Tuesday, July 28, 2020

The Librarian as Teacher, the Teacher as Learning Coach, and the Student Driving the Bus

There has been a great volume being written as of late about how instruction will happen in the fall - remote and totally online, face to face with safe social distancing, or some hybrid.  I wonder, however, whether the right question has yet to be asked.  The pieces about modality of instruction take for granted the subject matter of what will be taught.  In other words, these pieces are as conservative as they could possibly be in regard to replicating how instruction was done before the pandemic.  But a sober assessment of how things were going in that pre-pandemic state would conclude that they weren't going very well at all. Within higher ed, there has been a well-documented mental health crisis among students, which the pandemic has exacerbated.  Why not, then, opt for more radical change in an attempt to address some of the underlying issues with instruction and do that for K-12 as well as for higher ed.  This piece doesn't offer a full plan along these lines, but I hope it suggests enough that others would feel it useful to flesh out the details more.

Let's begin with a mental picture for what is being argued here.  The young Abe Lincoln who read by the light of the fire serves as an iconic representation of the solitary learner, who learns primarily through reading.  While we have no image of this, we might imagine Lincoln lying on his bed afterwards, reflecting on what he read, processing what he has been learning by asking whether it confirms his prior beliefs, challenges those beliefs, or is unrelated to his earlier thinking. Maybe some of that reflection have happened while still reading the book, pausing after a particularly interesting or challenging passage to make better sense of what he had read.  And perhaps he would reread this portion or something earlier in the book, to verify he was understanding the book well and drawing interesting conclusions from it.  Lincoln would do this entirely at his own pace and he'd be the one selecting what to read from what was available.  This is what I mean in my title by the student driving the bus.  Readers might prefer saying that the student engages in self-teaching.

Now let's consider how typical instruction occurred before the pandemic. The instructor selects the material to be read and makes the lesson plan for how that material will be covered in class.  The student's understanding of the material is subsequently assessed in a test, which is high stakes in that it matters a lot for the course grade, and the date of which is pre-specified.   There may be homework given after the material is presented in class that provides assessment in a lower stakes manner and serves as preparation for the test.  I've discussed the underlying dynamics of the situation in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  The upshot is that while students may get reasonable grades under this approach, they are mostly playing an artificial game that produces only surface learning.  Indeed, school becomes a charade, regarding learning, yet still seems essential, for getting a good job after graduation.  The approach doesn't encourage nurture of the student intellectually, which is what school really should be about.  In my view, the vast mental health issues that college students currently face is mainly a consequence of this underlying dynamic.

It is important to ask (and then understand) why students don't opt for self-teaching instead, taking each class as a second path to the subject matter, while they've already or simultaneously are following their own path through the material.  Of course, some students do this.  Indeed, they self-teach outside of their coursework as well.  But such students are comparatively rare.   For the rest, consider the following:

1) There is huge pressure on students now to have a good GPA to get a good return on investment.  As tuition has been hyper inflationary for much of the past 40 years or so, (at least till the pandemic changed things) this pressure is much higher on students today than it was on me and my cohort when we went to college (in the mid 1970s).

2) Online technologies, particularly mobile devices, have had a negative impact on student reading, especially reading for pleasure.  (I'm not counting reading text messages.  I'm talking about long form reading - books magazine articles, etc.)  Students "learn" to skim rather than to read carefully and digest what they are reading.  Indeed, because they don't get enough practice at this, many students can't make good meaning of long form pieces, even if they were to put in the time to read them slowly.

3) Self-teaching seems slower and is apparently more time consuming than the alternative - to memorize the lecture notes.  This is almost certainly true at first, but someone who has a firmer understanding of foundational material can make better sense of new ideas that are built on that foundation.  Someone who memorizes only can't do this.

4) As the memorization habit hardens over the years, the student loses self-confidence as a learner.  This lack of self-confidence contributes to the student's stress.

