One thing my own professor has done that makes the time spent reading feel valuable is that they provide a reading guide, with a set of questions that I know will be helpful to know the answers to on the test. I get all the reading done and I actually know what I'm supposed to learn from it, because some chapters go on for so long that I've forgotten what I read at the beginning by the time I get to the end, but if I take guided notes and review them, I actually learn what I feel I am meant to learn. I'm currently condensed classes taking classes at Arizona State University, covering 13 weeks of material in about 6, so it's a lot of reading.
Hey! I'm a student but this video is so accurate! I'd love to read the textbook but I'm very slow, will you ever make a video on how to read textbooks faster and more efficiently? ^^
Glad to hear that. As far as the video you requested, I WOULD make it, but I don't have much good news to share. Reading is slow by nature-that's how knowledge does its work. Any effort to shortcut the process won't get you to the goal you're looking for. However, I do think there's such a thing as wasted time reading, and maybe I could make something addressing how to read and understand the book in the LEAST amount of time.
It's heartbreaking when I give the students videos/podcasts/texts and they STILL DONT DO IT!!!!!!!! That's why I am spending precious weeks now showing them HOW to read EFFECTVIELY in class.........................
I know that not all of my students do all the reading all the time; however, I think a lot of them do and I have pretty good pass rates. Essentially I give them assignments to go with the reading in addition to giving them pop reading check quizzes. I try to throw in some easy questions that you get if you read, along with some SBMC questions. With that being said, I want to do two things differently next year: 1) attempt to give them a little less reading by skipping some of the content (i hope this doesn't bite me) and 2) teach them how to read better in my class. Thank you for the video!
THANK YOU!!! This helps so much. Near the end of my first semester doing dual credit EMT and they aren’t reading the text book and it shows. But few have a chance of passing the national test. This gives me hope to help them succeed in the spring.
This subject gets even bigger in the ELA classroom. When covering a novel, I really do need the students to read at home. Yes, we read in class as well, but the more reading we do in class, the less time there is to do other things to help enhance the knowledge of the text. Again, my students will say they simply do not have enough time. I am starting to think that this is not always a legitimate excuse as many students in today's world are busy with the instant rewards that come with today's entertainment. I digress. I have tried giving students options as far as listening to the audiobook. Many will not opt to do even that much. What I think it ultimately comes down to is time management. I think this is where I kind of understand. There is so much more calling at students today than there was before the turn of the century. Time management is something they need to be introduced to long before high school; if not, then I need to find a way to teach that to them. Any thoughts?
I knew this professor that I grew up with. Unfortunately he died not too long ago (April 7th.) And he sent me some problems that the university gives to high school seniors (I was in... middle school at the time.) I solved two problems... He sent me back an email where he told me that I did the wrong thing by using the multiple choice answers to answer the problem! I think there is a big disconnect between teachers and students. Of course I used the multiple choice answers to answer the problem! What person wouldn't?!? He wanted me to learn from the problems he sent me. But that would set me up for a less-than-ideal situation because instead being rewarded for what I knew I would be punished. I'd see students who knew less than me get better grades and I'd be punished for doing things the "virtuous way" (most of the time) because no one knew I was doing it that way. I have no problem with not being rewarded for doing good work, but I definitely don't want to feel punished for it!!! I wrote a draft to him that I never sent, and I can tell that I was really demotivated and annoyed by his response. At the age I couldn't/didn't understand why he wrote that. I started second guessing, it seems, whether I was right... It's kind of like using a hammer to hit a rock. Each hit causes micro-cuts, but if the student (the one hitting the rock) were graded on the 20th hit when it is the 22nd when the rock would have broken he/she would get a D grade for maybe just chipping off some pieces. So no wonder students "cheat" and use a power tool. :-) Why be punished for good work!?!
My middle school and high school American history class was a two year course of study. It began in 8th grade and finished in 9th grade. The textbook was not edited well. It was chock full of information and gave more info than necessary. The quizzes and exams were questions that were worth multiple points and they were in fact extremely challenging. The quizzes and exams came from a workbook binding to the teacher's textbook with answers. Hardly any student passed with a B because the course work was so much. The review questions in the back of each chapter helped outline the chapter easier because the went from beginning of chapter to the end of the chapter. The textbook title was: America: The People and the Dream (1993).
Modeling is sooooo important. They need to know how to decode a text! How to take notes is also the first 2-3 things we do in my APUSH course. What's really important? What do you really need to know? I have them do essential questions for each chapter. Helps them focus. For struggling readers a guided reading handout can be helpful too. This can be problematic though. They learn how to pick and peck through the Guided Reading questions/prompts and never really learn how to docode and read the text for themselves. "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day...teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Good conversations to have! We teachers need to have these conversations!
