My interest in how students learn, as well as how they go through the motions but don't really learn much at all, dates back to the early 1990s when I was teaching a section of intermediate microeconomics, probably one per year, perhaps one per semester. Memory fails on which it was. But I do recall that my approach was to teach the subject matter, as opposed to teach the student (and adjust the course content by the nature of who the student was). While a handful of students would really like my course, the vast majority would not and by my performance measures they didn't get very much out of the course as well.
At that time, intermediate microeconomics was a required course for all business majors, and many of them bristled at this requirement. Some years later, I became aware that there are certain "hurdle courses" for some majors, for pre-meds it is organic chemistry, and the students typically dislike the course and are extremely instrumental in their approach to getting through the course, meaning they care about their grade in the course quite a bit, but they care about the content in the course not a whit. I also learned that regarding the "rate the instructor" item on the course evaluations administered at the end of the semester, in intermediate microeconomics scores were uniformly lower than they were for other economics courses, regardless of who was teaching the class.
Had I known these things in the early 1990s, perhaps I wouldn't have been so bothered about the mediocre outcomes I was seeing. As it was, however, it did bother me. And the question I framed for myself as a result was this - is it me or is it them? If it was me, that meant there was some other way to teach the class that would produce better results. If it was them, then my teaching was fine but the way they went about being students was lacking. One way to interpret my question is how the course should be targeted. Should it target the better students? Or should it target the median student? Implicitly, I was doing the former, as that is what teaching the subject matter seemed to require.
Now let me jump ahead 20 years. Since retiring I've largely taught one upper level course in the major, The Economics of Organizations, and done one section per year in the fall. And I've customized the teaching method in the course to better match what I've learned since getting involved with educational technology. This includes finding ways for the students to express their formative thinking, giving them feedback in a judgmental/non-judgemental way, limiting the extent of letter grades and instead relying on credit/no credit grades on the work students produce, and devoting more of my course time to response rather than to presentation. During the first few years of doing this, I thought it was going quite well and I had discovered a way to make student learning better. More recently, however, the results have produced similar mediocrity to twenty years ago, though there are some differences. The most notable of these is
reaching some of the students who are extremely quiet in class. The weekly blogging I have students do, where I respond to their posts, eventually gives them a space to open up and be forthcoming, which allows them to make connections between the subject matter and their personal experiences. I wish this sort of thing happened with the bulk of the class, but really only a handful of students show the benefit of the approach. For the majority of the students, it's as if they are Teflon. Nothing I try sticks with them.
The question is why. There are multiple possible explanations that may overlap some. One is that the economics major is full of students who are business major wannabes, but lack the test scores and other credentials to get into the college of business. Such students are not unlike the ones I confronted in intermediate microeconomics 20 years earlier, even though they are nominally economics majors. In this sense it may be an extreme form of what Arthur Levine points out in his chapter of the volume
Declining by Degrees. There are disconnects between students and their colleges, particularly in that the courses we offer tend to be highly theoretical while the students are looking for practical information. When courses show a lack of that, the students tune out. The irony is that my Economics of Organizations class does have some practical information, but it may be too little too late to matter. Another explanation is that
senioritis has set in. Fearing that they will enter the daily grind, once they have a full-time job after graduation, the students opt for partying while they still can, hitting the bars, even on weekday nights, or finding other means of late night entertainment that precludes taking school too seriously. I have some empathy for students in this situation, with the following exception. I stopped teaching in the spring semester, because the senioritis was palpable then. It seems, however, that the last few times I taught in the fall, the senioritis had manifest there - for students who would graduate the following spring, or perhaps even later. This type of stoppage in running the race, before the finish line is really evident, I find disturbing. I wonder if it is possible to document how widespread it is.
The third possibility is that what I'm seeing is part of a larger phenomenon with students that is other than senioritis. Rather it is that too many students are non-readers and they find their way through college and a decent GPA by methods that don't tax their lacking in reading. The Chronicle had
a very interesting article about this last week. (If you don't subscribe to the Chronicle, you can download and then unzip the article
here.) Non-readers can't possibly find the academic side of college nurturing. So they become alienated and then tune out, quite apart from the subject matter they are supposedly studying. I want to note a certain parallel in this explanation between being a non-reader, what
Carol Dweck refers to as having a fixed mindset, and what
Ken Bain calls surface learning. Likewise, a student with the reading habit is apt to have the growth mindset and engage in deep learning. I don't know if anyone has tried to make an exact identification between these different concepts, but the parallel is unmistakable.