The above is evident to me from the college teaching I've done at the University of Illinois.  Now I want to make an additional claim, for which I have far less evidence in support, but which I believe nonetheless based on my own experience.  An adult skill, part of what is referred to as "chin up leadership" is to make sense of complexity, which as I argued in this piece, Q: Did you read the book?  A: No, but I saw the movie, is to produce a narrative, one that tries to fit the facts, including those that seem to contradict the prior held worldview.  (Those who have confirmation bias tend to ignore those unpleasant facts.) We also produce a narrative when we try to make sense of what we read.  The information comes in a different way with reading (when I was a campus administrator most of the information I got came by having conversations with a variety of people on campus or with my peers at other campuses around the country) but the sense making is essentially the same.   Thus, self-teaching via reading and reflection is excellent preparation for assuming a leadership position later in life.  (It is not sufficient, as one needs good schmooze skills to be a leader. I won't otherwise talk about schmooze skills in this post, but one should keep it in mind.  College isn't producing that either but, to be fair, it's my view that those skills should develop outside of courses, not in them, and students need to want to have conversations with others unlike themselves that would develop those skills.)

Points (1) - (4) above provide the basis for a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma that many students operate under.  I will add one further point, that students over program themselves with extracurricular activities, mainly for resume building rather than for intrinsic interest in the activity.  If other students didn't do this, the student wouldn't feel obligated to be over programmed.  But since everyone else is doing it, the student can't afford not to.  This is the logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma that each student faces.  One wonders, is there anything that can cut through all of this to get the student to take a different approach, one where the student drives the bus?  I have been vexed by this question for quite some time.

I've written several posts over the years with each trying to answer this question, the answers being partial, speculative, and quite idealistic. The current post adds one more to the sequence.  Before putting some flesh on the items in the title, let me give a quick run through of those earlier posts and in so doing get to one other critical point. Learning requires some articulation of the thinking.  This can happen by producing some object that is a consequence of the learning. For the introvert, it might be the expected modality.  For the extrovert, instead, this will happen via conversation with a friend or colleague who is receptive to talking about the ideas.  Still a third alternative is to write about it.  This sort of writing is externalized conversation and what you might do if you have no object to produce and no friend to have a chat with.  This is why I turned to writing blog posts, now more than 15 years ago.  It didn't just occur to me to do that.  I had some prior frustration, writing what I thought were interesting comments on a listserv I participated in.  Those comments failed to generate the type of response I was hoping for.  So I tried, instead, to write out in the open where anyone could access what I said. Writing of this sort, the author has a conversation with an imagined reader and then hopes that real readers find the discussion interesting and useful. Sometimes the real readers indicate that with their comments, which are greatly appreciated when they show the writing has hit the mark.  Comments are also helpful even when the writing is a near miss.  The author always benefits from hearing the views of real readers to learn how their reactions differ from the those of the imagined reader whom the author was writing to.

Some years later I first tried to teach a class where the students did weekly blogging.   The class was for students in the Campus Honors Program and a subtext of the course was leadership.  By then I had come to believe there was substantial overlap between learning and leadership.  So, given my own blogging and the example of others who did use blogging for instruction, this seemed like a natural thing to do. Nonetheless this experiment produced several surprises for me.  The biggest of these was that many of the students were quiet in the classroom, preferring to listen to the flow of discussion rather than participate in it as contributors.  This was a small seminar class with high caliber students and I had not experienced this before when I taught CHP classes, though it turned out to be a portent to my later teaching. Further, most of the quiet students found their voices in writing their blog posts, while several of the very vocal students in class had a much harder time doing this online writing.  I took the lessons I learned from that experience and applied them to my subsequent teaching after I retired in the Economics of Organizations, a class for upper level students in the major, which I tried to teach in discussion mode though there were many more students than in the CHP classes, and many of the Econ students demonstrated the issues with reading for understanding that I described above.

The versions of my class in fall 2012, 2013, and 2014 went reasonably well, even with the issues of student reading that I mentioned.  But in 2015 there was a noticeable drop off in the class and I became discouraged about teaching as a result. I'm not sure why this drop off happened, but for the first time I started to wonder whether my own particular interventions in student learning were doomed to fail because those interventions amounted to too little and too late.  So I wrote this post,  The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution.  It envisioned extending the type of interventions I had been doing in my upper level class and instead doing them in a seminar for first-year students that would be so intensive it would be the only course students would take.  Regarding intensity of intervention, it had a chance to significantly impact how students go about their learning.  But it was non-solution for several reasons.  The biggest were: (a) what students would want to opt into this alternative instead of taking the regular curriculum being offered? (b) teaching the class represented way too much work for an individual instructor so even if it were tried once with me that instructor that probably couldn't be replicated, and (c) the campus wants to think its current way of doing things in the classroom is reasonably effective, so an experiment that demonstrated otherwise would be unwelcome. In spite of those limitations, I found the overall idea intriguing, so I didn't abandon the notion altogether.