I started the year doing that and they did well, but I shifted and went real basic and told them to follow a 5W's approach and I grade their notes as a part of their exam. They have to turn in their notes as a part of the test, and then I create a separate homework assignment and grade that. In the test, I then identify the questions they got wrong where the information was missing from their notes. This has created a collaborative environment of note sharing, which I wasn't expecting. They are doing better.
Great stuff, as usual. (Good luck on A Secular Age! It's on my list, heard great things.) I'm a first year WHAP teacher, and for what it's worth, I've had some success giving students guided reading notes for some structure as they go through the textbook, then holding them accountable with a weekly quiz that could be any day of the week (we meet every other day). I didn't start out this way (not that smart!), but just found it with trial and error in my APEH class I've been teaching for a few years. I think it basically works because it gives very clear incentives (weekly grade), but they're getting some 'modeling' of what it's like to read for what's important (like you suggested with your in-class reading example). They can turn in hand-written copies of their reading guides for a little extra credit on tests, for a little extra incentive (and to encourage hand-written work which cuts down on distraction, to your point). I will say, the reading guides took/are taking *a lot* of work to prepare and tweak. They're a mixture of key concepts, guiding questions, IDs, charts to help organize, compare, and synthesize information. Which leads me to a question about giving options like videos to get the content. I'm open to it, but I'm wondering how to hold them accountable and give them tangible grade incentives on a daily/weekly basis for the videos. I'd rather not go through every video and create a 'viewing guide' (laziness factor creeping in). Does that make sense?
Makes TOTAL sense. I know a lot of teachers give note guides for textbook reading, and I think it's great that you give them some incentive to do the work. But you're right about the massive amount of work that requires. What I'm trying to figure out (and I haven't yet) is how to incentivize the reading while NOT adding hours of extra work to my week.
Really helpful and thought-provoking, as usual. I agree that modeling good reading strategies is key, as is teaching students how to pull out the most important information and record it in a way that is useful to them (i.e. notes that aren't just a dump of information). I still haven't hit on the solution to the latter one, in particular. I like the Guided Notes idea. Any others?
Thanks for telling the truth about the school system as well as the students mindset resulting off it That it’s not about learning but about grades or passing the exams
As you did with the classroom reading example, I always give students focus question(s) for the reading, and tell them to look for the answers to those questions in the reading. The focus questions have to be thoughtful ones that lead them to understanding what the author wants to say, rather than just trivia. Then, we eat with those issues in class the next day (including with a quick quiz). At the start of the year, I go through an exercise that shows them that what is or is not important in a reading depends on the question that the author is trying to answer.
Seems to me that this is a student discipline problem, not a teaching methodology problem. The solution shouldn't be more inspiring teachers, although that definitely helps. The proper and universal solution would be for parents better to discipline their children so that they do the reading whether they like it or not. They can then use videos and other sources for supplementary learning material. The textbooks, provided they're accurate, however, should never be discarded.
Students don't read textbooks because 1. Textbooks are boring. And 2. Many students don't have the reading ability, vocabulary, and background knowledge to understand it well. So, I don't use textbooks. I use real books. People love stories. And they retain and learn what they read in a story. Read aloud and silent reading. And discuss what you read. And maybe write about what you read. And classic movies. Not the whole movie at once, but 20 minutes per day. And discuss and maybe write about it. And I also teach and test on vocabulary. And essay questions on what we read and watched. Kids love this and learn a lot. Reading scores go up. But admin hates it so you have to put on a show when you get observed. I just don't use textbooks. The kids are right. They are boring. And for me, the goal is not memorizing some facts that will soon be forgotten. It is helping the kids understand and analyze life. To read and think deeply. To write well and to articulate their thoughts. And to enjoy the process. Education is not just preparation for life. Education is life.
A question that should be asked is whether teachers should continue reading textbooks or just read full texts instead? The benefit of a textbook is that it allows you to cram a wide variety of ideas in something that could really be read in a few weeks if the student is dedicated enough. But a drawback is that the student only gets snippets of that information that the textbook publishers want the students to know and thus this method takes away from deep reading. One of the most beneficial classes I ever had was a War History class where every week we were assigned an entire book to read (yes, a whole book each week like All Quiet on the Western Front) and then the professor would give us a quiz on that book with random information from the book being asked about so that if you just read/watched a summary of the book, you wouldn't know the answer but if you read the book well then you should know the answer.
