Holy smokes! Teaching Study Strategies in Developmental Education speaks to those higher-order issues that I talked about in my last post. Though the audience for this book seems to be reading and study strategy instructors, because this is about developmental students, I'm in!
Based on the title, it seemed logical to start off with the article "Reading and Learning Strategies: Recommendations for the Twenty-First Century" by Michele L. Simpson, Norman A. Stahl, and Michelle Anderson Francis.* Teachers, don't fall off your chairs when I tell you that Simpson, Stahl, and Anderson Francis suggest that active learning is critical for developmental students. They also say that students will acheive more when they transfer their study skills across disciplines, learning a variety of strategies and how to determine which strategy should be applied to the tasks they will face in other classes (14).
Something that I suspected that was confirmed in this article was about students' beliefs about the learning process, including studying, when they got to college: "...it is not atypical for college freshmen to believe that learning should be easy, completed quickly (i.e., the night before in a cramming session), and should happen to them because of what others do for them (i.e., the professor did not teach me how to solve that problem)" (18). The writers then posit that the most successful students know that the responsibility for their learning lies with themselves and are able to apply useful strategies (18).
Okay, got it. If I can help students to understand that learning new concepts (or, in the case of grammar, old concepts that they didn't get the first or second (third?!) time) can be difficult and therefore requires time and commitment on their parts, that's useful.
The authors also suggest that instructors learn what is happening in the curriculum of other disciplines and to "...teach students to be cue seekers who understand the language and metalanguage of the college curriculum" (20). Okay, so how? Perhaps, as the authors' suggest, by helping students learn how to interpret syllabi and interact professionally with instructors during office hours and how to analyze test questions in other courses to determine how to best answer those questions (20).
Ultimately, we do our best as instructors when we learn about the particular needs of the students who are in our classrooms and, based on that information, change how we deliver the material (25). Monitoring what our students are learning throughout the semester is important, too. The authors suggest that students could write about their own experiences with education at the start of the semester and continue to reflect on their college coursework in journals throughout the rest of the semester (26).
So, folks, there you have it. Get students actively involved in not just the subject matter of the course (like comma usage), but also help them understand why it's important to learn and the usefulness of the concept beyond that day in class. We'd also do well to encourage our students, as the concepts won't necessarily come easily. This is the most critical thing for me to keep in mind, especially with the grammar concepts that I picked up on easily as a kid and now have a harder time teaching.
Above all? It's not just about fragments or the difference between its and it's. It's also about learning how to think.
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*A note on citation: For these blog entries, I will always introduce the article name and authors as well as including a picture of the text from which the articles came (as appropriate). I will also refer to page numbers. I know that it's not a formal style. This is my blog, though, so I'm the boss.
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