A few years later I wrote another post in this vein, A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn.  It addressed some of the deficiencies in the prior post.  The intervention would be even earlier in the student's career, the summer after 11th grade.  The selection problem was addressed as well.  Academic summer programs for high school students typically attract elite students.  The students chosen for this summer camp would be different, closer to average students.  It also explicitly got at teaching how to read better and in so doing incorporated both individualized reading (where the student does drive the bus) with common group reading, along with appropriate feedback for both types of reading.   The downside in the proposal is that it would be quite expensive.  To get the students to be willing to participate they would need to be paid at approximately the same rate as if they were working a summer job.  This was assumed necessary to get them willing to participate and to keep them engaged in the camp rather than goof off. The staff would need to be compensated as well.  So this idea would require some foundation to buy in and support it as an experiment for several years.  I wouldn't know how to pitch this to a foundation, but if we ever get past the pandemic, maybe somebody else would take up the mantle and make the summer camp for college reading a reality.  If that were to happen and if in tracking the students who did attend it turned out they performed better in college than their observationally equivalent peers, then maybe subsequent camps could charge the families of the attendees and make the idea sustainable.  Alternatively, maybe some of the ideas could filter down into the high schools (and junior high schools) to encourage students to read better and be more self-directed in their learning.

This more recent post, Is Now an Apt Time for College Students to Embrace The Creative Attitude? was written after the pandemic hit and stay-at-home orders were issued.  It makes note of a rather grim economic fact that might defeat the Prisoner's Dilemma logic students had been dealing with prior to the pandemic.  The labor market, previously strong for college grads and college students seeking internships, has become very soft. Further there is a great deal of uncertainty as to how long it will stay that way.  The academic credentials students have already amassed have depreciated accordingly.  The incentive to acquire yet additional academic credentials has diminished as a result.  Further, the quality of instruction during the pandemic may reasonably be expected to diminish to accommodate the safety needs.  That too may diminish the value of the academic credentials.  So, a good case can be made for a student to take a gap year while staying at home.  Then, instead of merely idling or doing waste of time activities, the student could engage in reading and learning to self-teach that way.  The opportunity is there to do that and it might be the best alternative that is available to the student.

Would the student stick with it?  If the student is living with mom and dad and if they can't tell whether the student is engaged in serious reading and self-teaching, then this might require more discipline than the student can muster.  Further, if we now bring in the student's mental health into the picture, with the student apt to be feeling anxious and depressed, won't that make it even less likely that the student would stick with it?  So, one wonders if academic resources were brought to bear to help the student, could that improve the likelihood that the student will persevere and develop self-teaching skills that will last a lifetime. This post will noodle on that possibility.

* * * * *

Pretty early in the semester when I teach Economics of Organizations, I tell the students they must learn the line, assume a can opener, as part of their general education in economics.  A little while later I gesticulate wildly while telling them that if I'm waving my hands, that means I'm giving a bs explanation and they shouldn't take it seriously.   I don't have an answer here as to how to address the business processes that would need to be aligned to make the proposal here make sense.  So, I'm waving my hands here.  Let me illustrate those business process issues.

If a student does take a gap year, how can the university devote resources to that student as there will be no tuition paid in this instance?  Alternatively, if the student opts to take independent study credits and thus pays tuition, will that bring forth the requisite university resources?  I want to note that during the time I've taught since retirement I got paid under contract each time I taught my class.  I've also served as the adviser for independent study projects that students would do.  I only did that for students I had taught previously.  And I did that as a volunteer activity.  Traditionally, such work was simply part of the service that faculty do.  It wouldn't warrant an overload payment.   Then, too, there are limits in place for how many credits can be taken as independent study.  So, if the student was paying tuition, then it would be rational to take other courses that in total would add up to a full load.  But that would end up completely defeating the purpose in taking time out to learn about self-teaching via reading.