One point I would like to make is that you make time for what is importance. I didn’t grow up with cell phones and internet access. But we still wanted to hang out with our friends listen to music, watch tv and go to the video arcade. The majority of us had part time jobs by the time we were 15. So, we had study parties where we would get together and help each other out. Wr would look over each others. It’s as some were better at taken notes in class than others. We asks questions and wrote them down to ask in class we had no issues finding the teacher and asking for help. And to our parents education was a priority and a privilege that we needed to take advantage of. Maybe a little less time on the phone screen and a little more in a book would work miracles on comprehension and concentration levels longer than 5 minutes.
I really wish we were teaching them as littles that cramming is not effective learning. I give my college students some tests early on and then I ask: Are you getting the grade you want? How are you studying? Then we talk about effective studying based on science snd misconceptions about cramming. Then we go over how to make a 90-minute session more effective.
I graduated with merits in 1981. How many textbooks did I read? One, in nuclear physics. The professor really sucked, so I had no choice. The rest? I took notes and listened to the lecture. Reading books is not an efficient way to learn.
For the most part American education is presented as a social activity in which the teacher explains to a group everything which they’re required to know so why bother reading the book when clearly you’re not expected to be familiar with its entire contents? Hence the popularity of Cliff’s Notes for cramming for exams. Then also there’s the gentleman’s “C” since for most people college is basically a finishing school for future salespeople and certainly no spawning ground for future academics in most cases. So most people cope with this tiresome activity by attending lectures, taking notes, and then memorizing the notes prior to exams. And it doesn’t help that most textbooks are written by college professors instead of professional writers.
With almost anything in life, if you do it a lot it becomes easy whereas if you seldom do it, it is hard. The issue is getting past that initial struggle.
One thing my own professor has done that makes the time spent reading feel valuable is that they provide a reading guide, with a set of questions that I know will be helpful to know the answers to on the test. I get all the reading done and I actually know what I'm supposed to learn from it, because some chapters go on for so long that I've forgotten what I read at the beginning by the time I get to the end, but if I take guided notes and review them, I actually learn what I feel I am meant to learn. I'm currently condensed classes taking classes at Arizona State University, covering 13 weeks of material in about 6, so it's a lot of reading.
Hey! I'm a student but this video is so accurate! I'd love to read the textbook but I'm very slow, will you ever make a video on how to read textbooks faster and more efficiently? ^^
Glad to hear that. As far as the video you requested, I WOULD make it, but I don't have much good news to share. Reading is slow by nature-that's how knowledge does its work. Any effort to shortcut the process won't get you to the goal you're looking for. However, I do think there's such a thing as wasted time reading, and maybe I could make something addressing how to read and understand the book in the LEAST amount of time.
It's heartbreaking when I give the students videos/podcasts/texts and they STILL DONT DO IT!!!!!!!! That's why I am spending precious weeks now showing them HOW to read EFFECTVIELY in class.........................
I know that not all of my students do all the reading all the time; however, I think a lot of them do and I have pretty good pass rates. Essentially I give them assignments to go with the reading in addition to giving them pop reading check quizzes. I try to throw in some easy questions that you get if you read, along with some SBMC questions. With that being said, I want to do two things differently next year: 1) attempt to give them a little less reading by skipping some of the content (i hope this doesn't bite me) and 2) teach them how to read better in my class. Thank you for the video!
THANK YOU!!! This helps so much. Near the end of my first semester doing dual credit EMT and they aren’t reading the text book and it shows. But few have a chance of passing the national test. This gives me hope to help them succeed in the spring.
This subject gets even bigger in the ELA classroom. When covering a novel, I really do need the students to read at home. Yes, we read in class as well, but the more reading we do in class, the less time there is to do other things to help enhance the knowledge of the text. Again, my students will say they simply do not have enough time. I am starting to think that this is not always a legitimate excuse as many students in today's world are busy with the instant rewards that come with today's entertainment.
I digress. I have tried giving students options as far as listening to the audiobook. Many will not opt to do even that much. What I think it ultimately comes down to is time management. I think this is where I kind of understand. There is so much more calling at students today than there was before the turn of the century. Time management is something they need to be introduced to long before high school; if not, then I need to find a way to teach that to them. Any thoughts?
I knew this professor that I grew up with. Unfortunately he died not too long ago (April 7th.) And he sent me some problems that the university gives to high school seniors (I was in... middle school at the time.) I solved two problems... He sent me back an email where he told me that I did the wrong thing by using the multiple choice answers to answer the problem! I think there is a big disconnect between teachers and students. Of course I used the multiple choice answers to answer the problem! What person wouldn't?!? He wanted me to learn from the problems he sent me.
