Especially for Teachers - Resources

Reaching Reluctant Readers and Learners

A forum for teachers hosted by Dr Jeffrey Wilhelm

This is an edited transcript of the discussion that took place in the English Classroom Forum on the Discover website of the Tasmanian Department of Education.

The discussion was hosted by Dr Jeffrey Wilhelm, Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Maine. Dr Wilhelm has a distinguished international reputation as a teacher and researcher. He has authored eight books, most notably You Gotta Be the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents (Teachers College Press, 1997, available through AATE), Strategic Reading: Guiding Adolescents to Lifelong Literacy (Heinemann, 2001) and most recently Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies (Scholastic, 2001), Reading Don’t Fix no Chevies: The Role of Literacy in the Lives of Young Men (Heinemann, 2002) and Enactment Strategies for Readers (Scholastic, 2002). Dr Wilhelm was a plenary speaker at the 2001 AATE/ALEA Joint National Conference in Hobart and conducted workshops for teachers in Tasmania and other states after the conference. Response to his sessions was outstandingly positive.

Participants in the discussion included early childhood, primary and secondary teachers and pre-service teachers. We think you will find the discussion absorbing to read in its entirety and a valuable professional learning tool. You can read the discussion below or download it as a Word document. (Click here to download the word document - 140k).

In the forum, Jeffrey Wilhelm refers to a number of documents. These are now available here as downloadable Word files.

Teaching as a relational activity
Different models of teaching and learning — the case for a sociocultural, learning centred model based on the work of Vygotsky
Frontloading — activating and building background knowledge
Creating engaging tasks and supporting student learning
Learning through inquiry
Concluding remarks

Jeff Wilhelm

Greetings: I met many of you at my various workshops and talks on behalf of AATE, ALEA and the Department of Education. During those talks and workshops I spent a great deal of time exploring the various theoretical perspectives and models that inform literacy teaching, and argued that each perspective involves particular politics and pronounced consequences for teachers, students, school organization and the like.

The model that I ended up arguing for in each of my presentations was the two-sided sociocultural model of teaching and learning based on the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. I would like to organize our discussion around some of Vygotsky's thinking, and to explore how particular notions apply (or do not apply) to our own teaching. For example, one of Vygotsky's central insights is that teaching is relational. Neo-Vygotskians insist that teaching is a transitive verb, which means that someone (a teacher) teaches something to someone else. What is learned must be taught through a relationship in which the more expert person shares expertise with a learner.

The work of Vygotsky and his followers indicates that to teach, we must personally know and care about our students. We must know them so that we can teach them appropriately, by building on their interests and previous knowledge, so we can help them to outgrow their current selves. For instance, during my recent study on boys and books, we found that the boys felt there was an implicit social contract held with teachers, which teachers almost always reneged upon. That contract implied that teachers would:
1. care about you
2. try to get to know you
3. attend to your interests as far as possible
4. make sure you learned; actively help as necessary
5. be committed and passionate about what was being taught

My co-researcher Michael Smith and I found that teachers who exhibited even one of these elements were generally embraced by the students, who would be much more willing to work for that teacher.

I thought we could begin our discussion around this idea of relationship:
1. IS teaching essentially relational? If so, how should that inform our teaching?
2. What can we do to establish teaching relationships with our students? How can these relationships be organized around learning activities?

For example, in my own teaching I try to organize all my instruction around group inquiry projects, which require me to work with students to help them acquire strategies that are necessary to pursuing their own inquiries.

Extra-curricularly, I try to greet each student each day, and I adopt one student a week. I take this student to lunch, listen to some songs chosen by that student, etc. I find this costs me very little time and reaps huge relational teaching benefits.

What are the rest of you doing and thinking? Let us all know and let the discussion begin!

Karen Clark

I agree, Jeff, that relationships are the key to getting through to kids. As teachers we need to spend time with each student we teach, so that we know who they are - the experiences they are battling with and to find something we like! The relationship needs to be genuine - even if only temporary.

I've just spent three years in a large city high school where full time teachers can expect to teach about two hundred kids. If we are genuine about getting through to young people we can't work within a structure such as this. So much is tied up with resource allocation and teachers face such a struggle to "get in there" and really "shift the furniture" — particularly when dealing with such numbers.

Of course we can't be defeatist and we all need to find ways of getting through to at least some kids on more than a superficial level. While we do this, leaders in education need to be active in finding ways to restructure schools so that teachers are dealing with realistic numbers on a daily basis. Not a lot of discussion seems to be talking place on this level.

Jeff Wilhelm

I generally work with classes of 25 or a bit larger so I see 125-150 kids a day. I find that a real challenge and have been astonished that Australian teachers work with even larger groups.

There is a research base in the USA that demonstrates that the larger the class size (beyond 17-18 students) the progressively less each student in the class learns. So the bigger the class, the less the learning for each student. This is an indirect proof of the Vygotskian hypothesis that all learning occurs through relationship. The most influential study along these lines was the Tennessee Valley STAR study, and there have been others. These studies have been used to start classroom size reductions in early elementary grades in urban areas, particularly in California. Though this is an issue for middle and secondary schools, they have received little attention.

I'd be interested in how people are forging relationships and pursuing relational teaching despite the large class sizes AND, as Karen suggests we must, how we can apply political pressure on school boards, politicians and the media to work for changes such as reduced class sizes.

Education, here as in America, seems to get a lot of lip service, but not too much action when it costs money. I think it is up to us as teachers to give voice to our students. Do you have ideas for doing so?

Patricia Corby

I was pleased to read about your views on relationships and their importance as it is a viewpoint I also hold. In fact, the memorable learning experiences in my own life are largely due to the relationship I felt between the teacher and myself. When I felt valued, I tried all the more.

Karen commented on the special problems faced by big city high schools. This is a real difficulty as I see it. You do your best in each class but have a lot of students to relate to. I am in a district high and find that living and working in the same community gives us a rather special advantage as we get to know students from a range of different perspectives. This does help in the teaching back in the classroom.

It is always good when one has recreational opportunities to mix with kids beyond the classroom. When we are sharing activities with students, we find ourselves in both a teacher role and a student role. I think this may be a key. When students see us as fellow learners, it can be easier for them to share where they are at. They see our vulnerable side and this allows them to be less anxious about being vulnerable too. It is great when students can teach teachers — this happens often in the computing area where software is so varied and changing that no one can know it all.

I also like lunch times. Duty at my school has few problem patches so I can spend my duty catching up with kids for a chat outside the classroom. I was interested in your adopting of a student weekly and taking them to lunch. Have you run in to any problems about doing this? I ask as harassment accusations have abounded in recent years and I wonder how such concerns are handled in the US.

Jeff Wilhelm

Patricia, you bring up some interesting points. I wonder how many of us would think back to our own most memorable learning experiences and find that a relationship was at the heart of that learning. I also really liked what you said about finding situations in which you can help the students to learn things that are in service of their own purposes, and during which they can teach you about things that they know.

Inquiry and design environments are perfect for this kind of learning, particularly when it involves technology, as you point out. In my book Hyperlearning (Stenhouse, available through Elizabeth Curtain), my team teaching partner Paul Friedemann and I showed how curricula could be organized around problem-orientations that interest the students. Different groups pursued different kinds of inquiry and created electronic (or dramatic) knowledge documents (e.g. websites, hypermedia stacks, video documentaries) that showed what they learned and that did some kind of social work (helped them engage in social action, make an argument, etc.). In this context, we had to relate to kids. They were teaching us what they were learning about their interests, and we helped them to ask questions, read particular kinds of texts, analyze and organize information. In the beginning we were teaching them about technology, but after a while many of them were teaching us. Excellent! This is relational teaching where the student and teacher learn from each other, and help each other to do their work.

To respond to your last question, we also have many harassment issues in the States. So you have to be careful but there are ways of doing it. If you do the same kinds of things with all your students, that helps. Or doing things in small groups also helps.

Peter Swift

I have recently changed schools and have realised that teaching is more of a social contract than I had thought. Knowing the kids, the community they come from and how things operate are all part of the complex behaviours of teaching. I have moved from a large school to a small independent secondary school. During the first few months the kids were sussing me out and it has taken a long time to build relationship with the kids and establish by the doing that I am interested in them as people and what they are up to. This idea that teaching is part of a relationship with kids is vital to our pursuits as educators.

Tammy Norris

I think that memories of positive relationships that we have had with our teachers remain with us throughout life. Conversely, bad relationships can also remain with us. I will never forget a certain teacher of mine who told me that I was incapable and silly and that she had no time for me. I disliked both the teacher and the subject after that and tried my best to avoid both.

Now I am a teacher (a pre-service teacher, actually), I try to value each of my students as individuals and respect the multi-faceted opinions and ideas that each of them brings to the classroom. I have found that my students not only treat each other with respect but they truly feel concern when things seem to be bad for a classmate. They value their education and they value each other's contributions in class. They question, answer and discuss.

Is it not our duty as teachers to foster positive relationships with our students? Shouldn't our classrooms be spaces where children are able to learn, create and develop without fear of failure or criticism??

