that we have inadvertently
placed a limit on how far they can proceed in post-secondary education. If our 12th grade texts are
heavily scaffolded and the learning is largely presented orally, with even the
text mostly read aloud, or not at all, if the assessments are primarily bubble
tests, how does this prepare a student for the enormous reading and writing
demands of post-secondary education? I
would argue that a student who has developed the skill sets to independently
master academic text and has been first exposed to ideas in texts since the 4th
grade, and has had to cope with the nearly daily frustration of mastering
complex prose, is in a much stronger position to succeed in the rigorous
environment of the post-secondary world.
5.
Writing
not only records thought, it creates thought:
It is crucial for teachers to understand how important writing is in
the learning process. So much of
oral learning cycles at the superficial level of the brainstorm, or takes place
during discussions with pairs, trios or small groups, often only a
recapitulation of orally rendered and graphically displayed ideas. Writing is at the core of the academic life,
for it is often only in the act of writing that academics experience insights
or probe deeply into ideas. Oral musing
seldom penetrates beneath the surface of ideas.
The syntactical structure of written discourse is often just the depth
charge a researcher needs. So much of
the academy depends on an exchange of ideas on paper. Most of the writing strategies I have
encountered in modern pedagogy are examples of front-loading. The model is of random ideas that must be
harnessed by some spider diagram and then dropped into a graphic organizer to
achieve coherence. The act of writing
here is one of recording what has already been discovered orally. When writing becomes a tool of critical
thinking, however, and the learner recognizes the inherent logic of language,
only then will the benefits of teaching backwards be realized. For a more detailed look at this idea, access
my website, click on the link to “Reading Weblog” and open the article entitled
“The Logic of Reading and Writing.”
6.
Teachers
should frequently communicate their ideas through writing: Most teachers I know are very reluctant
to share their writing with students.
This, unfortunately, denies students a very powerful model for their own
thinking and writing. It is extremely
difficult to locate relevant criticism on the stories and poems we share with
students and publishers have made very little effort to help us in this regard. We spend a good portion of our time in
language arts turning our students into critics, but rarely do we model
criticism for them. Teachers should
routinely write their own interpretations and present them to the class. Most teachers are not reluctant to share
their interpretations orally and will talk effortlessly, and sometimes
endlessly, about what a story, poem, play or novel means. I would recommend that a teacher begin with
one literary piece per unit that he writes a critical interpretation for and
shares with his students. Each semester
or year he can add an additional piece of criticism. A teacher may find this extremely difficult
to do at first, but it becomes easier with each attempt. For an example of a unit constructed this
way, access my website, click on “Reading Weblog” and then on “Unit on Teaching
Backwards.”
7.
Rhetoric
is as important as concept: One of
the unintended consequences of an oral education is the poor rhetorical
modeling it presents to students. Even
the most articulate teacher fails to speak at even 10% of the eloquence of
prose unless he writes it out first and rehearses it. The earliest examples of western education
were schools of rhetoric. The ancient
Greeks not only went to the academy to learn philosophy and mathematics, they
attended as often to study effective communication. The more we privilege written discourse the
closer we will get to the rhetoric and syntax that generates critical
thinking. John Ciardi wrote a famous
essay about how a poem means, using Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a
Snowy Evening” as his text to explicate.
Ciardi says: “And by now a
further point will have suggested itself: that the human insight of the poem
and the technicalities of its poetic artifice are inseparable. Each feeds the
other. That interplay is the poem’s meaning, a matter not of WHAT DOES IT MEAN,
for no one can ever say entirely what a good poem means, but of HOW DOES IT
MEAN, a process one can come much closer to discussing.” To paraphrase Ciardi, it is not only the
reader’s concern what a poem means, but how it means. In other words, how does a poem mean what it
means? This leads readers to an
examination of both rhetorical devices and strategies. I would argue that how a poem means is as
important as what it means. If I believe
this, and Ciardi asserts that they are inseparable, then it follows that the
study of rhetorical strategies becomes crucially important in any classroom
work.
If a teacher accepts these premises, how can instruction be organized and delivered that will honor the special relationship between reader and writer and will re-assert the primacy of text? In the beginning I wrote that most teachers I knew were on a continual hunt for effective strategies. I hope that these assumptions don’t constitute a strategy in this narrow sense. To use the popular term, this is a paradigm shift. I am describing a method. Strategies that support this method can take various forms.
When I returned to the classroom in 2002, I asked to be placed at a high school on a semester block schedule. I wanted to teach longer periods that compress a year into a semester. I also asked for students in the middle, the most under-served students in the system. In a suburban district, these are the college prep students. From the very first day I attempted to generate strategies consistent with the premises of the teaching backwards’ model.