But that would set me up for a less-than-ideal situation because instead being rewarded for what I knew I would be punished. I'd see students who knew less than me get better grades and I'd be punished for doing things the "virtuous way" (most of the time) because no one knew I was doing it that way. I have no problem with not being rewarded for doing good work, but I definitely don't want to feel punished for it!!! I wrote a draft to him that I never sent, and I can tell that I was really demotivated and annoyed by his response. At the age I couldn't/didn't understand why he wrote that. I started second guessing, it seems, whether I was right...
It's kind of like using a hammer to hit a rock. Each hit causes micro-cuts, but if the student (the one hitting the rock) were graded on the 20th hit when it is the 22nd when the rock would have broken he/she would get a D grade for maybe just chipping off some pieces. So no wonder students "cheat" and use a power tool. :-) Why be punished for good work!?!
My middle school and high school American history class was a two year course of study. It began in 8th grade and finished in 9th grade. The textbook was not edited well. It was chock full of information and gave more info than necessary. The quizzes and exams were questions that were worth multiple points and they were in fact extremely challenging. The quizzes and exams came from a workbook binding to the teacher's textbook with answers. Hardly any student passed with a B because the course work was so much. The review questions in the back of each chapter helped outline the chapter easier because the went from beginning of chapter to the end of the chapter. The textbook title was: America: The People and the Dream (1993).
Modeling is sooooo important. They need to know how to decode a text!
How to take notes is also the first 2-3 things we do in my APUSH course. What's really important? What do you really need to know? I have them do essential questions for each chapter. Helps them focus.
For struggling readers a guided reading handout can be helpful too. This can be problematic though. They learn how to pick and peck through the Guided Reading questions/prompts and never really learn how to docode and read the text for themselves. "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day...teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."
Good conversations to have! We teachers need to have these conversations!
That all sounds brilliant... YOU should be making the video!
@@HeimlersHistoryTeachers Thanks. I don't have the raz-mataz you do, but I'd be happy to share my methods & materials with you.
I started the year doing that and they did well, but I shifted and went real basic and told them to follow a 5W's approach and I grade their notes as a part of their exam. They have to turn in their notes as a part of the test, and then I create a separate homework assignment and grade that. In the test, I then identify the questions they got wrong where the information was missing from their notes. This has created a collaborative environment of note sharing, which I wasn't expecting. They are doing better.
Great stuff, as usual. (Good luck on A Secular Age! It's on my list, heard great things.) I'm a first year WHAP teacher, and for what it's worth, I've had some success giving students guided reading notes for some structure as they go through the textbook, then holding them accountable with a weekly quiz that could be any day of the week (we meet every other day). I didn't start out this way (not that smart!), but just found it with trial and error in my APEH class I've been teaching for a few years. I think it basically works because it gives very clear incentives (weekly grade), but they're getting some 'modeling' of what it's like to read for what's important (like you suggested with your in-class reading example). They can turn in hand-written copies of their reading guides for a little extra credit on tests, for a little extra incentive (and to encourage hand-written work which cuts down on distraction, to your point).
I will say, the reading guides took/are taking *a lot* of work to prepare and tweak. They're a mixture of key concepts, guiding questions, IDs, charts to help organize, compare, and synthesize information. Which leads me to a question about giving options like videos to get the content. I'm open to it, but I'm wondering how to hold them accountable and give them tangible grade incentives on a daily/weekly basis for the videos. I'd rather not go through every video and create a 'viewing guide' (laziness factor creeping in). Does that make sense?
Makes TOTAL sense. I know a lot of teachers give note guides for textbook reading, and I think it's great that you give them some incentive to do the work. But you're right about the massive amount of work that requires. What I'm trying to figure out (and I haven't yet) is how to incentivize the reading while NOT adding hours of extra work to my week.
The acts of reading, note-taking, writing and problem-solving are indispensable to learning, retention and application.
Really helpful and thought-provoking, as usual. I agree that modeling good reading strategies is key, as is teaching students how to pull out the most important information and record it in a way that is useful to them (i.e. notes that aren't just a dump of information). I still haven't hit on the solution to the latter one, in particular. I like the Guided Notes idea. Any others?
Thanks for telling the truth about the school system as well as the students mindset resulting off it
That it’s not about learning but about grades or passing the exams
As you did with the classroom reading example, I always give students focus question(s) for the reading, and tell them to look for the answers to those questions in the reading. The focus questions have to be thoughtful ones that lead them to understanding what the author wants to say, rather than just trivia. Then, we eat with those issues in class the next day (including with a quick quiz). At the start of the year, I go through an exercise that shows them that what is or is not important in a reading depends on the question that the author is trying to answer.