Jeff Wilhelm

Tammy, I could not agree more that part of our job as teachers is to help students respectfully consider the multiple perspectives around important issues AND to learn how to interact with each other in respectful and positive ways. This, I think, is the foundation of the conjoint productive activity and complementarity that John Dewey said is the basis of all democratic living. A dilemma that you imply is, how can we have high standards and nurture growth? In other words, how can we name students as learners and name their growth, but not pander to anything that they do? How can we be respectful in expecting them to meet challenges and outgrow themselves, to not be satisfied with less than they can do?

I'd like to now steer our conversation to how we might actually teach literacy skills like reading and writing through our relationships with students.

I hope I don't overwhelm anyone here, but I think the following is very important. There are three very different models of teaching and learning that are currently contending with each other in political debates about teaching, national testing and assessment schemes, the teaching of reading, and many other venues.

The model I personally endorse is the Vygotskian one. Vygotskians define teaching as "assisting students to more competent learning performances in meaningful contexts." This means that teaching involves helping kids know how to do things (to achieve procedural knowledge of HOW) in contexts in which the kids actually have a need to do particular things, use specific strategies, to achieve a goal.

This is a radically different view from two much more prevalent definitions of teaching, as pointed out by the famous cognitive scientist Barbara Rogoff. Rogoff says that the most pervasive view of teaching practiced around the world is that teaching is "purveying information". In other words, telling students stuff and conveying factual information (declarative knowledge) to them is what constitutes the teaching act. In the U.S., reviews of teaching by Arthur Applebee and another by George Hillocks demonstrated that over 90% of language arts and English teachers spent most of their time "telling" students information. This view of teaching is often called the teaching centred view, the information centred model or the curriculum centred model.

The Vygotskian view also differs, though not quite so radically, from what is known as the student centred model. In this model, teaching is defined as "creating an environment in which the individual learner can be encouraged and nurtured to develop naturally according to her level or set stage of development." In this case, the teacher creates workshop settings, provides lots of books and invitations to write so that students can follow their natural course of development, which is pre-ordained.

Vygotskian teaching is often called the two-sided model because it is the only model that requires a relationship and interchange between teacher and student, an exchange and negotiation of procedural expertise. This model is sometimes referred to as the sociocultural or learning centred model. Its purpose is not to transmit information or create an environment where learning will naturally occur. In fact, Vygotskians would argue that information is not worthy to be the focus of learning; only learning how to learn is a worthy focus for teachers. And they would dispute that learning is natural, especially learning language and literacy. They argue that all knowledge is socially constructed, conventional, and therefore non-natural. Therefore they argue that anything that is learned must be explicitly taught.

As an example, Vygotskians point out that the word "apple" is not natural. It is conventional, which means that groups of people agree that it means a red-globed fruit. Other groups of people agree on a different convention, i.e. that the red-globed fruit should be called a "pomme" or an "Apfel" or something else.

Vygotskians say that if you lock a child in a room with books, the child will not learn to read. Why not? Because reading is not natural. The way in which fables, satires, ironic monologues, arguments and any other kind of text works is, according to Vygotskians, conventional. You won't learn how these texts operate, and therefore how to read and write them, unless you are explicitly taught.

Vygotsky himself argued that every learner has a zone of actual development (ZAD). In other words, every learner has a set of strategies that they can deploy on their own without help. Just beyond the ZAD is what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development (ZPD). He defined the ZPD as that cognitive zone where a learner can do something with help that she cannot do alone. Vygotsky claimed that learners can only be taught in the ZPD. If a task is in the ZAD then the student can already do the task and assigning it does not lead to learning. If the task is so hard that the student cannot complete it even with the teacher sharing her expertise and helping the student, then it is beyond the ZPD and not worth teaching since the student will not achieve new strategies of learning by completing the task.

Obviously, such a view requires us to know our students' ZADs and ZPDs. It also requires us to know how to explicitly teach students to complete new tasks such as inferring, reading a fable, understanding irony, etc.

Clearly, each of these learning theories has huge political implications. (In the U.S. George W. Bush is a proponent of information centred teaching. He has passed through Congress a mandated test of information for all school children. He has pressed the NICHD to fund research only if it adheres to this model, which by the way has very little supporting research base). The models also have practical implications for how we think about teaching and how we actually teach. You probably recognize that the information centred model is based on behaviouristic theories based on the work of Thorndike, Skinner and Pavlov. The student centred model is Piagetian and associated with progressivism and natural models such as those proposed by Rousseau. The sociocultural model is based on sociocultural theories and co-constructivism.

I'm personally compelled that Vygotsky and his followers are right. But it would be nice not to believe him, because his theories put a big burden on teachers. Neo Vygotskians, in fact, argue that English teachers basically underappreciate and underarticulate what it is readers and writers really have to do when they read or write particular kinds of texts. They also charge that most teachers never teach; they just assign and evaluate, but never actually help kids work through and master the processes of expert readers and writers.

Ok, here are some questions for discussion:

1. Do you have any feelings about the three theories that you would like to share? Any questions about them?

Are the Vygotskians right? Partly right? Where would you come down and why?

2. How can we discern a student's ZAD? In other words, how can we figure out what a student can already do as a writer or reader? (doing this with writing is easier than with reading, which is a more invisible act) In other words, how can we make our students' reading and writing and thinking visible so we can see what they know and might be able to do next?

3. What teaching strategies do we have available that can help us assist students in the context of real writing or reading performances? In other words, how do you help your students to do things that they are unable to do on their own?

Specific examples would be very welcome!

Roslyn Teirney

Jeff, I will take you up on the invitation to ask a question and make a comment regarding Barbara Rogoff. According to a book review of her Learning Together (2001), she "shows that children and adults do not learn in independent study or by being taught particular facts or concepts, but by participating within a community of learners."

How does this fit with your description of the "purveying information" model?

Jeff Wilhelm

Rogoff is arguing here that information (the WHAT) does not result in significant learning, but that purveying procedural knowledge (the HOW) is significant learning. She is taking a Vygotskian position by arguing that our job as teachers is to apprentice students into an expert literacy community by transforming their participation from novice to that of expert. This transformation takes place by participating together on significant projects that require students to learn and internalize what the teacher knows.

Roslyn Teirney

Thanks for the clarification. I want to comment now on your discussion of Vygotsky. You say, "This means that teaching involves helping kids know how to do things (to achieve procedural knowledge of HOW) in contexts in which the kids actually have a need to do particular things, use specific strategies, etc. to achieve a goal."

My own impression is that students are motivated by their teacher's love of and respect for their subject area (for us, language and literature), even if they do not have "a need to do particular things." If the student looks up to a teacher, the climate is set for learning to take place.

Also, I have always aimed to structure "preparation" and "practice" on either side of "presentation" of knowledge. The "purveying" model is in danger of being cheapened by a brief description and by an assumption that because it came before child-centred or Vygotsky models that it is/was less appropriate or effective. The "purveyor" provides what is needed.

Jeff Wilhelm

The research on boys and literacy I just completed with Michael Smith showed this to be true. The boys would learn for a teacher who was passionate about the subject, or committed to them personally. The best situation, though, was when a teacher exhibited these traits and created meaningful learning situations where the use and function of what was learned could be immediately applied for thinking about issues and taking actions related to them.

The big question for Vygotskians would be whether or not a teacher is purveying declarative knowledge (information) or procedural knowledge (strategies). Of course, you have to have information to apply strategies to, but you don’t have to have strategies when you simply purvey information.

Roslyn Teirney

If my students accept me as an authority they will accept the tasks I select for them and "do particular things" because they trust me, not because they necessarily know already that they "have a need ... to achieve a goal".

I gain my authority as a teacher not only by my competence in my subject, or by my pedagogical skill or enthusiasm, but also by my capacity to acknowledge and capitalise on the gifts and talents of my students.

Jeff Wilhelm

Ah yes. What you say here resonates with Lee Shulman’s research on pedagogical content knowledge. He claims that teachers possess 7 kinds of knowledge; 6 of these go beyond content knowledge:

1. knowledge of the subject to be taught (content knowledge)
2. general pedagogical knowledge ("those broad principles and strategies of classroom management and organisation that appear to transcend subject matter")
3. curriculum knowledge of available materials, programs, mandates, etc.
4. knowledge of students, of how they develop and learn
5. knowledge of educational contexts
6. knowledge of educational ends, purposes and values
7. knowledge of pedagogy — of how to relate the strategic knowledge from the discipline or discourse community to students so that they can become more expert practitioners in that community (this is what Rogoff is on about)

This amalgam of knowledge enables teachers to know how to teach. Of course, it requires that we know our students personally (the relationship angle) and that we know how to then teach them. This extends well beyond simple content knowledge.

Andy Kowaluk

Thanks, Jeff, for leading a stimulating discussion. I must admit I enjoyed your sessions at the recent AATE /ALEA Conference and noted with interest your adherence to Vygotsky. His main failing, in my opinion, is that he is Russian rather than Polish! I guess that can be overlooked.

