If you’ve seen Heinemann’s Spring Catalog already, you may know that Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading will be out in about six weeks. And as a run up to its release, I’d like to share some of the books’s big ideas and features over the next few weeks, beginning here with the concept of dynamic teaching.
At some point as I was writing the book, I started noticing the word dynamic in various articles and blog posts that showed up in my inbox and twitter feed. Most of these talked about a need for teachers to embrace more dynamic practices, such as this study from The Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to educational equity, which looked at the kinds of reading-related assignments students were being asked to do to meet the Common Core Standards.
As I share in the book, one of their major findings was that “many—if not most—assignments were over-scaffolded . . . [with] much of the work actually done for the students rather than by them.” In particular, the researchers took aim at close-reading and text-annotation tasks, which they said “were so tightly scripted they actually appeared to interfere with the deep understanding of complex text.” And this led them to ponder whether “the implementation approaches we have chosen are overly mechanical, denying the dynamic nature of teaching needed for strategic thinking.”
A similar finding is shared by P. David Pearson in his wonderful coda to Comprehension Going Forward, “Toward the Next Generation of Comprehension Instruction.” Having taken a hard look at the current state of strategy instruction, he acknowledges that its implementation—especially in classrooms where teachers are using commercial reading programs—often lacks “the dynamic, adaptive and responsive character,” needed for it to be effective and meaningful. And that leads him to conclude that these practices also “stand in need of reform.”
But what precisely might a more dynamic implementation look like? If you go to Google and type in dynamic teaching, you’ll find any number of ways people think about it. For some, it means bringing more technology into classrooms or creating blending learning opportunities. To others, it’s about us, as teachers, being more energetic, enthusiastic and engaging; while still others think it involves making more real world connections between what goes on inside and outside of school. All of these practices are certainly worthwhile, but none of them—even when combined—necessarily capture the essence of the word dynamic, which the Oxford Dictionary says describes a system or process “characterized by constant change, activity or progress.”
For me this means teaching that engages students in a recursive, interactive process that allows their thinking, understanding and sense of agency to actually change, develop and grow as they work together to figure something out—whether that’s the difference between a scene and a summary, which I wrote about recently, or, in the case of reading, what an author might be trying to show us about the human condition.
It’s worth noting that this concept of teaching isn’t new. It goes all the way back to Dewey who believed that learning required thinking, not “a diet of predigested materials” and that “we only think when confronted with a problem.” Therefore, he thought teachers should “give the pupils something to do, not something to learn” (as in strategies or skills), and if “the doing was of such a nature to demand thinking,” (as trying to figure something out is) “learning would naturally result.” And one of Dewey’s colleagues and friend, Michael Vincent O’Shea, even used the word dynamic in his book Problems in Everyday Teaching, which was published in 1912. According to O’Shea:
“Whenever a pupil is obliged to make things work, he will think as effectively as it is possible for him to do. If in our teaching we can arrange a program of exercises of this concrete, dynamic character, we can keep pupils thinking up to the limit of their constantly enlarging capacity. Really, the art of teaching consists mainly in realizing this plan to its fullest extend in all studies. . . [as] there can be no effective learning in any class where the pupils are not in a dynamic attitude toward the thing which is being presented. And they can not be dynamic for any considerable length of time unless they are self-active in organizing and setting forth in some way.”
More recently, this vision of dynamic teaching was recommended in a report put out last August by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) called “What Matters Now: A New Compact for Teaching and Learning.” There they argue for a set of “New Teaching Dynamics” where, in order to “empower students to become self-directed and responsible learners,” teachers need to become learning strategists rather than content providers.
As you can see from this graphic, being a learning strategist requires teachers to take on multiple roles, some of which will be new to many. These roles also require us to be flexible, adaptive and responsive thinkers, frequently in the moment, which can also be new—and scary. And here’s where Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading comes in.
Throughout the book, I’ve tried to make the teaching moves involved in this kind of teaching as concrete, explicit and replicable as possible so you can transfer and apply them to different grades, instructional settings and texts. You’ll find chapters that show you how to create and implement dynamic learning opportunities for your students in reading, and each of these ends with a chart, like the one below, that captures and names the specific teaching moves shared in each chapter’s classroom examples.
From Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading by Vicki Vinton. 2017. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing
Additionally, you’ll find sections in those chapters that unpack the thinking behind the moves, share ways of providing vital in-the-moment feedback, and show you not only how to plan for this kind of teaching but how to actually be prepared for the various twists and turns a more dynamic approach can take. And with that said, it’s time to begin thinking about next week’s post: What Is Deeper Reading?
To Make a Prairie 