Seems to me that this is a student discipline problem, not a teaching methodology problem. The solution shouldn't be more inspiring teachers, although that definitely helps. The proper and universal solution would be for parents better to discipline their children so that they do the reading whether they like it or not. They can then use videos and other sources for supplementary learning material. The textbooks, provided they're accurate, however, should never be discarded.
Students don't read textbooks because 1. Textbooks are boring. And 2. Many students don't have the reading ability, vocabulary, and background knowledge to understand it well.
So, I don't use textbooks. I use real books. People love stories. And they retain and learn what they read in a story.
Read aloud and silent reading. And discuss what you read. And maybe write about what you read.
And classic movies. Not the whole movie at once, but 20 minutes per day. And discuss and maybe write about it.
And I also teach and test on vocabulary. And essay questions on what we read and watched.
Kids love this and learn a lot. Reading scores go up. But admin hates it so you have to put on a show when you get observed.
I just don't use textbooks. The kids are right. They are boring. And for me, the goal is not memorizing some facts that will soon be forgotten. It is helping the kids understand and analyze life. To read and think deeply. To write well and to articulate their thoughts. And to enjoy the process. Education is not just preparation for life. Education is life.
A question that should be asked is whether teachers should continue reading textbooks or just read full texts instead?
The benefit of a textbook is that it allows you to cram a wide variety of ideas in something that could really be read in a few weeks if the student is dedicated enough.
But a drawback is that the student only gets snippets of that information that the textbook publishers want the students to know and thus this method takes away from deep reading.
One of the most beneficial classes I ever had was a War History class where every week we were assigned an entire book to read (yes, a whole book each week like All Quiet on the Western Front) and then the professor would give us a quiz on that book with random information from the book being asked about so that if you just read/watched a summary of the book, you wouldn't know the answer but if you read the book well then you should know the answer.
One point I would like to make is that you make time for what is importance. I didn’t grow up with cell phones and internet access. But we still wanted to hang out with our friends listen to music, watch tv and go to the video arcade. The majority of us had part time jobs by the time we were 15. So, we had study parties where we would get together and help each other out. Wr would look over each others. It’s as some were better at taken notes in class than others. We asks questions and wrote them down to ask in class we had no issues finding the teacher and asking for help. And to our parents education was a priority and a privilege that we needed to take advantage of. Maybe a little less time on the phone screen and a little more in a book would work miracles on comprehension and concentration levels longer than 5 minutes.
Are the closed captions wrong on this video?
I really wish we were teaching them as littles that cramming is not effective learning. I give my college students some tests early on and then I ask: Are you getting the grade you want? How are you studying? Then we talk about effective studying based on science snd misconceptions about cramming. Then we go over how to make a 90-minute session more effective.
as interesting as a piece of dry shredded wheat. hilarious and amazing. thank you. very helpful.
I'm trying to figure out why i cannot just read the prescribed texts. It's so easy but I just can't do it 😭
The reason why I dont read is because the more I read the more confuse I am. Sometimes, I dont even remember what I read. I am a slow reader too :(
I like shredded wheat. I like reading textbooks too.
I graduated with merits in 1981. How many textbooks did I read? One, in nuclear physics. The professor really sucked, so I had no choice. The rest? I took notes and listened to the lecture. Reading books is not an efficient way to learn.
For the most part American education is presented as a social activity in which the teacher explains to a group everything which they’re required to know so why bother reading the book when clearly you’re not expected to be familiar with its entire contents? Hence the popularity of Cliff’s Notes for cramming for exams. Then also there’s the gentleman’s “C” since for most people college is basically a finishing school for future salespeople and certainly no spawning ground for future academics in most cases. So most people cope with this tiresome activity by attending lectures, taking notes, and then memorizing the notes prior to exams. And it doesn’t help that most textbooks are written by college professors instead of professional writers.
bro just proved progressive education 0:53
I hate textbooks, and I am a teacher. My reason is I don't need an author to tell me how to teach my subject.
A teacher? What subject…woodwork perhaps?
i would rather listen to lectures for 16 hours than read textbooks for 4
I find this struggling to understand books weird. Reading is easy, dictionaries, these are easy to use.
With almost anything in life, if you do it a lot it becomes easy whereas if you seldom do it, it is hard. The issue is getting past that initial struggle.
I had a great teacher once. He taught me so well that l never had to read the text book.
How did he do this? What was his method? What tools did he use?
@@Moomtaz He had a way of explaining things which made everything easy to understand
The topic of the class was ‘making Plasticine animals’.