Your point concerning the information centred model is well made. An approach to teaching and learning in any discipline that likens teaching to the pouring of water into a vase is to be looked at with disdain. To take the point further, teachers who simply tell students information run the risk of boring them to the point of disinterest and disengagement.

In my opinion, however, we must be careful not to move too far to the other end of the spectrum. The fact is that a purely discovery centred model requires that students bring to a task a high level of referential knowledge. Often this is not present in our students. This is especially true where they have backgrounds that are disadvantaged. Typically this occurs where socio-economic hardship and rurality are factors. In cases such as this formal imparting of knowledge should not be denigrated. To a certain extent it is necessary and desirable. A bit of good old-fashioned chalking and talking, especially where it permits interaction with students can be very effective no matter what our ideological stance might be.

To adopt Allan Luke’s phrase, if we are to avoid a "dumbing down of the curriculum" it may be that we need to impart our own knowledge to our students from time to time. If this is all we do, then it may be time to retire. But if we do not do it, we may be letting down the young minds that are entrusted to our care.

To adopt your own Vygotskian stance, though, a chalk and talk session will be more effective where solid relationship exists between teacher and student, and where students see the purpose of what is being done. Done well, moreover, it may provide a vehicle for more efficient learning that occurs at a higher level. Where the teacher is truly knowledgeable and where they love what they are doing it can be inspirational.

To take up another point, teachers who do simply "assign and evaluate" are missing the most pleasurable and vital part of the job. Actually teaching their students - working with them as they move along the road to real learning.

Jeff Wilhelm

Yes, Andy! Vygotskians are not against the purveying of information when it is done in a meaningful context and in the service of learning the strategic repertoire necessary to becoming a more expert participant in a community of practice.

By the way, Vygotsky, though he lived during the early part of this century and died in the thirties, was only recently translated and published in the West (due to the Iron Curtain and the Cold War). That's why he's not nearly as well known as Piaget and others. His ideas have been very influential in early literacy programs like Reading Recovery and Guided Reading. But his ideas have not been translated and applied at the middle and secondary levels. My recent book Strategic Reading (Heinemann) attempts to do exactly this.

You might be interested in having a look at two charts that outline:
1) the different features of the three learning models discussed earlier;
2) three models of learning to read and of reading literature that map on to these three models.

I hope these will be helpful. Have a look also at examples of the types of assignments that I would propose for assisting students through their ZPD.

Amy Jansen

I've been incorporating the Vygotskian method into my lesson plans more and more in recent weeks and perhaps this example will serve to illustrate the differences between the surface/declarative model of teaching and the relationships/inquiry based model:

At the school in which I teach we have curriculum guidelines which suggest what 'knowledge' should be taught in particular year groups. This is present in all schools (whether explicit or implicit) and it tends to be the Tasmanian case that students in year 7 study mapping and Tasmanian history.

So, faced with the prospect of teaching students to read statistical data from early settlement and present this information in the conventional graph form (are you falling asleep yet?), it seems I could have approached it two main ways:

(1) The Easy Way

A chalk and talk lesson in which students had to silently get out their books and follow the model I constructed on the board, obeying appropriate instructions: "You must do this, you must do that; rule up your page this way!" The end result is perfect bookwork for those able to concentrate on my voice for this length of time; students who are not able to do so probably being excluded from the class; a gaggle of well behaved yet bored students staring out the window/at the clock at this stage (or telling the student who is taking time over his work to "Hurry up!"); the teacher who has them in the next lesson asking me at lunch time, "What did you DO to those students this morning? Half were asleep and the other half were climbing up the walls!"

(2) "Sizzling Statistics": The Potentially Chaotic Fun Way (a.k.a Why on earth not?)

A group work lesson in which the teacher (in role or out of role, whatever your flavour) introduces the class to the task of being 'time detectives'.

The scenario is that planet earth has been destroyed and no available records exist about the fabled island 'Tazmoonia' except these five/six artefacts. The students mission, if they chose to accept it, is to work together as an elite core of scientists/historians/anthropologists/'smart guys' (who represent the descendants of an original group of humans who escaped in a space shuttle)...

What follows is a straight forward graffiti exercise: number the students off into small groups and organise the classroom in such a way as they can move freely around tables on which there is (a) an artefact (b) butchers paper (c) pen/s or texta/s. Students have from two to five minutes at each table to try and predict/assume/research what can be known about that original culture in as much detail as possible from these artefacts only.

After this time, have students bring their chairs to the front of the classroom in a horseshoe and report back to 'mission command' what could be extrapolated from the data about the Tazmoonian inhabitants. You may like to divide the board into 'hypothesis' and 'questions for further research'. Systematically have students report back what they found out and the questions on which they may need further clarification...a research session in the library can follow.

Of course, for my purposes with this class, my artefacts were limited to statistical data only (i.e. population statistics/ line graphs/ bar graphs all relating to the settlers (migrants/convicts) in Tasmania in the early 1800s and including data on the Aboriginal population - particularly pre and post 'Black Line' massacre), but in hindsight there is no reason why I couldn't have limited the graphical information and included other forms of historical documentation about early Tasmania (photos/sketches/clothing/technology/smelly things etc.)

My students loved this and it was also a wonderful way to start a more extended look into Aboriginal Studies as the students could really see the correlation between the increase in the population of free settlers in Tasmania and the increase in reported clashes between the Aboriginal tribes and colonists. We could then discuss why they thought this may be so and what different values about land ownership could be at play. For the activity, all I had to do was assume the students understood how to read graphs or were at least motivated to try and discover how to. Indeed they were and even my struggling students were having a ball and LEARNING!

Hope this is useful and not too much what we know already...

Jeff Wilhelm

Amy, this is a great example of creating a meaningful context through drama and then inviting kids into an expert community of practice as scientists/historians/anthropologist through the "mantle of the expert" technique.

Brava! Vygotsky would be proud.

Andrea Dare

Thanks, Amy. Your lesson sounds fantastic. It is wonderful to hear how teachers are managing to make the "must do" stuff relevant to the students by selecting productive pedagogies which help students make connections and think, rather than just remember.

Phillipa Clymo

As a pre-service teacher with limited experience in schools, I'd love to know (just out of interest, as well as getting a feel for the sort of playing field I'm due to enter) what sort of proportions of teachers champion these theories. Indeed, are they mutually exclusive, or can one teacher embrace aspects of more than one? Does anyone out there care/dare to hazard a guess?!

Jeff Wilhelm

In the U.S. the most recent reviews by George Hillocks and Arthur Applebee indicate that at the secondary level around 90% of teachers implicitly embrace the information transmission model. About 7-8% the student-centred model and the remaining few a Vygotskian model. The percentages are more skewed towards Vygotskian instruction in the earlier grades, these commentators argue, because early grades teachers have to teach students how to do things and this model is the most powerful for doing so.

Of course, I'm arguing that we still have to teach our students how to do things at the secondary level, a point which Dick Allington has made in his research. Reading and understanding irony, reading and writing arguments, understanding symbolism, learning how to inquire and research -- these are just a few examples of complex procedural skills that kids cannot be effectively taught through lecture.

In answer to your last question, I guess that most teachers make use of multiple models in particular situations. But as I responded to Andy Kowaluk, a Vygotskian/sociocultural teacher will purvey information in the context of teaching strategies, and may ask students to engage in their own student-centred inquiry projects AFTER they have been explicitly taught how to do so through modelling and shared practice.

Great questions, Philippa, and I hope this helps!

Hugo McCann

I have been following the exchange of ideas that you have initiated, stimulated and sustained. I have been lurking, in other words. While I am sure I have missed various nuances in the exchanges and your responses, I have come to think that perhaps it might be useful to pose a question to (make a comment on) your Vygotskian views with which I am very much in sympathy and largely in agreement. I was taken with the use of the grammatical metaphor "teaching is a transitive verb". What follows is an attempt to contribute to the explorations of relational understandings of teaching.

Some years ago I came to think that it was not enough to think of the verb "to teach" as being a transitive verb taking both a direct and indirect object. (i) X teaches something to someone or (ii) Y teaches someone something. I sometimes think of (i) as being what many high school or university teachers do and (ii) as something which infant and primary grade teachers do. It is a matter of emphasis, I guess.

I am sure that to teach is a transitive verb a lot of the time. But somehow I wanted to explore the response of the "someone" in each of these cases and how that response was treated by the teacher in the teaching-learning exchange.

One might think of this as the 'second phase' in the teaching/learning setting. (Somewhat like a second phase in a sporting tactic - if we do that, what are they likely to do and what will we do then?) Many people/teachers/communicators have a great capacity to stimulate, but do not know what to do with the responses they have stimulated. It is a little bit like being able, after careful looking up of dictionaries and grammars, to ask someone something in a foreign language but not yet being competent to deal with the replies and responses one receives. And even when one can understand the general import of what is said back one cannot quite grasp the nuances and subtleties in what is being said or suggested or implied or revealed.