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The fantasy from an instructional design perspective is that with appropriate interventions one might be able to transform the student in a way that promotes the student's further learning. In looking through some old files, I was delighted to find
this essay of mine from spring 1996, the first piece I wrote about how online learning might achieve this mean feat. In that piece I classified the students I saw in intermediate microeconomics into three categories, which I named colorfully: eager beavers, drones, and sluggos. I don't use these labels today for a few reasons. Back then I didn't really have attendance problems with my class. The bulk of the students showed up, with no incentive required for that. It's the no-shows whom I was referring to as sluggos. More recently I've had serious attendance problems (under 50% of the students showing up, with the issue getting more severe as the semester wore on). Sluggo as a label may make sense for outliers, but it doesn't if the median student is in that category. Second, those in the middle category might not like to hear about themselves referred to as drones, even though that's what they appear like to me. They put in effort in their studies and likely take pride in having a decent GPA. Yet the effort is not well placed to produce real understanding of the subject matter. There is an open question whether these students are self-aware enough that they are not learning deeply, or if they are fooled in this respect by the grades they are receiving. In any event, it is these students who are the focus of the fantasy. Through the proper coaching, can they change the ways they go about things and become deep learners, thereby moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset?
Back when I wrote that first essay, the thought was that good results could be had on a course by course basis from suitable interventions, aided by online learning. To a large extent, that view still prevails today, witness this recent piece in the Chronicle,
How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging. But if the way that students go about their studies is largely habit, determined by their approach in many prior courses as well as in concurrent courses, then intervention in one course only, though it may produce some accommodations by the students, will likely keep their underlying study habits largely intact, and thus not produce the transformation in the students as learners that is called for. Further (as an economist I would say, on the supply side) the adjunctification of college instruction, particularly in the large lecture courses, has acted as a force in the opposite direction, where students become aware of a teach to the test mindset in such classes, and thus respond accordingly. So, one would like an intervention that either predates the taking of these large lecture classes, so a change in habits occurs beforehand, or a systematic approach across many classes, so there is a countering force to these high enrollment cookbook lecture classes.
It is with that thought in mind that I wrote this post a few years ago,
The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution. I envisioned myself teaching a freshman seminar that would be the only course the students would take that semester, where it was meant to be a full course load, perhaps 16 credit hours, and where I thought the intensity and the coordination in the approach might be sufficient to bring about the change in the student learning habits that are desired. But the approach failed on a number of dimensions. Here let me note just one of those. Who would opt into such a course as an alternative to taking regular course offerings? Would that bit of self-selection mean the students were actually eager beavers in the first place? I didn't have a mechanism to address that dilemma. The summer camp described in the next section would do that.
Before getting to that I'd like to describe the reading issue as I understand it. Students can make meaning out of individual sentences just fine, even if there are occasionally words they don't know and they choose to not look them up in a dictionary and thus remain ignorant of the meaning. (When reading online, one can highlight the word, then right-click on it, and one of the suggested alternatives is for Google to do a search on the word, which will bring up a dictionary definition. All of that is pretty convenient on a computer, perhaps a bit less so on a smartphone.) The issue is larger than making meaning of an individual sentence, or even making meaning of individual paragraphs.
Closer to the mark is whether the reader can supply the contextual clues to interpret the piece as the author intended, even when those clues are not directly evident in the piece. I wrote about this and related issues in a post called,
Are We Ketman? In that piece I made specific reference to E.D. Hirsch's Book,
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. In Hirsch's view, if there is a common cultural literacy and if authors in writing their general interest pieces restrict their contexts to what is already within the scope of that cultural literacy, then the meaning of what they write will be well taken by readers. Conversely, if students are non-readers, one big explanation for why is that they lack this cultural literacy, so are unable to make good meaning of the full piece even while they can make good meaning of each sentence within the piece. In other words, this is not about teaching phonics. We're passed that. This is quite a different issue.
I'm sympathetic to Hirsch's argument, up to a point. But it needs some refinements and then some entirely different ways to consider the issue. For one thing, our common culture is not static. Thirty years ago or so, Hirsch got himself into trouble in part for arguing to the contrary and in part because too much of this common culture was associated with dead white males, but also, perhaps, for disallowing much of the popular culture as a necessary part of the core. The implication is that there is a need to keep up as the common culture morphs and grows. Regular readers can do this and part of their reading is done to achieve this purpose. Can non-readers do something similar? Say by watching The Daily Show? I doubt it.
