It’s easy for me to get caught up in a rush, both personally and professionally. There’s always something to check off my to-do list: another standard to cover, another appointment to keep, another event or meeting to attend. Lately, I’ve been trying to slow down. Although I can’t completely rid myself of my duties and obligations, I’ve realized that I can enjoy and get more out of them when I allow myself to be present in the moment, stop myself from thinking about what’s next, and give my time and attention to the matter at hand.
It has occurred to me that my students have a similar problem. Many times I see them rushing through their work, trying to get it done so they can move on to the next thing. My class is just one of six or seven courses my high school students are taking, so I understand that they may not always have as much time and motivation to slow down and think through their work as I might like. Instead, I’ve started looking for opportunities to slow down within the classroom, ways to help my students see the value of putting extra thought and time into their work.
I began using this activity when I found myself repeatedly asking students to “go deeper” with their thinking and analysis of a text. While we are in the midst of reading a novel, I ask students to choose three quotations from their nightly reading. I don’t give much more direction other than to choose things that they think are important, interesting, and/or confusing. When students return to class with their quotations, they choose their favorite one (each student says theirs out loud to avoid repeats) and write it at the top of a piece of paper. We move our desks into a large circle and pass the papers to the right. Students spend one to two minutes responding to the quotation in front of them. Before their first response, I give them some ideas for what they can write about:
Why do you think this quotation is important?
What does it tell us about a character or event?
Is there a deeper meaning below the surface?
Does it foreshadow a future event?
Is it ironic in any way?
Does it remind you of something else?
Does it raise any questions?
The one rule of the activity is that each response needs to bring up something new, rather than just restating the same idea over and over again in different words. As the papers continue to move around the circle and all of the obvious ideas are expressed, the process gets more difficult. Students have to think a lot harder about the quotation and begin to look at it from different angles.
This activity typically takes up an entire class period, and sometimes the quotations don’t even make it all the way back to their original owners. Afterward, we look back over the chain of responses and I ask students to identify the most insightful ones. They are almost always the responses at the end of the chain. The lesson that is illustrated for students is that the best ideas aren’t always the ones that pop into your head first.
Many times when my students are presented with a more challenging text, they complain that even after reading it, they just don’t get it. While working through a unit on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, I was hearing this complaint a lot. Poe’s work is full of dense, complicated sentence structures and obscure vocabulary. When asked about the reading strategies they were using to improve their comprehension, most students admitted that they just kept plowing through the text, skipping over things that didn’t make sense. My students needed to learn how to slow down as they read, how to pause and check their understanding before continuing. If they weren’t going to stop on their own, I decided, I would have to build reading breaks into the story. I reformatted the next story we read by breaking it into one- or two-paragraph sections. I started by reading the first paragraph aloud and thinking aloud to show that even I, as the teacher, need to pause and reflect on what I have just read.
I also demonstrated how to annotate the text as you read. I explained to students that sometimes their annotations might simply summarize a particularly difficult section, but that other times their annotations could reflect what they were inferring about character, setting, or plot. Students continued reading the story in this vein, stopping at each break to assess their understanding, annotate the text, and talk briefly with their group members. Although it took us a lot longer to read the story this way, the majority of students reported understanding it much better. Pausing to reflect while reading is a simple strategy that any student can do; it’s just that many of them are in too much of a hurry to do it. After building the breaks into the reading, students came to see that slowing down was a strategy they could turn to when reading became difficult.
One Beginning, Three Ways
In their rush to start on a piece of writing, students can tend to make the first sentence a throwaway, a means of getting started and on to the better stuff. But a good, effective lead is crucial to a piece of writing, and I want my students to see that you’re never going to open a book that has as its first line, “Today I’m going to be writing about . . .” We started by turning to our independent reading books and checking out the leads crafted by professional authors.
After we had many examples to look at, we began to put names to the strategies that the authors were using and grouping the leads into categories, such as dialogue, flashback, focus of sensory detail, mysterious, and more. When we went to write our next essay, I required students to write three different leads to the piece, employing a different strategy for each.
After students had crafted their leads, they shared them with their group members, who gave their opinions about which lead was most intriguing and would make them want to read on. Most often, students ended up choosing the second or third lead that they had created for the piece, once again demonstrating that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t always the most creative or original. Instead of dashing off the first sentence that comes to mind, students were creating leads that were more interesting and enticing for the reader.
Each of these strategies is grounded in the simple principle that taking the time to slow down, reflect, and put more thought into reading and writing produces a richer result.