So after all that I came to ask myself another "grammatical question": how reflexive is the verb "to teach"? There are many verbs in our languages which are reflexive. What I got from this was something like how well could I prepare myself to respond to student views, attitudes and perspectives. How well might I come to understand the topics and subjects if I listened to/observed my students? By teaching in certain ways I might be taught a great deal - I might learn about the topics as well as the learners.

I have often noticed that the best way for me to learn something complex or to explore contested or contestable matters was to attempt to explain them to others or to interest others and to observe their responses. In that situation I came to see and activate connections I would have otherwise missed. In a way my acts of teaching were always reflexive in that they came to teach me things about myself and my understanding as well as about subjects, topics and learners as well as materials I might choose to use.

Picture books by people like Anthony Brown (The Willy Books), Chris Van Allsburg (The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Z was Zapped), Maurice Sendak (Outside Over There), Jane Tanner’s pictures with Allan Baillie’s words (eg Drac and the Gremlin), Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins (My Place) all provided the kinds of visual texts and learning contexts in which the questions of teaching as a reflexive verb came to the fore for me but only if I was able to recall that teaching was more than a transitive. I found new readings returning to enlighten me from any number of groups and individuals. [Of course, this list of pictures books might be extended and organised in a variety of ways. This list is really only indicative.]

The texts - print and picture - are rich in the opportunities for inference and contrasting interpretation and seem to pick up a range of learning styles. (They are also good fun when explored in social groupings.) The opportunities for interpretation and inference gave a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable range of responses rich in information and added to my understanding of learning and understanding. The opportunities included the possibilities for learners to talk, to act, to write, to paint, to sing, to dance and to create new works and allowed me to work alongside (emotionally and cognitively) the learners and this adjusted or nuanced the transitive nature of the verb "to teach".

As I said I am very sympathetic to Lev Vygotsky’s recognition of the social and relational factors in learning. I am very taken with your comments and explanations and I offer this as merely another perspective on the activities of communicating and teaching. It is a comment really on the "transitive" nature of the verb "to teach" with which you began. It is an attempt to explore the "relational" elements in teaching and learning.

Jeff Wilhelm

Thanks, Hugo, for the very incisive comments. You have given me a lot to think about! I will say that Vygotsky himself wrote that teaching and learning were reflexive acts and that in true teaching the teacher and her participation and understanding were transformed as well as the students. Which jibes completely with what I hear you saying.

On another matter, I've been really impressed with all the discussion about using visual texts and video with reading that has been going on alongside our discussion in the English Classroom forum. One of the most salient differences between good and poor readers is that good readers intensely visualize characters, settings and situations, and elaborate visually on these textual features. Poorer readers do not do this. So using visual texts provides Vygotskian assistance to these readers, particularly if you help them to make the connection to how expert readers visualize based on various textual cues, e.g. how the director of the movie envisioned particular scenes from the text, or why Gary Crew and his illustrator chose particular illustrations to go with particular text.

By the way, students who have vast experience with picture books are usually better readers, and recent research shows that the only deaf children who progress beyond elementary reading skills were almost always inveterate readers of comic books! So these kinds of texts clearly provide assistance to readers trying to visualize, and helps them learn how to do so.

Anna Stewart

Jeff, I read about deaf people and comics. I wondered why the Japanese might read comics as their main popular reading material instead of novels, magazines and other texts. Do you think it may be because of the "inner space" thing? For example, when you’re in a crowded population as in Tokyo you never feel alone. Trying to get an "inner self" seems to be the thing everyone seeks in order to gain "space". Do you think the "fast" reading of comics has given them the opportunity to "escape"? If you do think this, then why on earth have the comics developed into the thickest books that one can carry! I seldom saw a Japanese person reading a novel, even when teaching in a girls’ university! Many students use comics to gain an overall understanding of what we would call popular classics. Is this the future for Western countries? How do cultural differences affect the way people read text? Do you think that technological change has made the reading of books a pastime that will be valued only by people who have lots of time? Often I think that young people become more embedded in the computer culture text than they are in their own particular lives.

Jeff Wilhelm

Anna, this is an interesting observation and a great question.

I really don't know the answer but I bet your "inner space" theory is a good one. I also wonder if having an iconic written language as the Japanese do might make them especially attuned to visual texts? "Japanimation" is very big in the States, and many boys in our boys study loved it and worked hard to explain how it was superior and different from American and other cultural forms of animation. Interesting.

I would also concur that there is a history of literacy and that this history reflects the needs and technologies of the time and culture in which it develops. At one time being able to sign your name was to be literate. Then to be able to read and write at a functional level. Now one needs to be able to compose and read hypermedia to be literate (at least according to Jay David Bolter, who claims that being literate has always been about the ability to use the most powerful available means for making meaning and communicating). Since literacy changes, of course, the kinds of texts that engage us will change. And I think you are right too that the kinds of engagement kids get with comics or movies or even music videos is akin to the engagement that we get out of written texts or novels. But I think it must be different too - perhaps because written texts are more symbolic and require more translations - (word to visual image to interpretation) whereas videos are more immediate (already visual, some interpretation cues like laugh tracks or music provided). So I think readers do more substantive and difficult work. Nonetheless the ability to engage in comics shows the capacity to engage with text and may scaffold or build towards engagement with written text, PARTICULARLY if we draw the parallels and use such texts as a way to assist and scaffold visual experience with text AND to transform or interpret that experience. That requires explicit instruction.

Now, I’d like us to move to a couple of new questions.

Vygotskian thinkers like Gerard Coles in his book Reading Lessons point out that learners not only have cognitive zones of actual and proximal development, but perhaps more importantly, affective or motivational zones. So in order to teach a student, you not only have to know what she already knows, so you can build on this or confront it as a misconception, but you also need to know what she is interested in (this would include not only topics, but the kinds of processes, e.g. game like structures that tend to engage her). Coles argues that you have to build new interests by extending or showing connections to existing ones - a very Vygotskian idea of extending students through a zone of proximal development.

So here are the questions:

Remember that research clearly shows that the most effective time to teach is BEFORE kids read or write. So . . .

1) What do you do to develop and create interest in an assignment before kids engage in it?

2) What do you do before reading (or writing) to activate or build background, either conceptual or procedural, that kids will need to approach and be successful with the upcoming task?

You might find it useful to refer to the following charts:

• summary charts of how the three models of teaching and learning differ;
• a summary chart of how theories of reading and reading literature (literary theories) align themselves with these three theories;
• examples of frontloading assignments that can help identify student interests and positions on particular issues you might study and;
• a criteria sheet for developing a "frontloading" activity (frontloading means teaching you do before reading that will assist the reading).

Let me give a couple of short examples of procedural frontloading here (i.e. preparing kids to read by helping them recognize and be able to use the appropriate strategies):

Reading an epistolary novel requires readers to write what Eco (1979) calls ghost chapters in which they work to fill in the events that occurred between the dates of the letters or diary entries. Helping students understand that doing so is part of the reader’s role and providing practice in miniature in doing so, would make such texts more immediately accessible. Practice could be given by asking students to fill in the "gutters", or spaces between cartoon panels where time has obviously passed. As another example, the most consistent difficulty that the boys in our study had in responding to the four protocol stories was their failure to see the symbolic significance of the marigolds in "Marigolds." Pre-reading activities in which they work first with common symbols and then perhaps to visual texts (like comics) that make use of symbols would heighten their attention to how symbolism works and how they work with symbolism and give them a chance for a more complete reading. Using texts with which our students are familiar and that they feel competent to read and critique is very important in recognizing their existing competence, engaging their interest and giving them a sense of agency and control. Using popular culture texts helps us connect to students personally and can help them connect from the known to the new as popular culture texts use many of the same concepts and conventions of more traditional texts. These similarities can and should be exploited.

You might also like to have a look at a chapter from my book Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies (think-alouds are a technique in which the teacher or a more expert reader "thinks aloud" about how she is reading so that the text cues are recognized and the interpretive strategies they require are highlighted and modelled) and some material on symbolic story representation. Both are great ways to make reading visible, both to determine a student's ZAD and ZPD for reading a particular kind of text, and also to teach and assist kids through the ZPD.

OK - please float all questions, reactions, theories, possibilities and ideas. I'm grateful to all of you who have already done so: you've provided us all with much more excellent examples of how this can be done than I could have possibly provided.

Tammy Norris

Before commencing reading or writing activities with children, I think that it is important to gauge where they are at in their social and cultural understandings. It's important that the assignment addresses issues and problems that are related to them NOW... not in the future. They are concerned about themselves and where they fit into the world, the here and now and benefits to themselves, rather than the future.

I have had extreme success with my year 7 class with the novel So Much To Tell You by John Marsden. The girls were so taken with the novel that they actually set one of their own questions/tasks for the assignment. They decided to write and perform a short play based on the novel. They have been excitedly talking about it and have made a poster (also as part of the assignment) to advertise their performance.