·
Make all
learning begin in text: This
premise, then, becomes a strategy. The
classroom I returned to in 2002 had a built-in LCD projector in the ceiling and
a projection screen. The district
allowed me to take the laptop with me that I had used for observing
teachers. I decided to use power point
technology, not to create eye candy of my own, nor to reduce complex ideas to
simple bullets, but as a method of projecting large black font on a white
background. What I displayed was as
close to authentic text as I could get.
I typically used a set of written directions to students that allowed
them to enter the lesson through text.
Often I directed them to pages I had downloaded from content free sites
like the On-Line Books’ website [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/] and
reproduced for them. The directions
generally asked them to read the selection twice, once straight through, the
way the author meant them to experience it, and then a second time, marking up
the text on this reading.
·
Have
students mark up text as a way of entering it:
I trained my students to mark up the text, something they could not
do with district purchased textbooks, as a way of entering it. I graphically displayed text as a rectangular
room with doors on all four sides.
Marking up text was a way of turning doorknobs. Eventually a door would open and they would
be inside the text. Once inside, the
text would begin to reveal itself. Being
inside a text generally meant recognizing how, in the presence of most authors
worth reading, form is always in the service of content. Often the first observations the students
would make would be rhetorical ones.
This inexorably led to insights into the ideas wrapped within. There is an example of one student’s work
with a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins displayed on my website.
·
Have
students assess their own work using rubrics:
The use of rubrics became a way of communicating with students
through text and also a way of allowing students to form their own opinions and
then evaluate that performance before I placed a value on it. My goal was to engender an eventual meeting
of the minds. I rarely gave a cumulative
test. Thus there was seldom a need for
a review. The canon is large and the
choices from it are somewhat arbitrary, oftentimes determined by the cost to
the publisher rather than the merits of the piece. The only reason to read a short story, poem,
play, novel or non-fiction piece was to become a better reader of the next
piece the student encountered. Thus,
students assessed themselves often, and nearly exclusively, on pieces they had
never seen before. The rubrics I wrote
were highly specific re-writes of the generic ones I used to introduce a genre. It was my goal that, by the end of the term,
the students would begin to see their writing in approximately the same way as
I did. If so, this would indicate they
had embedded crucial aspects of the rubric.
This was a highly successful venture that my former students often cite
in conversation when I meet them on campus.
·
Work on
fluency every day: As a co-director
and presenter at summer institutes on reading of the California Reading and
Literature Project, I had come to believe that the main problem in reading was
a pedagogical one and the decisions that flowed from it as early as grade
3. It involves the issue of
automaticity. Students practice their
reading, mostly orally, in grades 2 and 3.
More practice makes for a more automatic reader. But one of the first symptoms of automaticity
is the experience of reading a passage and remembering nothing of it. When students report this phenomenon, current
pedagogy recommends a number of oral interventions, based on what modern
theorists contend good readers do. Such
a high premium is placed on coupling early automaticity with adequate
comprehension, that readers are asked to slow down and perform a number of
interventions; for example, summarize what they have read, ask questions of the
text, or predict where the text is heading.
Students on the road to becoming automatic readers are slowed to a halt
and asked to place a higher value on comprehension than fluency. Based on the work of Benjamin Bloom, I have
come to believe just the opposite. When any
skill becomes automatized, as in typing, court reporting, playing a musical
instrument, or performing any skill sport, the first symptom of mastery is the
ability to perform the skill while thinking of something else. Have you ever driven to the market and not be
able to recall how you got there? Did
you drive safely? Probably. Driving has become automatized and people
routinely daydream while they perform it.
When students read fluently and have no idea what they have read, this
is a signal to celebrate, not a clarion call to intervene. This represents an important step on the way
to becoming a proficient reader. The job
of the teacher is to encourage more reading and to gradually turn the reader
back toward the even higher level skill of comprehension. To this end, I downloaded a piece of software
for my computer that would allow me to place a stopwatch on my desktop that
would both count-up and count-down. I
used the count-down timer for activities such as silent reading. I used the count-up timer so that students
could time themselves and record their fluency on a daily basis. I also downloaded two copy-right free novels,
White Fang by Jack London, for 9th
graders, and The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, for 10th graders.
I chunked out the novels, beginning with 700 words passages for the
freshmen and 1,000 word passages for the sophomores. Both groups ended up with 3,000 word passages
by the end of the term. This took only a
few minutes of class time and both novels were completed in about 80 class
periods. I rarely asked the students to
discuss what they were reading and I never asked them to write about the
novels. I sometimes picked a passage for
them to study rhetorically. This was
exclusively intended to be a daily fluency check and it worked extremely
well. Most of my students doubled or
tripled their reading rates during the course of the term. To explore this topic in more detail, go to
my website and click on the “Reading Weblog” and then on the article: “Fluency
in the Language Arts Classroom.”