There is a different issue that Hirsch's argument doesn't confront, which is understanding context when the intended audience for the written piece is more specialized; they are more like insiders who speak in a special code. The need for the reader to provide context to understand the piece is the same, but in this setting it is unrealistic to expect being literate in a common culture to help in deciphering the meaning of the piece.
I first learned about this issue of context for reading from conversations I had with Robert Alun Jones, back in the mid 1990s when I took over from Burks to run
SCALE. Bob had been an insider on the project for a while but then there was a big breakup and Bob was on the outs. That made him a fascinating character for me and while it took a while, we ultimately had several extremely interesting conversations, both about the SCALE history and about his views on how technology might help in learning.
I recall one conversation where Bob talked about his own reading of texts, where a pile of other references where immediately at hand for him, so the context he supplied was extremely rich, while his students were aware of none of this. Bob made reference to
an article he wrote with Rand Spiro, this was written back in 1994, so the technology solution they envisioned matched the times in which the piece was written. Authors of these pieces could provide hyperlinks to sources. Readers could not only read the piece the author had written, but also backtrack and follow the hyperlinks (or interrupt the reading of the original piece to follow the link). This makes reading a kind of research, in which the reader's job is to build not just an understanding of the piece but also an understanding of the context in which the piece was written.
Web search hardly existed back in 1994. And authors still should link to sources, where they can, for readers to follow if they are so inclined. But now search is much more sophisticated and authors can't be expected to link to all possible relevant pieces that might provide context. Some of that burden should be switched to the readers. Yet for that to happen, readers need to develop a variety of concomitant skills that make this do-able. In other words, we need to consider the set of applied skills for readers to build their own context for reading a piece, one that might not perfectly overlap the context that the author intended, but that is sufficiently similar so that good meaning is made in the reading.
Much of this I think of as developing a sense of taste in the reader to be able to answer these questions. Am I understanding what I'm reading or are there puzzles where the answers elude me now? (This question can be posed reading only a fragment of the piece and doesn't require a full reading before posing the question.) If there are puzzles, can I then ask other questions and do Web searches to find other pieces I should read to resolve these puzzles? There is then a motivational question that needs to be asked (or perhaps this question is asked earlier). Do I care enough to follow down the leads I discover via search and read those pieces to produce an understanding? There is also then a lesson in self-understanding. When will I so care, and when will I punt and move onto something else? Do I have that tradeoff reasonably well honed for my own learning or do I punt too often for my own good? (Or perhaps do I get too wrapped up in a search on something where I should have punted? Truthfully, I think this is not an issue for most students but it might be an issue for some absent-minded professors I know, myself included.)
If doing this sort of thing is not already a habit in the (non)reader, it may seem like a lot of work. And for somebody trying it for the first time, it most certainly is. But as the reader gets more proficient at it, much of this questioning happens autonomously and the answers then come rather quickly, especially in domains where the reader already has some familiarity. However, there is a different issue to consider with the reading that may make additional effort necessary. Expressing this from the viewpoint of the reader, is what I'm reading sufficiently important to me that I want to commit it to my working memory so it is available in the future? Or is it merely transitory knowledge that I need in the here and now but I'm quite okay forgetting about it entirely after that? If the former, then there is effort required to connect what is currently being read to what the reader already knows via experience or prior reading. Making active connections of this sort can be enjoyable, but it is definitely time consuming to do so. The reader who wants to grow from the reading must expect to put in the requisite time to produce such connections.
Let me introduce one other idea and then close this section. I've written the above as if I'm advocating reading online as distinct from reading on paper, with electronic devices of any sort out of bounds. Nowadays, I find I read mainly online, so I have some bias in me that way. (Adjusting the font size is one big reason I prefer online.) But there are obvious distractions in doing that. If one advocates for reading on paper, as a way to enhance concentration and avoid the distractions, which makes good sense to me, then how does the reader become self-sufficient with regard to providing context? I wish I knew the answer to that question. It may be that reading on paper needs to be limited to those cases where the piece is self-contained or that there is an iterative approach, where references are tracked down online but are then read offline, though I don't have experience with whether that is really do-able or not.