I have another grade 7 group who are reading The Root Cellar by Janet Lunn. These girls are really focussing on the issues involved in the novel and are enjoying reading it. They have engaged with the novel and are really interested in work involved with the novel. I actually have to schedule specific days for them to work on their assignments otherwise they are begging me for more lessons to work on it. I am both excited and pleased about the work they are producing.

I am lucky with the groups that I am working with, in that they are very motivated girls and work hard. I enjoy listening to them talk about their novels and different paths that they think the plot is going to take. It is exciting to hear them talk about an author's motivation for choosing a particular setting and the ways in which different characters relate to each other.

I would like to think that we, as teachers (or preservice teachers!) are capable of choosing tasks that are relevant and engaging to our students, while being of relevance educationally.

Jeff Wilhelm

Amen, Tammy! This is an insight that John Dewey wrote about in 1916 and the psychologist Mihalyi Czsikimihalyi has argued based on his own writing quite recently. Many things can be made relevant if we look for possible connections that make material personally relevant and socially significant . . .and frontloading is a great way to do that.

Thanks for the insight!

Karen Clark

Jeff, after reading your question on developing and creating interest in an assignment before kids engage in it, I drifted back a few years to when I used to use drama regularly to get kids engaged and to "prepare the ground". Why have I stopped using it as a regular tool? Is it because I don't have enough time to cover everything that is crammed into the courses and I like to see "that black stuff on the paper" to feel I am doing my job? Is it because it takes time to set up the structures necessary for effective use of Drama in classrooms - especially if I want to maintain some sort of order? Or is it because the links between Drama and English have dissolved over the last decade - and it's not part of my consciousness as an English teacher any more.

Jeff Wilhelm

Thanks, Karen, for the provocative note. The crush for coverage, coming as it does from an information transmission perspective, always puts pressure on teachers to move away from time-consuming forms of more Vygotskian instruction.

I'm grateful to you for mentioning how powerful drama can be to frontload and to assist students to work through a text, both conceptually and procedurally. I know a lot of you are very accomplished users of drama in education, but remember that even very short drama scenes or strategies that take very little time can work powerfully to frontload a text or to assist kids through a difficult section.

Christine Topfer

I thought I would make a contribution from a primary perspective. I have not heard the term "frontloading" before but have been aware of the importance of developing background knowledge prior to reading. In fact in the early years we refer to the term as "book orientation" which involves talking the child through the book prior to them reading the book. This forms an important part of a guided reading sessions where the group are involved in discussions about the topic, genre or vocabulary contained in the book prior to reading it. When non-fiction books are involved such "before" activities can involve the use of Before and After Charts (i.e. recording all they know about a topic before they read and then revisiting these comments after they have read the text to add what they have learnt from the reading). Another activity to develop vocab and background knowledge is to write all the topic words involved in the text on a sheet of paper and ask students to draw lines between words that may be related in some way, underline words they do not know and so on. Resultant discussions build background knowledge and prepare the students for the terms discussed in the text. A good resource for strategies to use prior to reading is the First Steps Reading Resource Book. This outlines comprehension activities for before, during and after reading.

Jeff Wilhelm

Chris, What a great example of Vygotskian teaching, which is of course the foundation of Guided Reading. You oriented the kids towards the reading, activated and built background, and monitored and named what they were learning and had learned.

Andrea Dare

Lots of Kath Murdoch's "tuning in" strategies would be good as "frontloading" strategies. Her book Classroom Connections (Eleanor Curtain) is magnificent and, although primary oriented, has heaps of stuff that could be used in secondary schools. One strategy that comes to mind is "possible sentences" where students are given a word which is in the text and they write a sentence they predict might be in the text - great strategy for any aged student.

Kathy Morgan

One of the great things I'm finding in my use of reciprocal teaching is that it provides kids with the opportunities to engage in the reading before they begin. A student leader makes a prediction about the text and invites others to add to the prediction. It takes guided reading a step further and the students are involved in prediction, clarifying, question generating and summarising. In the first instance, the teacher is the leader, and then this role is taken over by students in the group enabling the teacher to either be a participant in the group or to be an outsider. Vygotsky would smile in his grave!

My work has mainly been with middle primary and the students are keen to teach each other the stages.

Jeff Wilhelm

Right on, Kathy! Reciprocal reading and teaching were based on Vygotskian theory when they were developed. And I have seen adaptations that assist kids to go beyond the general processes of reading that are usually taught. Thanks for the insight!

Scott Johnston

Jeff calls it "frontloading" but it can also be thought of as activating background knowledge, preparing the way for new ideas, concepts, and can relate to form, technique, themes, characters, events.... It applies to oral, written, visual and multi-media texts, from the everyday to the literary canon(s). There are so many strategies, activities which can be used to help readers into texts at deeper levels than would have happened if the reading is done cold. Selection has a lot to do with the particular text, with the class's purposes for engaging with that text, with the readers' known background knowledge.

Benton and Fox in Teaching Literature from 9 to 14 (Oxford) suggest structuring engagement with literary texts in three distinct phases - Before Reading, During Reading and After Reading - which I have found to be immensely valuable in developing programs of work and in considering where and how I do the explicit teaching part and where and how the students have opportunity and support to demonstrate their learning in relation to any text. The English Learning Area website gives examples of Before Reading activities I have used or observed in classrooms. People might like to check it out.

This year I chose to use David Metzenthen's novel Stony Heart Country with my Grade Nines as a whole class, shared text. With a whole class shared text I model, explicitly, ways of reading, of interacting with text, of reflection - I teach how to study text to make meaning and to understand.

This novel is set in an economically depressed regional area, and the main character's father has been sent into the town (from L.A., no less) to re-structure the local factory. The dad is a corporate hatchet man, and in the big cities it has always been possible for the son to be distanced from the effects of his father's work. In a small rural community such anonymity is not possible.

My class were from predominantly urban, middle class, quite well off families. In the Before Reading stage of this novel study, I wanted to help the students remember or come to understand the closeness of small communities and how what affects one person will affect the whole community to some extent. I also wanted them to think about how the country and the city are the same and different and used two role plays from a St Clair Press publication, The Jingella File, which focuses on a small rural community that has been selected to be the site of an all-night New Years Eve Dance Party. Kids were assigned characters and through role play and writing in role the impact of this announcement was explored. I also used copies of a Town and Country page which compared the life and work of real people in different occupations in the town and in the country. I had been saving these from the Good Weekend magazine included in the Saturday Age newspaper. In pairs students read through these articles and then used a two circle Venn diagram to note points of similarity and difference. Each pair read two or three articles about occupations as diverse as lifeguard, teacher, butcher, policeman.... and from their notes we collated a whole class list, which was then used by each student to write a short essay. At this stage we still had not started reading the novel. Indeed the class had not been told what it was titled, despite the protestations of several who I thought would have gone out and read it overnight — and thus compromising its usefulness for my teaching purposes.

After the role plays, the readings, and writing accompanied by much discussion and hypothesising, I brought in copies of the novel. We read the cover of the novel together, predicting and anticipating what the words between the cover might mean. Then we started reading the book. The Before Reading phase was probably two weeks' work - seems a long time in a school year, but it was definitely worth it in terms of engaging the students with the story, especially the boys.

I hope I'm not waffling on here in the dark, but this example seemed to me to fit Jeff's questions - and it was a great unit of work

Jeff Wilhelm

Scott, your example is spot on. Your frontloading built conceptual knowledge about the topic, some procedural knowledge that would be helpful (e.g. comparing and contrasting; seeing similarities and differences with tools like the Venn diagram), and built both competence and interest that helped the kids engage with the book once you read it.

Again, the research base is clear; the best and most effective time to teach is BEFORE reading - it pays clear dividends, as you found out, during and after the reading. Thanks for saying it so well!

Charles Morgan

Scott Johnston mentioned that there are other good frontloading ideas on the English website. Strategies include research, parallel narrative, vocabulary awareness, displays, mind mapping, stem statements, PMI, KWL and supporting texts. They are described with examples on the site so I won’t go into detail here, but you will find strategies to support a range of texts including The Water Tower, Goodnight Mr Tom, Enzo the Wonderfish, Dabu, the Baby Dugong, Hatchet, Animal Farm, Grandad’s Teeth, Macbeth and others.

Here is an suggestion from the site for introducing Macbeth: "Before launching into a viewing of a performance or a reading of the script of Macbeth, students could explore the notions of right and wrong, host and guest, high status roles and lower status roles, through a role play, incorporating soliloquy, in which you welcome to your home, your boss whom you intend to murder, and the scene before this in which you and your spouse discuss the plan of action. If the focus is upon exploring power and obligation, then students’ versions may be compared with Shakespeare’s to discover ‘universals’ and differences."

For other frontloading ideas, you might like to have a look at Scott’s detailed unit on The Pied Piper of Hamelin designed for years 5-8:

One of my favourite strategies is Reading Book Covers, also by Scott. Using Bellyflop by Morris Gleitzman as an example, Scott developed a range of questions to ask of the book cover before reading: about the author, the title, the illustration, the bar code and ISBN, the spine, the blurb, the author photo, the publisher’s Imprint and the credits. He includes a proforma to support this activity and range of other ideas for using book covers.