On the other hand (remember that Harry Truman wanted a one-arm economist because he hated the phrase, on the other hand) those who follow the news in higher ed are aware that many faculty are losing their jobs at universities that are experiencing declining enrollments and don't have the revenues coming in to keep paying these faculty.  What will these people who are laid off do?  Would they want to give a try at being a learning coach for a college student, provided that they could make a few shekels from doing so?  There is also that the experience from this past spring is that instruction can be delivered online, even if the quality in doing so is a a step or two down from face-to-face instruction.  Might online instruction coupled with individual learning coaches end up as the new form by which learning takes place at the college level, especially if students en masse succeed in developing their own self-teaching skills under that approach?   I have no answer to that question.  I bring it up here now, simply to suggest that the new normal after the pandemic is over may be quite unlike what teaching and learning was like before we ever heard of the coronavirus.  And if that is possible, then experiments now to demonstrate the viability of an alternative approach may make sense.

The connection between student reading and student performance, particularly in college, is understood but it remains in the background.  Implicitly, the teaching and learning centers on our campuses around the country have whitewashed the issue by advocating that if the instructor applies the right pedagogical approach then real learning will occur, independent of the student's reading.  I think we need to back away from that idea.  Instead, it should be paramount that students learn to direct their own learning through their reading.  For elementary school children, this is a natural goal, one that I believe was achieved by the better students of my day.  For students who have graduated from high school, this is much more of a challenge.  Brain plasticity will tend to be far less for such students.  Nevertheless, given that the pandemic has made school anything but business as usual, this is an opportunity to try and make headway with those students who want to give it a go.

To show what I have in mind, I'm going to begin with my own elementary school experience and use it as metaphor for how things might work now.  We had two different types of reading instruction.  One was individualized reading, where the kid chose the book to read for that week.  On making that choice I had different pathways.  My dad would take me to the Windsor Park Public Library on Saturday.  I would return the book from the week before and then go to look for this week's book.  Early on, the librarian showed me where to look for books that might interest me.  Later, as I began to understand the library layout, I would do that myself.  Something similar happened with the library at P.S. 203.  And my parents also bought us a fair number of books that were on the bookshelf at home. So I had ample materials from which to choose.  Each student kept a notebook where the student entered the date when reading the book was completed, the book title, and a sentence about the book.  Once in a while there was a student-teacher conference to discuss the readings.  The teacher would use the notebook entries to make the conference more valuable.  Also, there were book reports done in class by a few students who had read the same book.  This provided another way to see what the students were getting out of the reading plus it was marketing of the book to other students in the class.  Some of the individualized reading happened from magazines (Weekly Reader, Junior Scholastic) rather than from books.  I don't recall how that was incorporated into the process, but with that I do want to note the variety of readings available to students.

The other method of reading instruction was SRA, which aimed at developing the student's reading comprehension and reading speed.  For elementary school kids, perhaps the two are both important.  For college kids, I care a great deal about reading comprehension but not much at all about reading speed. Much more important is whether the student can become absorbed in the reading and make that the student's total universe.  As the students these days are so into multiprocessing, this itself is an enormous challenge.

There is a question about whether the individualized reading informed the SRA and vice versa.  To the extent that this is about working vocabulary, students probably can't make good sense of the reading when many of the words are unknown to them and they don't have the patience to stop and look up those words.  The SRA approach was to use the color of the materials as an indicator of reading difficulty.   I don't recall any attempt to line up the individualized reading with what color I was currently on in SRA.  Maybe that happened unbeknownst to me.  But perhaps the librarian's guidance about books I might choose wasn't informed that way.  Likewise, my parents may not have gotten outside advice regarding the books they purchased for me. It is an issue we'll return to below.

I developed a pattern with my booking reading.  I would start with one book in a new genre.  For example, I received a birthday present (perhaps when I was 9, maybe when I was 10) of The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt. I liked it.  Then I would get other books by Walter Farley in the Black Stallion series from the library.  Eventually I would stop with this line of reading, either because my interest waned or because I had read all the books that were available.  At this point, I was ready to start on a new genre. This is where I might solicit a recommendation from a librarian or from my teacher.  (In sixth grade the school librarian was my teacher.) The new genre could be quite different from the previous one. I was open then to different possibilities and not nearly as locked into what I like to read as I am as an adult.  But it may be that the librarians and teachers could offer up their recommendations for me based on their experience with other kids, so I was likely to be happy with their suggestions.  That too is an issue we'll consider below.