In any event, the thought that providing context is the reader's job, and that part of the job that might not be self-evident at first, means that reading pieces can be a larger commitment than might seemingly be given by statistics that the piece itself provides - number of words, reading difficulty level, and overt description of the subject matter. Further, it is not so evident how much additional commitment providing context requires. So this can work only if the reader is willing to do whatever it takes. To achieve that end may require its own resolution. The reader must implicitly believe that understanding the work is something important and is therefore willing to devote the necessary time and energy to produce that result, or that developing such a capability in oneself to produce such understanding is likewise sufficiently important. This, itself, requires a change in the mindset of most student readers. Until now, depth of understanding seems a luxury to which most students feel they can't afford. They need to change their orientation to this. If they are not learning deeply, then why bother? And if they can learn something deeply, why feel bad that the time it takes blocks doing other things?
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The article in the Chronicle about reading, mentioned above, gives some interesting though depressing statistics about student reading in grade school. Performance is reasonably good in elementary school, but declines thereafter, and is not good at all for high school seniors who should be getting ready for college.
Reading in the classroom changed, too: The typical 17-year-old now reads fewer pages for school than the typical 9-year-old, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Meanwhile, students’ preparedness for the kind of reading they would do in college buckled as they grew older. “Only 51 percent of 2005 ACT-tested high school graduates are ready for college-level reading,” the ACT wrote in a 2006 report. “And, what’s worse, more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.”
The cause for this decline is unclear. But I think it should be noted that 9-year olds are in elementary school, where reading is among the main objectives and where they have one teacher who monitors their learning. (This is the holistic environment in the piece I linked to above.). By middle school there are different teachers for different subject matter and most of these instructors might not feel it necessary to assign reading outside the textbook, with English the exception that proves the rule. Indeed, as interest in the humanities has declined in higher education, it's explanation might be found in this decline in reading in the other subjects by typical high school students. It is also not clear how much pleasure reading students are doing, but one might hypothesize not much at all. Further, when I was in high school there was some sense of social obligation imparted on kids by both school and parents to read the newspaper (which apart from the Sports section I would not call pleasure reading). I think that this sense of obligation is gone even if it were other sources that provided the obligatory reading.
If the causes for this decline were well understood, it might be argued that they should be addressed directly. The summer camp model doesn't do that. It is aimed at students who have finished their junior year in high school, so have been well into this decline already. The thought in favor of the summer camp approach is that students at this age, 16 or 17 most likely, are old enough to be critical about their own education and not blind adherents to their schooling, if they are given the opportunity to open up about it and feel they have a willing listener to talk with about it. Their parents, however, might be more blind about their child's learning and if the kid's grades are reasonably good not wanting to upset the apple cart, as good grades seem like the path to decent future income. That can be anticipated and that too must be accounted for.
I attended a summer program for math in 1971 held at Hampshire College after my junior year in high school. It lasted six weeks. For the first four weeks I was in a class on number theory and group theory. In the last two weeks, and I believe this was an improvisation done at the time because some of us felt we were in over our heads, I was in a different class with a different instructor where we did elements of probability. None of this used textbooks. It was all extremely conceptual in approach. I don't recall what my parents paid for me to attend this program, but maybe it was room and board, with tuition covered by an NSF grant the program had received. The target for those who attended that program were those students very interested in math and who were high performers in the subject. This program offered me the first opportunity to be with kids who were much smarter than I was or, at the least, much further along in their understanding of math.
My younger son also attended a summer program after his junior year in high school. This one was at Rose-Hulman and was for engineering education. I believe we paid for everything, tuition included, so they may not have been quite as selective on who got to attend. On that I'm less sure. What does seem evident to me is that such programs now typically appeal to very bright kids or to parents who want to give their kids every educational opportunity possible and are willing to pay for that. One difference between my son's experience and what I did at Hampshire, as Terre Haute isn't that far from Champaign, my wife and I went over there on several weekends, to visit with my son and take him to lunch. When I attended Hampshire back in 1971, I don't recall any parents visiting kids during the program. There was a cookout the first night when the parents dropped us off. And there was a retrieval at the end. That was it.
The target audience for the summer camp in reading would be different. Based on standardized test scores that the students had taken that spring, a pool of students would be selected who had a reasonable chance to get into the U of I (my reference point for students) but who would be
below median in their standardized test performance. Among this population, teacher recommendations would have to identify students who are hard workers, though not necessarily insightful in their work. And, if it were possible to administer reading tests like what the NAEP assessment does, without the students sandbagging on the test, then we'd want to restrict the pool to those students
who read at grade level or below.