I have always found a learning log or journal to be a really useful tool to enable kids to activate their knowledge before reading or writing. A learning log also helps the teacher to more clearly understand what the kids know.

In addition, the excellent case studies on guided writing and guided reading at Lindisfarne North provide excellent strategies for frontloading.


Jeff Wilhelm

Thanks for drawing our attention to these strategies, Charles. I am now proposing two new questions. But of course, all should feel free to pose questions or ideas regarding any of the past ground we have ploughed.

Here goes: Neo-Vygotskians propose that the job of teachers or any more expert person is to induct or apprentice a learner into an expert "community of practice", to "transform the participation" of the novice into something that more closely resembles the understanding and practice of the expert.

They argue that in any community of practice the practitioners create things: knowledge artefacts of new understandings, service projects, or items that have functional use. By extension, they argue that to induct students into a more literate community of practice, we need to assist them to make and do similar kinds of things in our school or classroom communities.

So . . .

1) What kinds of things do you make or create (or would you like to make or create) with your students along the lines of knowledge artefacts (e.g. video documentaries, websites, hypermedia stacks, books, anything that would placehold and publish their new understandings in artefact and archival form), service projects (e.g. anything that would translate understandings into service: cleaning up a lake, a public service announcement or campaign), or items for functional use (e.g. a museum exhibit or computer kiosk for the local history museum, a drama for presentation, electrifying a house after studying electricity, creating a garden or reserve of native plants and animals, etc.)

2) When you make or create things with students (or when you plan to) how could you assist your students to learn more expert strategies of learning (finding information through key word searches, reading particular kinds of texts like argument by learning the conventions of argument, organizing information by using issue trees, etc.) in the context of participating in the community of practice by doing the work necessary to making or creating things.

Carol Wilson

I don't think I know of any more powerful creation (for me in a primary classroom) than the world that emerges during classroom drama. When you are the classroom teacher there are ongoing opportunities outside the role-play to create the artefacts, eg the diaries of life on the goldfields, the artworks which deepen the commitment, the maps of the site, the documentation of the journeys. The students start to live and breathe the lives that they have created and then reluctantly complete the last drama on the topic in much the same way as a reader puts aside a much enjoyed book as it reaches its conclusion.

I recently worked with some Prep children and I introduced them to an imaginary building site. We became electricians, plumbers, carpenters etc and had to first build the house and then calm the owner who felt that her house had been incorrectly positioned on the block. They had great ideas on how to make her feel better about this ranging from knocking the whole lot down to having a special party. It was lots of fun but unfortunately the classroom teacher felt that the children's lack of knowledge on the topic took away from the success of the drama. I was surprised with her reaction because I felt that the drama had been the perfect opportunity to introduce these previously unknown occupations and the accompanying terminology. I would presume that the next time a plumber was called to the home or when a book mentioned a carpenter that those children would build on their small experiences in the drama and get to know more of the world around them.

Classroom drama is overwhelmingly memorable. Its success doesn't lie in extravaganza but in the knowledge that as the teacher you have taken children a little further in the ways they relate to each other, in stretching their imagination and sowing seeds of learning.

Jeff Wilhelm

Carol, I could not agree with you more. Situations co-produce knowledge. The drama you described created a situation and meaningful learning context in which they were "making things" and providing services. In that context they were motivated to learn things, were provided with a situation in which it could be taught and learned, and had a place in which to apply what they were learning. I think you are right on in your assessment of the power of the situation.

Charles Morgan

Jeff, I think your questions have really brought us to the heart of the issue — that is, what new tasks can we negotiate with our students to make learning more relevant and connected to their world? The tasks you suggest in your question certainly open up new possibilities.

In pondering your question, I kept thinking about the message that Allan Luke delivered at the Hobart AATE/ALEA conference. He argued strongly that the curriculum must connect to students’ life world and that ALL students need to be involved in learning activities that involve high levels of intellectual engagement and intellectual demand. He argued passionately that these elements are essential for all kids, but none more so than our most at-risk kids. In his concluding remarks, Luke said: "We need a substantive critical engagement with fields, disciplines and discourses so that we do not dumb down our curriculum…"

He also argued for the inclusion of multi-literacies into the curriculum to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. He says, "our capacity to represent ourselves, whether that is verbally, through drama, through art works, through design, on-line, through traditional print become the coin of the realm…"

There is no question that all this requires deep knowledge on the part of teachers. Without deep knowledge of disciplines/fields/discourses, teachers run the risk of setting tasks that pass the time enjoyably, but which lack the educational challenge seen as so important by Luke. Those of us who attended the conference will remember his example of the lesson on "Flipper" that involved the students in a number of enjoyable tasks which they seemed engaged, but didn’t involve them in any deep thinking or inquiry. Of course, none of what Luke advocates will happen in the absence of a learning environment in which knowledge and expertise are shared among participants and in which open inquiry is encouraged. This requires productive teacher/student and student/student relationships such as those discussed earlier in the forum.


Jeff Wilhelm

I certainly agree with Allan Luke. I've proposed inquiry as a context in which kids can powerfully learn as a community, and as a context in which knowledge artefacts are created. I am attaching below a section on Inquiry from the concluding chapter of my book on boys and literacy (co-authored with Michael Smith) entitled Reading Don’t Fix no Chevies: The Role of Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, Heinemann, 2002). I hope you find this interesting and useful.

The Power of Inquiry
One way to encourage the kind of problem-solving that the boys found so motivating is to structure units around critical questions so that students' reading and writing can be in service of genuine inquiry. That's what motivated most of the boys' literate activity outside school whether they were reading newspapers or magazines or electronic texts. (And that is exactly what motivates our own reading and work, including all that we did to pursue this study.)

One reason reading literature is so compelling both to us and to the committed readers in our study is that we use it as a form of inquiry. Through literature, we think about issues that matter to us while we are engaged with characters that we come to know and care about.

By expanding the kinds of texts that students read and by placing the study of literature in an inquiry framework, we can address the complaint expressed so eloquently by Rev that "English is about nothing." Through inquiry--the process of gathering and developing information, analysing and organizing it in an effort to "figure out" or deepen understanding about a contested issue--reading can become the means through which students converse with authors about the vital human concerns we all share, including adolescent boys.

Such an inquiry frame also provides a meaningful and immediate context in which to teach strategies, concepts and textual knowledge that we have privileged as a profession. But in an inquiry context this knowledge would be immediately situated and applicable. And our data compel us that inquiry would be embraced and used by the students in ways they do not embrace and use school literacy.

In every case where true inquiry environments (versus reporting out what the teacher already knows) were introduced in school, they were embraced. Huey and Guy, two of the more disengaged students, spoke at great length about their interest and enjoyment of their bridge building project in which they experimented with and tested different bridge designs. The inquiry oriented history class at one of the high schools was identified as their most engaging class by the students who had taken it. These students passionately described projects like investigating and dramatizing Supreme Court cases in the roles of justices, and of dramatically exploring "What If?" scenarios of what the present may be like if those decisions had been different.

Organizing literacy curricula around inquiry has received much recent interest. Hillocks (1999) makes the case that reading and writing are forms of inquiry and are best taught in contexts of inquiry. Beach and Myers (2001) argue that students engage more deeply with literacy when they use it to inquire into issues connected to their own lives. Smagorinsky (2002) bases his work on developing instruction in large measure on the belief that "people learn by making, and reflecting on, things they find useful and important" (p. vi, emphasis in the original). These researchers critique traditional forms of literacy instruction as being disconnected from students' immediate interests and the demands of their lives. They offer inquiry (though they may name it differently) as an alternative that helps students to see that various social worlds and the concepts within these worlds are socially constructed through multiple literacies, languages, and texts. These concepts and ways of doing things are therefore open to examination, critique and transformation.

Designing inquiry units
All inquiry begins with a problem and a question. The nature of the question (or questions) can vary widely. When Jeff and his team teaching partner Paul Friedemann (See Hyperlearning, 1998) pursued inquiry with seventh grade students, many of whom were labeled as at-risk, they organized the curricula around "contact zones," i.e. geographical and cognitive spaces where different perspectives come into conflict. "Contact Zones" (Pratt, 1991; Bizzell, 1994) is another way of conceiving issues and problems so they will be of vital interest to students. A contact zone can be defined as a geographical and intellectual space where different ideas and desires are competing for supremacy. For example, colonial America was a space where the views and interests of Native Americans, British, French, and various groups of colonists competed for supremacy. Various political campaigns about the environment that revolve around particular spaces like Hetch Hetchy or the Arctic National Preserve are also examples of "contact zones" where environmental, energy, political and native interests collide. Many such zones exist in local communities close to the students, as Jeff found when working with Maine students with contact zones around local dumping, forestry, and fishing practices that profoundly affected the lives of the students and their families in immediate ways (cf. Wilhelm, Baker and Dube, 2001). The central questions asked in such units include the following:

• What voices were most clearly heard and why? What voices were silenced and why?
• What voices ought to have been heard and why?