For the truth in advertising part of this piece, there are pleasure reading books I've started as an adult that I never finished.  (Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses are the two obvious ones.  They are both still on my to-do list, but there is no sense of urgency in getting back to them.)  And there are academic readings that either I did read through but didn't understand much of it (Keynes' General Theory) or could only get through part of it, without understanding the bit I did read (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason).  But I chose the titles here specifically because they are tough readings, which even good readers might not get through or make good meaning of.  My focus in the below is on readings meant for adults but are intended for a broad audience.  My contention is that college students at the University of Illinois should be able to make good meaning of such pieces.

Here is an example from that CHP class I taught where I first used blogging in my teaching.  Let me remind the reader that CHP students are among the elite students on campus.  We had a class session early in the semester on Atul Gawande's essay The Bell Curve, one of my favorite pieces and a good read even now. Subject-matter-wise, I thought students would have intrinsic interest in this particular piece, as it is about what it takes to really achieve excellence in a situation where performance can actually be measured objectively.  During the prior sessions (this was the fourth class session) I had led the discussion.  After the third one, the students expressed a desire to have more control, and I acceded to their request.  This was the first session under these new group dynamics and it may have mattered for the outcome.  Also, I had instituted post-class surveys so students would comment about how the discussion went that included Likert-style questions and a paragraph question where the students could comment.

The session itself was interesting for me in that I bit my lip on several occasions rather than chime in, though I had the urge to do that. But the session was a failure in terms of making good meaning of Gawande's essay.  As is my wont, I wrote a review and critique of that session and posted it to the class site.  We changed our in-class method after that to be a hybrid where the students led some of the time and I led at other times.  And we didn't have a replication of this instance where the students didn't make good meaning of the reading, but I'm not sure if that's because they worked harder to understand things or if I gave the answer as to what the reading was about earlier in the discussion. To the extent that it was the latter and the students were still not making good meaning of what they read, I'm quite sure the explanation was lack of practice in doing so.  As I mentioned above, the quiet students actually produced more interesting writing in their blog posts, some evidence that they were getting the readings but didn't feel compelled to show that in class.

I want to relay one more example.  This one does not involve an elite student and happened a few years later.  It was the only time I supervised an independent study from a student who didn't get an A from me in the prior class.  This student was kind of awkward in communicating but eventually did signal an interest in doing more economics under my supervision.  Since we had students blogging as a mechanism already from the prior course, I suggested he read a piece or two, then write a post about what he read, and I would comment on that and we'd go from there.  The first piece I recommended was The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould. Although Gould was an evolutionary biologist, this is a foundational essay in Behavioral Economics, especially the part of the essay where he introduces Linda the Bank Teller.  The essay was a book review on the subject of Joe Dimaggio's famous streak, getting a hit in 56 straight games.  The underlying question - was Dimaggio on a hot streak?  Or was this something to expect normally from a hitter as excellent as he was?  Underlying this is whether we humans perceive a player to be hot even when that's not really happening.  The student disappointed me by writing about some other baseball player, which for reasons that elude me, he thought was appropriate.  He didn't address any of the issues in Gould's essay.  I expressed my irritation in comments on the post.  Soon thereafter he dropped the independent study and took his blog down. Our expectations about how the independent study would unfold never came close to being aligned.

I have had subsequent independent studies that went well and cases where students have shown they made good meaning from the assigned readings.  But there have also been incidents where the students clearly didn't get it and, I fear, the latter is far more frequent than we care to admit at the college level.  This provides one strong reason why the students want to memorize the lecture notes and spit back the results on the exams. But even if they get satisfactory grades this way, it should count as a failure of the system, not a success.

* * * * *

Let's now begin with the following question.  How would one go about assessing a student's current reading level, where the assessment itself was either neutral or actually encouraging the student to do additional reading post assessment?  My view is that it must be assessment via friendly conversation, not via written test, and that conversation itself must be seen as part of an ongoing conversation that will persist thereafter.   Imagine that it is the librarian doing the assessment but for the purpose of identifying interesting reading materials for the student, not to report the results externally. The student may have expressed interest in certain subject matter, so if possible, at least some of the readings on which the assessment will be based should pertain to that subject matter.  But other readings might be more generic, so to better make comparisons with other students, and then identify popular readings from that peer group which might be shared with the student.

