Supporting Academic Reading in the Disciplines 12-hour WORKSHOP
Target audience: College Professors in departments or high school teachers.
Purposes: to promote the idea that teachers are the best ones to help students not only learn the content but also HOW to learn the content; to learn, then live, then adapt the academic reading strategies to the discipline’s ways of learning; to decide realistic ways to help students learn the strategies given every course’s severe time constraints; to create ways to encourage reading compliance; and to build and sustain professor’s capacity to support their students in reading the assigned texts efficiently and with deep, engaged learning.
Three Goals for the 12-hour Workshop Experience: Upon completion of this set of workshops, you should be able to:
Learn and live each of the key strategies with your own professional reading so you can speak from personal experience of their procedures and value.
Suggest the strategies to students using a minimum of class time but with strong effect on their reading for your class.
Learn a variety of ways to encourage students to read diligently so they come to class having read with engagement, inquiry, and deep learning. 90% prepared—feasible?
“Fundamentally, we want to promote deep, passionate, joyous, and creative learning” (Bain, 2012, What the Best College Students Do, p. 10) for the workshop participants and ultimately for their students. We desire that the teachers leave the workshop having created a plan they are excited about implementing to strengthen the abilities of their students to learn well and deeply from the reading materials they assign.
Description:
TIME: 12 hours of workshop time—can be spread across a semester, condensed into two days, or other configurations convenient for the audience. Homework time outside the workshop is to read assigned parts of the handbook and an article.
CONTENT: Principles for learning well from academic texts, 15 essential and scholarly strategies.
MATERIALS: a workshop packet, participants bring a challenging scholarly text of their own, a text they assign to students, their course syllabus, and our handbook Learn More & Read Faster, 4th ed.
DESCRIPTION: A series of nine highly interactive experiences where participants live the strategies by trying them on a text of their choosing. Workshop time is also used to process their learning, to coach participants as they practice the strategies, to explore how to promote the strategies with students, and to come up with viable ways to increase the probability that students actually read the important texts they need to read and with deep, long-lasting learning.