The boys' arguments for the importance of including multiple perspectives and their resistance at being told what to think suggests why such a contact zone inquiry might be appealing. As Fecho (2001) points out, teaching such a unit rings with some risks, for questions that matter are deeply felt. But we believe with him that the risks are well worth the taking, particularly when we compare the risk of emotional engagement to the risks of complete disengagement that we repeatedly witnessed during our study.

Many very different questions focused on contact zones could work as well. What does it mean to be mature? What counts as success? What makes a good parent? How, if at all, have the roles of women changed in popular culture? When is disobeying a law justified? What causes readers to respond to stories in different ways? And on and on and on.

Once the teacher, or class, or small group of students has selected a question, then the inquiry begins. As we discussed in our description in Chapter 4 of the unit Jeff built around the question "What are the costs and benefits of the American emphasis on sports?" the next step is to read widely. Most important questions have been addressed by a variety of writers, so students can access the Internet, check out magazines, newspapers, television shows and so on, and read relevant literature. With each new reading comes a new perspective that students have to contend with.

In fact, inquiry units force students to cope with conflicts within and between the various social worlds they inhabit. For example, Flower, Long and Higgins (2000) discuss pursuing "intercultural inquiry" as a way of developing literacy strategies in a context that is immediately meaningful. In intercultural inquiry, students explore differences between each other's cultural beliefs and expectations regarding gender, class, race, and other issues. Their research indicates that when students inquire into "rival hypotheses" or competing claims about the world and how it should work, they were highly engaged and learned to recognize, interrogate, and more deeply understand various perceptions and constructions of the world, including their own. Wells (1999) very similar work with "dialogic inquiry" reached the same conclusions.

The culminating event of inquiry units is for students to display their position by creating some kind of artifact. Research in educational psychology (cf. Lehrer, 1993) has established that learning is not internalized or owned by students until it is reorganized and transformed and represented in a new set of signs that is the students' own. They will not achieve deep understanding until this kind of "transformation" or "transmediation" has occurred. The knowledge artifact could be a piece of writing, a hypermedia stack, a poster, a video, a musical composition-anything that clearly communicates their position on the question. Inquiry units, then, encourage students to become both critical consumers of a wide variety of texts and informed producers of them for the purpose of staking a position in a meaningful conversation.

Inquiry and flow
Although we have advocated units of this sort throughout our careers, our work on this project has helped us better account for their power, for inquiry units work to create the conditions of flow experience that the boys found so compelling. First, inquiry necessitates a sense of control and competence. The topic of inquiry can be negotiated with students. But even if the teacher or curriculum guides us to a topic of inquiry, there will still be choices about what to inquire into, what to make of what has been learned, what position to take on the issue (since issues always have multiple perspectives), how to present your findings to others, and what kind of social action should be taken as a result of your position.

In inquiry units, teachers can help students develop competence because students will have extended experiences pursuing the issue in question. That means what students learn as they read one text can be applied when they read the next. Moreover, when students have a stake in using texts to grapple with a question that matters, they'll be very motivated to learn the reading strategies, search techniques, or data collection tools they need.

Inquiry also provides a challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill because any rich topic about a contested issue can provide many possible questions and many levels of research. Students can choose a subtopic that interests them and pursue it by reading whatever texts are available that are appropriately challenging. In this way, everyone in a class can be working at an appropriate level of skill and still be involved in the democratic classroom project of exploring and teaching each other about their various findings around the common issue. Students are motivated to learn because the learning is contextualized in a situation that provides clear goals and feedback. The students in an inquiry classroom need to know certain things to pursue and conclude their inquiries, so that they can represent and share what they have learned. Feedback is provided continuously as they see to what degree they have understood the multiple perspectives around the issue and to what degree they are ready to stake their own position.

This kind of sharing ties in to the theme of the importance of the social. Inquiry is best conducted in groups for the purposes of informing and convincing others. In inquiry situations, students learn literacy strategies and practices with a variety of different texts through active participation in what Tharp and Gallimore (1988) call "joint productive activities," in which a community works together in complementary ways to reach a common goal-instead of individually and in isolation from real world concerns. Moreover, because inquiry results in taking a public stance and creating an artifact to represent that stance, it makes students learning visible and accountable to the classroom community in ways traditional instruction does not. All of these factors together suggest that in inquiry units students will focus on the immediate experience. To be sure, they'll be gaining skills, strategies, and knowledge that they can apply in the future. But they'll be gaining them in the healthy work of the present.

How inquiry challenges the traditional. Conducting inquiries of the sort we have described here takes time. Although this works for the boys' desire for competence, sustained engagement, and for in-depth explorations of ideas, it of course works against much current curricula and the current reform and testing movements with their push for the coverage of information. The conditions of flow require that we reconceive of how time is used and spent in schools.

Inquiry also shifts literacy curricula from the traditional "teacher/information centered" model, the aim of which is to transmit information, and goes well beyond a "student centered model" of natural discovery, to a "learning centered model" with the aim of both capitalizing on the expertise that students bring with them to class and explicitly teaching to make them more expert in ways of reading, writing, and thinking that are valued in the classroom and the workplace (See Wilhelm, Baker and Dube, 2001, for a full discussion of these competing models of teaching and learning).

Inquiry-based instruction also challenges the prevalence of the "literalist" model of instruction (Seitz, 1999, cited in Beach and Myers, 2001) that focuses on "conveying literal information or stated positions", instead encouraging adopting a "metaphoric" model that "emphasizes the uses and practices of language in constructing meaning" (Beach and Myers, p. 7). The learning centered or metaphoric approach helps students to learn about the power and work that texts can do and the actions they can take to affect the immediate environment, problem or cultural situation. This approach emphasizes learning ways to negotiate and invent meanings around crucial issues and leads to using language to take action around these issues. In these cases, language is part of meaningful and transformative project.

Angela Bird

Thanks, Jeff, for this superb material on inquiry. The comments made by you and Charles connect with discussions I've been involved in with colleagues, relating to the importance of engaging kids in the curriculum. I was most interested in your comments about teaching what we think kids need to know in combination with the quality of the immediate experience. This is most pertinent I think for emerging adolescents. Many kids at this time become turned off education and as literacy educators it is a challenge for us to not only focus on literacy but on engaging kids in the curriculum. The notion of a curriculum of inquiry, although not a new one, is one that is worth rethinking especially with pressures on schools to meet literacy outcomes and targets while at the same time dealing with challenging student behaviours. I was also challenged by Alan Luke's scenario of the Flipper unit. This made me think about the purpose of what I do and whether opportunities are missed and that while kids might appear to be engaged it might be that they are busy and not causing trouble. I asked myself: "Are they learning something new, are they thinking and building on existing knowledge?" These are difficult questions because of the complex nature of teaching and learning. As an English teacher I feel privileged and at times daunted by the possibilities that teaching English provides. Through texts kids have the opportunity to explore the self and others, to examine all kinds of issues and escape into other worlds. The kinds of thinking opportunities that arise are only limited by the texts I chose and the questions I ask. That's another challenge I have as a teacher; making the most of the texts that are out there and the opportunities they provide.

Jeff Wilhelm

Thanks for your comments, Angela. A landmark study in the U.S., John Goodlad's A Place Called School, argued that school is "an uneasy truce between bored students who agree not to cause too much trouble and overworked teachers who agree not to make too many demands on students." Our own boys research, just completed, paints a very bleak picture of the disengagement of boys in school. However, there are seeds of hope because 1) they were all (including very poor students and at-risk kids) engaged in some form of literacy outside of school, and 2) most had some kind of experience in school - usually with inquiry or design projects where they inquired into an issue and then made things - that had engaged them. However, they felt that such experiences were anomalies and just plain good luck. They did not expect school to be different than it was. They and their teachers clearly suffered from "habitus", the commonsense but erroneous notion that things are as they naturally have to be, and that they cannot be transformed.

I am including below a couple of short examples of assisting students to understand the processes necessary to understanding a new text type. The following is the conclusion to Chapter 3 of Reading Don’t Fix no Chevies. In it are several short examples of ways to assist students in reading new text types. And I'd hasten to add that particular text types often lend themselves to studying particular topics. For example, oratorical poetry, featured below, can lend itself to a study of social pressures and social change. Kids can explore how texts shape thinking and how they lead (or don't lead) to particular kinds of change. In the same unit, kids could also inquire into how particular kinds of musical choices are oratorical, serve as identity markers for themselves, and how these choices align them with and against particular philosophies and ideas about ways to be in the world. Learning how to read oratorical poetry, then, connects to popular culture and is done in the service of understanding oneself, the world, choices to be taken in the world, possible social action projects, etc. Projects that could come out of such a unit could be oratorical poetry of one's one, a speech, a video or hypermedia document, a musical composition staking a position on an issue, a public service announcement, social action campaign and so on.

Here’s the conclusion to the chapter:

What This Makes Us Think About: Where Do We Start?
The most compelling question this chapter raised for us is, Where do we start when we plan instruction? We think our data fundamentally challenge the starting point from which many teachers, ourselves included, proceed.

