“Launching” the Reading: Tools for Active Learning in the Reading-Based Class

Molly Robinson Kelly, Associate Director of the Lewis & Clark College Teaching Excellence Program

“The most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind, in my opinion, is discussion.

I find it sweeter than any other action of our life.”

Michel de Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame)

Readings have long been a mainstay of the college classroom. How could it be otherwise? Written texts represent our best means of communicating facts, ideas, and experiences over time and space. Reading is integral to learning. As faculty, we put considerable thought and effort into creating the reading list for our courses. To me, my reading list feels like the beating heart of my syllabus: the “oxygen” of my course flows from it, and when the fuel provided by one reading dwindles, we return to the reading list for new sustenance. If the reading list falls short somehow, my course will surely fall short as well.

Yet reading alone is not enough. College is at its best – especially a small liberal arts college – when students have the opportunity to engage in vibrant discussions, most often about what they are reading. It’s when we discuss a reading that the magic happens: the magic of full-on engagement, in collaboration with a group of peers, with the work, thoughts, imagination, and discoveries of another, often from lands and eras distant from our own. Through discussion, we grapple with the material. We poke and prod at it from the different perspectives and positions we each occupy; we help each other think of questions that hadn’t occurred to us; we make each other see things we never would have seen on our own. As Montaigne notes, good discussion forces us to reckon with diversity and discord in ways that “launch” our learning, and make things more enjoyable along the way: “Discussion teaches and exercises us at the same time. If I discuss with a strong mind and a stiff jouster, he presses on my flanks, prods me right and left; his ideas launch mine,” he writes, adding, “Unison is an altogether boring quality in discussion.”

As academics, most of us have experienced the alchemy that happens when we engage so fully with the person we encounter through reading, discussion and writing, that his or her ideas become part of our own mental landscape. As teachers of reading-based classes, we have the opportunity to give our students this same experience. But as anyone who has assigned a beloved reading fully anticipating a lively in-class discussion of it, only to encounter what I like to call “asymmetrical enthusiasm” and the stubborn silence that accompanies it, discussion doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes we need tools that go beyond simple questions to get our students to engage with, process, and learn from the readings. The harder the reading, the more this is true. Following are some tools I’ve found that encourage active and participatory reading, discussion, and learning, whether or not your students love the text.

• No-pressure quiz. Start class with some kind of quiz. It can be serious (verifying important details, ensuring the reading was done), or fun (top three moments, favorite terms, “boredom rating,” etc.)

• Response paper. Have students write a non-graded, one-page paper in which they write about an aspect of the reading that they found compelling. If you have a big class, you can assign just a few students to do this for each class. As they share their papers, you note their main ideas on the board and refer back to them as discussion proceeds.

• Bring a MIP (most intriguing passage). Have everyone come to class ready to share their MIP and explain why they chose it.

• Spontaneous writing. At the beginning or at any point of the class, ask students to write for 5 minutes about any aspect of the text they’d like, then share their thoughts in small groups or with the entire class. Like the response paper, this gives the more introverted student the opportunity to prepare their thoughts before speaking.

• Note key words. No matter the exercise, take note on the board of what students are saying as they speak. It doesn’t have to be in great detail: a few words suffice. This tool is multi-valent: it validates the student’s participation, makes them feel that what they are saying is worthy of note, helps you to structure further discussion, and allows you to return to their thoughts later and make proper attribution if you do so. Students have consistently said that they felt validated when I “took notes” of what they were saying on the board.

• Designate class experts. At the beginning of a semester in which you know that your readings will touch on certain key topics, you can list these topics (e.g., gender, self-consciousness, positionality, race, art, history, environment, scale, etc.) and designate a group of students to be “class experts” on this topic. For every reading, these students have an explicit responsibility to be extra attentive to that topic, and to report back on it during class. (You can also devote some class time to giving these working groups a chance to meet and share ideas with each other.)

• “Cover the reading” without tedium. Here are some techniques:

1. Begin with the “basics”: have students work together to uncover / discover what the reading says and how it is structured. For fiction, this may be the basic plot; for non-fiction, the reading’s order and organization. Possible questions: what does the reading say, and in what order? Why does the author do it this way? Does the order itself signify something? Could s/he have done it differently? How?  
2. Once these “basics” are uncovered, do a deeper dive into the text. There are many options for how to do this. Some of my mainstays are:

• If I have time, I prepare discussion questions that I post on the projector. Almost always, I have pairs or small groups wrestle with them first and come up with an answer they agree on. Later, they share it with the group.
• If I don’t have time, I ask them to generate discussion questions. You can assign to each group a particular part, theme, or character of the text. Ask them to find a question they’d like to discuss with the large group, and write it on the board.
• Ask them to make a visual representation of the topic or reading on the board. Some topics and readings lend themselves well to concept maps, flow charts, diagrams, and even drawings. They can work alone or together; try different approaches on different days. This technique gets a lethargic class moving and embraces the possibility of different learning styles. I especially like to do this when they’ve just turned a paper in: I ask them to create a visual representation of their paper on the board and explain what it means to the class. I’ve been amazed by the creativity that emerges with this approach.
• Whether or not I have time to prepare questions in advance, I always make sure I have an idea of 2-3 “essentials” I feel we MUST discuss from the reading. If the students bring them up, that’s great! I elaborate on it and they feel they’ve contributed. If the students don’t, then I make sure we get there somehow.

• End class intentionally. We all know the feeling of trying to race through 20 minutes of material in the last 5 minutes of class. Whenever possible, give yourself room to end your class intentionally. Here are some possibilities for summing up:
• Muddy point “flash paper”: Have them write for 5 minutes about something that is still “muddy” for them about what you covered that day. You can touch on these at the beginning of class next time.
• “What stands out?” flash paper: Ask them to write about what stood out most for them in that class. You can use this to understand the “reception” of class material.
• Look forward: Where appropriate, announce the topic for next week’s class and get the juices flowing by asking how they imagine this topic connecting with what they’ve already learned; or what they already know about this topic; or what their biases and expectations are.
• Mini check-in: Every so often (I like to do it every 3 weeks), give them a half-sheet of paper with 3 questions: What’s going well for you in class? What is not going well? Anything I should know? Tell them they can write their name on the sheet or not; if they write their name, write a quick note on the back of the sheet responding to what they shared and hand it back next time. This will give you regular, low-pressure feedback on how they are doing both in and outside of class, and allow you to incorporate small correctives as you go.

For a printable handout summarizing the ideas contained in this post, see the L&C TEP Active Learning Toolkit.