If the reading program envisioned in this post is even modestly successful, the student should grow in reading ability and confidence, which one would hope contributes to the student wanting to embrace self-teaching. So, an assessment done once, up front, will have a limited shelf life.  Further the assessments themselves will be imprecise. This gives a reason to do them periodically and thus explains why there should be an ongoing conversation between the student and the librarian.  It may also be that at a time before the next assessment is scheduled the student requests recommendations for other reading, outside the genre of the current readings, or within the genre if all current readings have been read.  Perhaps this sort of request can be handled by an email exchange.  But my experience is that students are frequently quite imprecise in their formative thinking.  So, it may warrant a conversation as well to get at what the student really wants.

There then is the question, how does the student get access to the readings after receiving the recommendations from the librarian?  I'm not current on how that question might be answered, but I do want to note here that students from lower income households might well be at a disadvantage.  If they would otherwise benefit from this program, their access issues must be resolved in a way that they have as much access as every other student in the program.  Whether this is done by providing eReaders and having downloads of rentals that the program pays for or having paper reading materials circulate via the mail, I cannot say.  The program needs to find a solution that is reasonably effective.  I want to note, in addition, that effectiveness must balance access to the materials with combating the student tendency to multiprocess with their smartphones.  Reading long form material should demand full concentration by the student and print may be better able to facilitate that.  It should be the librarian who acts as the agent of the student in providing good access to reading material, as providing access to reading materials is a normal library function.  The program will flounder unless this function is done well.

Let us turn to the coaching of the student. For some it may seem strange to think of the teacher as the coach, but not the one who sets the readings.  The coaching part is fully consistent with Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles.  Teaching is response.  Teaching is answering a student question.  Teaching is commenting on a student paper.  Teaching is being empathetic when a student expresses a negative opinion about what is happening in the course and then offering supportive advice to help the student counter the negativity. We still conceive of teaching as lecture and thus the language - to deliver instruction - remains part of the vernacular.  (I really wish we could abandon that phrase, but it seems too embedded to do that.)

Now don't get me wrong.  I loved to lecture on the math models in my economics classes, filling the blackboard with equations written in chalk or with appropriate diagrams that are hand drawn, particularly when I was teaching graduate courses.  And lecture is surely the way the vast majority of presentations to professional audiences are conducted.  But those audiences possess strong self-teaching skills, and many will have read the paper before the professional presentation has begun.  That is not the situation with typical undergraduates, at least the ones I've seen in my classes.  We've already been through how they behave in points (1) - (4) above.  This effort is intended to make these students strong self-teachers.  They won't be that at the outset.  Lecture is not a good approach for such an audience.

Now let's turn to how the coaching will seem from the student perspective.  Because the student drives the bus, the coaching must be opt-in for the student.  In other words, if the student prefers the student can simply meet with the librarian on occasion and otherwise go it alone.  And if the student tries that for a while, begins to flounder, but doesn't want to give up, the student can opt into the coaching then.  This needs to be made plain to the student up front.  With that, the student should be encouraged to have a first meeting with the coach, just to see how it goes.  Thereafter, the student can control how frequently future meetings are scheduled and what the student would like to see get done at those meetings.

Critical, then, is for the coach to earn the student's trust and make good steps toward that in the first meeting.  On the specifics of that conversation, I would leave it to the participants.  But on the tone, the coach must be gentle and judgmental/non-judgmental, a term I'd like to explain further.  In a nutshell, the student needs feedback about how things might be done better.  To determine appropriate feedback of that sort, the coach needs to understand the situation as much as possible.  That's the judgmental part.  On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the student performance until now. In education circles that is called summative assessment.  The coaching should refrain from it.  Progress can be made and when that happens the progress needs to be noted.  Still more progress can be made after that.

I have some experience coaching students and wrote about it here. Some of the students in that CHP class wanted the coaching.  This is the sort of student I'd envision wanting to participate in the reading program.  Some of the particulars of the coaching are discussed in that Summer Camp post linked above.  One real reason that students don't make good meaning of what they read is that they don't understand that the reader needs to provide some context in order to get at what the writer is driving at.  Absent appropriate context, there can be substantial misinterpretation of what is read.  How to construct appropriate context is a skill that the student can develop.  That is part of what the coaching should be about.