·
Work regularly
on comprehension and retention: Francis
Bacon long ago described reading in this way:
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be
chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others
to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with
diligence and attention.” In language
arts classes, with the exception of sustained silent reading programs, most of
the reading tends to be chewed and digested, that is, read with diligence and
attention. I would hate to finish the
daily newspaper and then be quizzed on what I had just read. If I flunked such a quiz, would it mean that
I had wasted my time? Too often we
confuse comprehension with retention. If
we can prove that a student did not retain what he had read, is it fair to infer
that he did not comprehend it? Some
students, it’s true, neither comprehend, nor retain, certain readings. However, it is possible to comprehend and
then almost immediately dump the material.
In fact, students dump material they have comprehended and temporarily
stored for use on a quiz or test. We
tend to think content standard mastery confers some degree of permanency. Most students I know would be happy to dispel
such a notion. Try giving a quiz or test
and then having your students re-take it in a week without notice. Has their mastery now become incompetency? Students routinely wipe the hard drive clean,
as if with a magnet, to make room for new learning upon which they place little
long-term value. Adults do the same
thing every day. We read newspapers,
magazines, novels and non-fiction books with various degrees of comprehension, but
very little attempt at retention. Such
wide reading helps us with our attitudes, but does little to prepare us for
“Jeopardy.” Reading, especially critical
reading, is a skill. The contents, for
the most part, we can allow students to discard. But the attitudes that develop alongside
critical reading, those students will retain.
To paraphrase B.F. Skinner: “Learning is what remains after you’ve
forgotten everything you’ve been taught.”
Having said this, I would now like to argue in favor of retention
strategies. I also used my count-up
timer to record fluency rates for students reading non-fiction articles. We discovered that most readers slow down
one-quarter to one-third when moving from fiction to non-fiction. We had a good deal of discussion about this
phenomenon, and decided that the architecture of narrative fiction versus
expository non-fiction accounted for most of the decline in reading rate. Material organized logically required a
slower pace than material organized chronologically. To work on retention I had the students read
the article once for time, quickly record their time without figuring their
reading rate, turn the paper over and write down everything they could recall
from the article. Our goal was to “train
the brain to focus and retain.” When
students could no longer recall any details or ideas from the article, they
took a moment to figure and record their reading rates and then re-read the
article, marking it up on this reading.
The goal was for the students, over time, to increase the amount of
material they could train their brain to temporarily retain. Most students made impressive progress, often
moving from a few random bullets of information to an entire page of notes.
·
Use
Continuous Scripts to build texts backwards:
Medieval manuscripts often omitted even the spaces between
letters. One reason, of course, would be
to save precious space on fragile and scarce manuscript pages. As part of my design to elevate the role of text
in the classroom, I conceived the idea of rendering scripts continuously. Students peered at the succession of what
looked like random letters and had to begin by placing slash marks between the letters
to form words. Like a “Where’s Waldo”
picture, the text would emerge. Students
became so adept at this that, after a few sessions, they could pick out the
words without placing the slash marks.
This exercise would cause them to review everything they knew about
capitalization, punctuation and basic manuscript conventions, such as paragraph
breaks. I was fond of rendering poetry
this way and it was interesting to watch the students discover rhyme words or
count syllables and discover an underlying meter. Often the discovery of poetic text buried
underneath this word-search of seemingly random letters would spur an renewed
interest in the text and take analysis on a different tack. The continuous script was, to me, the essence
of teaching backwards. Build the text
from scratch and, only then, move to analysis, interpretation, evaluation and
other higher-level taxonomies. This also
inculcated a respect for text and a reverence for writers and their formidable
skills. I found this exercise to be so
much more productive of the ends of language than any daily oral language
exercises I had ever seen.
These were but five of the
strategies I used to teach backwards and to re-assert the primacy of text-based
learning in the classroom. I can imagine
any number of other strategies working just as well. The problem with forward teaching, however,
is how systemic it is and how well-supported it is by current research. It is a deliberate act to abandon modern
pedagogical practices and move toward teaching backwards. It takes courage and commitment to cancel the
anticipatory set and banish the graphic organizer. You have to privilege, instead, the very
special relationship that exists between writer and reader and try to stay out
of the way. You have to be ready with
scaffolds, but use them only sparingly, temporarily, and with only the students
who need them. Let learning begin in
text, support it all the way, and watch your students soar.
© Jack Farrell, Conejo Valley Unified School District, 2006