How to Learn from a Textbook

I'm thinking today about textbooks.

Probably this is because today I gave my Middle School Curriculum & Instruction students an assignment to review curriculum materials. It might also be because I have a textbook that I love that I'm using for teaching World Regional Geography. Okay, and it might also be because I was helping one of my kids take reading notes on a textbook-based reading assignment tonight.

Textbooks are a really great resource for teachers. I remember feeling as an undergraduate Education major a sense of pressure that if I ever relied on a textbook I would somehow be failing my students. But I've definitely come around: textbooks can be an extremely helpful resource to support teaching.

Notice, however, that I said they can be a resource. Just a resource. The textbook is not the be-all-and-end-all for teaching. Yes, textbooks, teacher's manuals, and pacing guides can be helpful. But teaching--real teaching--is more than just relying on the textbook. Certainly novice teachers are likely to rely on textbooks and teachers' guides, and even seasoned educators benefit from such resources, particularly when pressed for time, or when teaching a new content area, or when planning for multiple subjects.

Textbooks are designed and intended to function as learning resources for students, after all.

But the problem is, I think that many educators assume that students will just "know" how to learn from a textbook. I suspect this is because we educators are the ones who (generally) were winners at the game of school--we usually liked school, were successful at learning in school settings, and thrived enough to think we might like to go back and spend our professional lives in the classroom. Frankly, I think this makes us an unreliable and probably biased group for considering the role of the textbook

Most students need to be taught how to use a textbook to really benefit from them. Reading a textbook is different than reading a novel, for example. We have to use different strategies for learning from a textbook than we do for catching the plot points of a story. Pre-reading, re-reading, annotation, and summarizing are strategies that great students might use naturally when reading a textbook, and many teachers who were good students themselves have likely internalized such strategies to the point that they think everyone does this when they read a text.

I'm not so sure that is actually true, however.

As I've become more aware of this, I've been trying to more deliberately teach my students how to read a textbook. Here are a collection of strategies I've been trying in my World Regional Geography course with regard to the textbook I ask my students to read, and finding some success.

First, I give them a reading guide for each chapter I ask them to read. I use a strategy called clink/clunk (which I've previously written about on the blog.) In a nutshell, here's how it works:

• I create a sheet that includes a section-by-section breakdown of the chapter, with columns labeled "clink" and "clunk."
• The table that includes the section-by-section breakdown provides a pre-reading preview of the content, and I encourage them to re-read sections of the text that are troubling along they way.
• As they read each section, they are to think, "Did I understand what I just read?" If they answer "yes," they check the clink column. If they say, "I have a question about this..." they check the clunk column, and jot down their question so they can be sure to ask it in class.
• These "clunk" items guide a significant part of our class discussions the next time we meet up.
• Here's an example clink/clunk sheet to get the picture:

Click to view it larger--so you can actually read it. :-)

This structure gives them the encouragement to read the text mindfully, encouragement to think about what they are reading, and to think about their understanding of what they are reading. And if they don't understand it, I welcome their questions--because the point is that they engage with the text as a learning opportunity!

Another thing I encourage students to do is take reading notes. I have discovered, however, that many college students do not actually know how to do this. (Most high school students, and most middle school students probably also do not know how to do this. Teachers, if you're assigning your students to take reading notes, I strongly encourage you to actually teach this skill.)

There are different ways to take notes while reading. Some people use highlighting and marginalia. (I call this approach "destroying the book." I confess, it pains me to do this, though I know the value of personalizing a book this way. I just love books so much that I hate to mark them up!) Others take actual notes--whether digitally or longhand--as they read. Summarizing is the key. I encourage students to try and take each paragraph that they read and boil it down to just one point--what is the key idea to take away from that section of the text?

The first time I taught the course using this textbook, I wrote reading notes as a model for my students--I even posted them online for their use, so they could see the way I summarized the main ideas from the chapter. Here's an example from the same chapter the clink/clunk sheet above:

I prefer to hand-write notes when I'm reading. (Probably because I'm old...)

I've been encouraging my students in geography class to do this as well, but I recognize that if most of them are doing the clink/clunk approach, they are not likely to also write reading notes. (I'm idealistic, but pragmatic.) But I do think that modeling this sort of note-taking for students is a wise first step, if we expect students to take reading notes themselves.

One more thought about this: I've become pretty solidly convinced that if we are assigning students to read the text, we should read it too. Yes, it takes time to do this, and certainly teachers' time is valuable. However, I've committed to doing this. And, honestly, once I've read the book the first time through, a solid skim is usually enough to ensure that I have a working familiarity with the assigned reading, and it usually takes me one quarter of the time of the initial read. But I think it's that important: if we believe it's important for our students to read the text...we should put our money where our mouth is and believe it's important for us to read (and re-read) the text along with them.

What do you think? Do you teach your students specific strategies for reading a text? And if not, why not?