To elicit participation of such students, the summer camp would have to cover not just room and board and tuition, but it must pay a stipend to the student as well, so from the student's earnings perspective it would be like having a summer job. However, there would be some obvious differences. On the plus side for many students, it would be a preview about what residential college life would be like, as the camp would be held on some college campus. However, it would be much more intensive in that the bulk of their day would have programmed activity and time programmed for reading and reflective thought needed to be used that way and not blown off. This is not to say their wouldn't be time for fun - sports activities and other forms of socializing, and with field trips on weekends. But a full 8 hours each weekday would be devoted to learning activities and that makes it like a full-time job. Further, students will be selected from a wide geographic area, so the students will not be able to hang out with their high school friends during the time they are at the summer camp.
Under these circumstances, some students in the targeted group might find the prospectus for the camp intimidating, while other students in the targeted group and their families should be interested in participation. Then, one might imagine, a la supply and demand, that the stipend adjusts so that those in the second group are large enough to fill the expected cohort size at the camp. Here is the logic for not doing that but rather for the paying the student a stipend determined by other factors. While the summer camp is meant as an educational program, it is also an experiment with human subjects. The payment is meant to elicit participation in that experiment. This will entail some monitoring of the student during the camp, certainly. And it will also entail longitudinal monitoring of the student thereafter, both in the senior year in high school and through college. The core question to be addressed by that monitoring is whether the summer camp has a sustained impact on how the student goes about academic life and about reading outside of academic life. The students need to understand the experiment being performed at the outset and to consent to participate in the study throughout their remaining time in school. If the experiment proves successful, then being a part of it will serve as a credential of sorts. This is a further reason why the students should participate, even after the summer camp is over. In any event, the stipend will likely be higher than it otherwise would be were this just an education program without an experimental component.
Clearly to pull off such a summer camp while in pilot mode will require substantial funding, so to be implemented the idea needs to appeal to a foundation that is capable of making a grant to support such a program and/or to a wealthy donor who does likewise. If the pilot is successful and the summer camp is then seen as giving a leg up to those who attend, one would expect the funding model to change, with the students and their families bearing more of the cost. Further, high school teachers might then also attend the camp, as co-instructors, and to learn the methodology there, which might then impact their teaching back in high school. The point is that if the program seems to succeed, then the notion of intensive interventions to get serious students to read more and more effectively should flourish in a variety of ways. Summer camp would simply serve as the starting point to a more widespread approach.
Let me try to give a brief sketch of what such a camp would be like. Before I do, however, I want to note that in any such design there are things you can't know till you try it and see what happens. So there needs to be a process where the second summer the camp has some different features than the first. Likewise, the third summer will have some still new features. One hopes that sort of redesign will settle down, though as circumstances change accommodations must be made to adjust to them. It would be good for there to be several different camps in different regions of the country, with something of a common methodology so that comparisons across them could be made. Ultimately it would be the approach we'd want to see triumph rather than the superlative teaching of a small number of instructors, or that a handful of students became truly inspired readers as a consequence of the camp.
Each camp would have about 50 students. The camp would last 6 weeks. Students would be assigned to one of three different classes with between 15 and 20 students per class. Those classes would last 2 weeks and then students would rotate into a different class. After another 2 weeks there would again be a rotation. Each class would be led by a professor who has a track record for interest and innovation in undergraduate instruction. Preferably the professors are from different fields, so that some of the readings in their class are general interest pieces from within their discipline and it would be good if they were members of the faculty at other than the host campus (except for the director of the camp). Yet they should also be comfortable discussing general interest pieces that are entirely outside their area, as well as works of fiction. In other words, while they are experts in their fields, they also have to be fierce and engaged readers, who can discuss what they read as intelligent amateurs. That perspective is as needed as the expert perspective, perhaps even more so. Each professor will have two grad assistants, who need not know the professor they work with ahead of time nor need they be in the same discipline in their graduate studies. There will also be a three person evaluation team. A member of that team will be present while the class is in session.
