13.+Summary+Reflections

Aaron and Alice were glad to be randomly assigned to this project together, as we have been in groups together previously, and know that we both will put a good deal of effort into our work. We also have created a routine of being comfortable editing each others’ work, and have a pattern established for writing research papers together! Since we are both senior English teachers, we also have similar goals in pushing our students to think more deeply about literature and reading in general. We both came to see that our being paired together in this assignment was not only serendipitous, but perhaps essential: we can't imagine having worked with a teacher or TL in a vastly different "school situation" than our own; though such a differences are, of course, often illuminating, they are also often difficult to navigate with regards to assignment logistics, relevance, and being able to operate and imagine within a context that makes the assignment meaningful and directly applicable to our teaching lives. Our careers indicate that we love reading, and we look for ways to help our students to develop a similar love of reading. As such, it would have been potentially frustrating to be paired with a "less relevant" partner for this assignment--our reading strategy research may have felt less productive, worthwhile, and ultimately less effective for our students' learning. We would like to formally acknowledge the wisdom of our instructor in making such an appropriate choice!

Through the project, we realized that many strategies we use are so integrated into our daily practice that it is difficult to extract them and put them under the microscope—never mind find a source for where we learned them. Even so, with the focus on extending student thinking and insight, we were able to recognize that we can find new strategies to help us push our students just that little bit further. The assignment was beneficial, then, in the way in which it asked us to step back and narrow down exactly //what// it is that we do well and //how// it is that we do it.

When reflecting on these //what’s// and //how’s//, we found that this sense of “doing well” that we wanted to focus in on was essentially putting words to the feeling that we get when our students (and us as the teacher, of course) are collectively in a state of what author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as “flow” in his book titled the same: the state of being engaged with the task, subject, and ideas at hand in such a way that definite and productive movement forward is constant and noticeable, but almost effortless and always enjoyable. It is something akin to the everyday person’s equivalent of what long distance runners sometimes refer to as “runner’s high.” (For a quick overview of the basic tenets of “flow,” see this short article at [|pickthebrain.com]). When our classroom is in this state, we //know//—we definitively know (and anyone who walked into our classroom at that moment would definitely //know// as well)—that all parties are engaged, that real learning is happening, and that neurons are being formed and reformed to create pathways that will—eventually, with enough work and coaching—lead to new understandings and new levels of intellectual awareness and skills aptitude.

As such, we reflected on times in which this occurs in class and thought about the strategies that are employed when flow is most likely to occur. Flow occurs only when students are engrossed in challenging, higher level thinking and doing tasks; flow does not occur when students are asked a collection of, say, twenty fact-based recall questions (no matter how engaging the topic). We found that, as secondary English teachers with “fairly capable” students for the most part, we are always seeking for ways to encourage and develop deeper-thinking, inference and analysis skills. We also love when our students are highly engaged in such tasks and flowing (the two go hand in hand). The trick, then, was to therefore try and both recall strategies that have been instrumental in encouraging flow, and to also seek out more, new strategies that seemed likely to encourage flow.

We both already knew that some students have a greater love of reading. We also knew that pinpointing why this was the case for some and not for others, and devising effective means to cultivating this love in the classroom for all, were tasks that were perhaps next to impossible to fully achieve. However, through our research and reading, it was interesting to discover new findings linking the ability to achieve insight and to successfully think deeper and make connections (essentially analyzing and inferring) as the potential reason these students love reading—and perhaps this combination of deeper thinking and a sense of passion is what is happening during flow. Now armed with glimpses into a greater understanding regarding the //what’s// and //how’s//, we also have a new set of evidence to suggest and explain why we need to teach all students to make those connections that others find naturally, to push all students toward thinking into Bloom’s higher levels, and to encourage them to engage in the text just a little deeper. As students internalize and polish these skills, they will develop a greater appreciation for literature, and will increase their enjoyment—and will find perhaps find themselves in a state of flow that encourages active and meaningful connection with texts not just “because it is school and I am supposed to be doing this,” but because “I am genuinely engaged with this right now at this moment in my life in this classroom.”

We would love it if that occurred, and we are hoping that our newly-sharpened focus on analysis and inference reading strategies nudges us and our students a little closer toward—and perhaps straight into—streams of reading flow.