I believe in formative writing as a way to learn, which is why I have my students blog.  I would encourage the student to write in a formative way for the coach to read and respond to.  (It could be in an email message, or a Google Doc, or some other form.  At issue is not so much the particular technology but whether others can see this writing, particularly the librarian.) An additional aspect of the coach that I've found over the years is that even when students are on the right track, they tend to be abrupt and stop after taking a first stab at the idea.  Part of the coaching, then, is for the student to be able to consider the implications of that first stab and learn to push the ideas further.

Under the circumstances, some of the coaching may be more of a "virtual pat on the shoulder" to calm the student in these stressful times.  Also, the student may have practical issues to deal with if working at home that impact the reading but are not directly about the reading. The coach may be able to help with that.  And some of the coaching may be on particular issues with reading - determining the meaning of a word from the sentence and paragraph where it is used versus looking the word up in a dictionary and possibly building a glossary of new words that the student confronts in the reading.  I'm not sure there is one right answer that fits all students regarding how to manage this.  The coach should make clear that they will try little experiments in process and see how it goes.  The student shouldn't quit on the process too early, but if after a while it doesn't seem to be working then something else should be tried.  Life lessons about persistence yet dealing with failure definitely need to be part of the process.

I want to expand here on the virtual pat on the shoulder comment.  The coach should not pry into the student's personal life.  But if my experience is any indicator, once a degree of trust is earned the student is apt to be quite forthcoming about matters outside the reading and the coaching.  At this point the coach needs to make a judgment call whether to engage in some of these matters or not.  Among the issues that we know have impacted many students - before the pandemic - is loneliness.  The coach may start to play the role of friend in that case.  And if the coach has relationships with other students, who seem to be approximately in the same place regarding the reading, perhaps the coach arranges a group call to create a different dynamic and allow the students to engage each other in a virtual environment.  Again, this would have to be opt in for the student.   If it did happen, it could be a mixture of conversation about the readings and purely social stuff.  If the students seemed to express a preference for the latter and I were the coach, I would encourage them to meet again in the near future without me being present.

One last point to consider about the coaching is whether the coach has private conversations with the librarian about the student.  If that is to happen, the student needs to be aware of the conversations and approve that they occur, but then not to expect to learn the substance of the conversation unless the coach or the librarian choose to reveal what was said.  One can imagine the information flow between librarian and coach could more finely tune each of the activities.  But it is possible from one of them to bias the other in an unproductive way.  So, there are judgments that need to be made about which is more likely if this is to occur.

Now let's consider the student as the driver of the bus, in regard both to the what the student wants to read and to how much time the student wants to devote to the reading.  A student who is otherwise on a gap year should have ample time and will look to fill the time in a good way.  But because of the general predilection for the student to over program, perhaps by taking online courses from another institution, the student may not have as much spare time as expected.  This will matter as to how successful the reading program might be.  In the post on the creative attitude linked above, the goal was to become so absorbed in the reading that the student would lose all sense of time and sense of self.  If the student could achieve that on a regular basis, it would be quite an accomplishment.  In contrast, if the student struggles to be able to do this, the student should try to understand the obstacle(s).  The coaching might then be directed to removing the obstacle(s) or getting around them in some manner.

Regarding the choice of what to read, let's consider various ways to partition reading material: (a) fiction versus non-fiction, (b) short stories or magazine articles versus full length books, (c) junk versus serious material, (d) easy to read versus difficult (this one might be relative to where the student is as a reader at present), and possibly other distinctions that matter to the student.  As the student gets to drive, the choice of these is ultimately up to the student.  But the coach might discuss with the student why to focus on one of these, for a time.  Ultimately, the student needs to be aware of the goal that the reading should be tied to a sense of being able to self-teach on matters.  So, the student should mark progress on achieving that goal and these choices then should, at least in part, be driven by wanting to achieve that goal.

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It is my view that learning to teach oneself should be the main goal of K-16 education, even as having the ability to teach oneself is expressed by learning particular subject matter.  Our emphasis on grading and on GPA in school, unfortunately, ends up putting the emphasis elsewhere, on the grades themselves.  If students can learn to self-teach in the lower grades, they will sail through school thereafter.  Alas, many students don't learn this even after they are well into college.  We should not give up on these students, however.  We should give them a real chance to make up for their deficiencies.  The program sketched above is an attempt to do that.  Now would be a good time to try it.  If others agree, maybe together we can work to bring resources to bear to make it a reality.

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