In planning instruction it seems to be a commonsense idea to start by asking "What am I preparing them for?" The answers we tend to provide to this question vary: for the unit test, or college, or the upcoming state assessment, or next year's class, or success in the world of work–each one undoubtedly important. But if we want our students to bring something of the passion to our classes that they bring to the activities in which they engage outside of school, our data suggest that we have to start by asking another question right along with it: "What is the quality of the experience I want them to have today?"

This isn't a question educators are used to asking. Our friend Brian White, who read a draft of our book, told us that our analysis reminded him of a metaphor he heard in a curriculum theory class taught by Herbert Kliebard at the University of Wisconsin. "In the education as preparation view" Kliebard argued, "life is a concert--and education is the bus that takes you there." In such a view, as long as some students ultimately hear the music, it doesn't matter how long or bumpy the ride is for them.

But the essential characteristic of flow experiences is that they enrich the present. When the engaged readers in our study talked about reading, they explained that it was the enjoyment they experienced while reading that made them rank reading high on their lists. When we get home from our adult book clubs, it's the fun we had while we were there that makes us so look forward to the next meeting.

How much changes when we ask "What is the quality of the experience I want them to have today?" instead of or along with "What am I preparing them for?" A lot, we think. When we have applied this new question to our own teaching of preservice teachers, we see that it makes us more immediately accountable for our curricular and instructional decisions. It means we can't, for example, select a difficult text for our reading list and say simply "This is important for them to know in the future." It means we have to think about the kind of instruction that will make their engagement with that book immediately rewarding.

Doing this kind of thinking has caused us to look for inspiration in unlikely places. We suspect that many of our readers regard video games with suspicion or even contempt, as symptomatic of our students' need for flashy visuals and instant gratification, things that are odds with what they get in our classes. But our study has convinced us that thinking about video games can be a useful guide, or heuristic, for us as teachers because by their very nature, video games are designed to hook their players by providing flow experiences. Because they get more difficult as players get more accomplished, they provide both a feeling of competence and an appropriate level of challenge. Because the goals are clear, they provide unambiguous feedback.

Rather than provide a quick catalog of ways that we might create the same conditions in our classrooms, we'd like to take a single implication and explore it in greater depth, for we think that our data speak powerfully to the way curricula are organized. When Applebee, Burroughs, and Stevens (2000) examined the curricular structure of the classes of a group of experienced and highly-regarded literature teachers, they found that in the vast majority of them, teachers and students made very few connections across texts.

Unless curricula are structured so that the understandings students gain in one text or activity can be brought forward to the next one, they can't develop a sense of competence. Instead, as our respondents told us, they're likely to feel overmatched and then resistant. But if students can bring their learning from one text to the next they can feel equipped to encounter their new reading. Moreover, they'll be more likely to understand why they're doing it.

In our last chapter, we're going to more fully explore this issue of sequencing assignments so that students develop strategic knowledge in one activity or assignment that they can bring forward to serve them and build on in the next activity or assignment. Right now, though, we want to stress that we think the notion of assignment sequencing that our data suggest to us challenges many common practices. When you play a video game you know the rules and get better at abiding by them and using them to your advantage. When you read a certain kind of text like a satire or an editorial, the same thing happens. But the genre divisions that inform textbooks and curricula are simply too broad to provide the same kind of experience. Are short stories sufficiently similar that one reads them all in similar ways? Poetry? In many American literature anthologies Dickinson and Whitman appear close to each other. But the fact that both wrote poems in the same country at about the same time doesn't mean that they have the same expectations of their readers. In fact, what it takes to read the free verse of Whitman is completely different from what is required to read the lyric poetry of Dickinson.

So while short stories might not be a useful category, short stories with unreliable first-person narrators might. Accepting the invitation to read such stories requires one to identify what might make a narrator reliable or unreliable in certain circumstances. It requires identifying the facts of the story that are beyond question. It requires applying standards from outside the story to the interpretation of those facts. (See Smith, 1991, for a more complete discussion of judging narrator reliability.)

Other sets of stories that share the same expectations of readers might also be usefully grouped. Stories told through letters and diaries, for example, require attention to dates in a way that other stories don't. But more than just strategies are typically involved in responding to a genre. Stories told through diaries typically require assessing how and why a character changes. And if the diary is by an adolescent, they typically require thinking about what it means to grow up and whether the character is making positive progress in that direction. Survival stories typically require a special attention to the setting. They also require readers to think hard about how people relate to nature.

Our object here is not to make exhaustive lists, for slicing genres so thinly would involve teaching a virtually limitless number of rules that had very limited application. It seems to us, rather, that we can help our students feel competent in playing the game by identifying relatively broad genres that invite the application of similar interpretive strategies. Thinking of poetry as a genre probably does not work, so putting Whitman and Dickinson together might not be sensible. But maybe grouping Whitman with some Sandberg and some Ginsberg and some rap in a unit on what might be called oratorical poetry would. Ricardo didn't like reading plays because he was baffled by them. We wonder how much experience he had reading them. If his experience is like most students, the answer is likely one a year. We wonder how he would have felt if he had experience reading short dialogues and then one act plays as a way to gain experience in understanding the subtext of dialogue and of imagining the scenes in which that dialogue takes place. We wonder how he would have felt if his teachers had shown him "the road and the path" and had given him repeated practice in traveling it. We think his attitude and his competence would improve dramatically.

We want to stress that when we look to video games for inspiration we're doing more than saying study has to be leavened with a bit of fun. If, say, we were faced with the requirement of teaching Twelfth Night (as was one group of teachers we observed) or another text that we felt would be too difficult for our students, creating the conditions of a flow experience means far more than tossing in an occasional wordsearch or Jeopardy game. It means instead that we have to set up a sequence of texts and instruction so that students will understand why they are reading, how they ought to be reading, and that they're able to do the reading. We want to stress as well that our attention to students' likes and dislikes in this chapter doesn't mean that we are simply saying "Give them reading that relates to their interests." After all, the boys' interests were sufficiently different that doing so would mean a class could never read a common text. Rather we are saying that if we understand why they like what they like, we can work to create the conditions that make it more likely that they will genuinely engage in learning what they need to know. These conditions are those of "flow" experience, which require us (among other things) to set appropriate challenges and help students to develop and name competence in social situations. Sequencing can help us to do this.

All right! I am going to officially close our forum discussions about Vygotsky.

Thanks to all who participated and shared their ideas; thanks also to those who "lurked" and participated on the periphery. Many very substantive ideas were shared. It's gratifying to hear teachers thinking so hard about their teaching and innovating so courageously in the face of many obstacles. For this, I thank you even more.

I'll close with a brief sharing. In the U.S. two important reviews of American teaching (one by Arthur Applebee and one by George Hillocks) both found that the vast majority of teachers at the secondary (and tertiary, in the case of Hillocks) level taught from a teacher-centred, information-transmission model (upwards of 90%, according to Applebee). Most of the remaining teachers took a student-centred, natural language learning/discovery kind of approach. Very few took the learning centred, transformation of participation approach advocated by Vygotskian thinkers. (Remember that these models are never pure, but teachers tend to teach from a dominant perspective.)

Even more interesting to me is that when Hillocks interviewed teachers from different perspectives (reported in his intriguing book Ways of Thinking/Ways of Teaching), he found that those coming from an information-transmission model were almost always negative about their students' abilities to learn (he called them "informationist-pessimists" or something along those lines). They did not believe that students could do complex tasks and that they therefore needed to be spoon fed, with information doled out in dribs and drabs. They blamed the students when learning did not occur.

On the other hand, every single constructivist/Vygotksian teacher was positive about their students' ability to learn given the right assistance (a responsibility they saw as their own). Their thinking matched that of Benjamin Bloom's work on human potential, in which he found that almost anybody can learn almost anything if given the right support. When students did not learn, these teachers considered how they might teach differently to help them and did not blame the students. ALL OF THESE TEACHERS WERE OPTIMISTS - AND HILLOCKS NAMED THEM "CONSTRUCTIVIST-OPTIMISTS" - NONE OF THEM WERE PESSIMISTIC ABOUT STUDENT ABILITIES!!!

Though the forum is over, I'd leave you with these questions:

1. Are the pessimistic or optimistic attitudes of teachers a cause or an effect of their learning theories and teaching models?

2. Which teachers do you think were happiest and most stimulated? Whose students were happiest and most stimulated?

Again, I thank you all for your participation and wish you the best of luck in your all-important future teaching endeavours! It has been a treat to work with you!

Charles Morgan

On behalf of the members of the English classroom forum, I would like to thank you, Jeff, for your leadership of this discussion. Your deep knowledge, enormous professional generosity and exceptional ability to communicate have made this a most enjoyable and significant discussion. Feedback on the discussion from teachers around the state has been extremely positive.

Your contribution to the professional learning of Tasmanian and Australian teachers during the short time you have been in Australia has been remarkable and I wish we could find a way to keep you here permanently.

You have our best wishes and respect.