Classes might meet from 8:30 - 11:00 AM, with students then given some down time for reading before lunch. In the afternoon each student will meet with the student's mentor, either the professor or one of the grad assistants, for between 15 minutes and a half hour. This would be to discuss progress in the reading, issues the student is having, letting the mentor give some friendly suggestions, and simply allowing the student to air what's going on inside the student's head. I envision these sessions to be somewhat awkward the first couple of days, but then to become more relaxed, as everyone gets comfortable with the arrangement. For this reason, I don't know if the mentorship should change after the class rotation happens or if it should remain as at the outset. That is one of the things to work out.
The rest of the afternoon would be for reading/reflection or doing some social activity. When I was at Hampshire, there was a regular soccer game in the afternoon. (I tried it once and then went back to playing tennis.) I don't want to predict which sort of activity would take hold at the camp. The soccer was an all guy thing. After dinner there was a volleyball game that was co-ed. On this dimension let the locals work through the details. One afternoon a week the student will have a meeting with the evaluator, which will be different than the meeting with the mentor in that the evaluator will drive, asking certain questions first for the students to explain what the student does outside of class, then to find if that behavior changes over the course of the camp, and some attitudinal information about the student - does the student do these things willingly or is it done only because of obligation from receiving the stipend?
If some of the readings are common to each of the classes (I'll discuss that a bit below) then possibly during the evening their might be the showing of a movie based on the readings. So there will be some attempt to make this fun, but also some attempt for the program to keep the students engaged and not be idle, though distinguishing idle time from time spent on reflection is not trivial and it may be that some idle time is necessary to make the reflective time effective.
The courses taught in the first third of the camp will differ from those in the middle third, which are again different from those in the final third, in accordance with the idea that the students will grow in the capabilities during the camp and the courses need to make appropriate demands on the students based on where they are in their learning. In the first third the focus will be on self-contained pieces where the context should be readily apparent. Do students make good meaning of those pieces from the outset, or do they miss things in the story that are important? The coaching during the class, and perhaps also during the mentoring session will be aimed at getting the students to fully digest the piece they are reading. In the middle third, the issue of building context will begin, by reading pieces which have references and/or hyperlinked pieces that might also be read. What other pieces might be read and then in what order? There are strategies for that. Can those be taught to the student? In the final third, the students will begin to take on the question of building context by finding their own sources for supplementary reading.
The entire camp will be aimed, in this respect, to get the student to drive the learning. The choice of supplementary reading done in the final third of the camp is one aspect of this. But even in the first third there will be elements of this as students will be asked to also do individualized reading and this, more than the common reading, might be the object of discussion with the mentor. A significant part of this program of individualized reading is to encourage the students to try new things to read, some of which the student might fancy even if not everything works that way, and in this way for the student to learn a bit about what is pleasing and perhaps about why this is so.
The hardest part of this for me to conceptualize here, is to get any sense of how much time it will take for students to read the pieces they are assigned when they are getting the full meaning of these pieces. The pace of the classes needs to adjust to this. So I would refrain from having a full schedule for the full two weeks and instead have a sequence of readings in mind, then get as far as one can get in the sequence with the students reading for meaning. Of course, each individual student will read at the student's own pace. The instructor will have to figure a strategy to cope with that variation. I don't want to impose that here. It is easier on the individualized reading to adjust the pace as you can simply put a bookmark at the stopping point and resume reading at the same place tomorrow. So the individualized reading might serve as the right sort of buffer to keep all the students in lock step about the common readings.
In terms of particular works that everyone in the camp might read, I have a few ideas. Of course, the faculty who are leading the camp would have to agree on these or suggest their own alternatives. So I mean this only to be suggestive and get the ball rolling. The first piece is the short story,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe. I may have read it when I was in high school, but I didn't remember doing that, so I just read it now. It took me about 50 minutes (and I did a bit of multiprocessing while reading it, including learning that it is the seminal detective story, setting the stage for an entire genre of fiction). There are several reasons for choosing the piece. It is a compelling and interesting story, so the reading should be enjoyable in its own right. We want to start with pieces that have that feature and only later work through pieces that may be more of a slug. Second, metaphorically speaking, the students can consider themselves as sleuths in making meaning of future readings they confront. It's good for them to have that metaphor in mind throughout the camp. Then, it might be that if they liked the story enough and if they otherwise haven't read much if any detective fiction, that they look to read more as part of their individualized reading. My older son, who grew up during the Harry Potter craze, did become something of a reader, but it was all fantasy fiction for quite a while. One thing this camp might achieve is to give students exposure to other genres of work that they'd find engrossing. My hope is that students would become somewhat eclectic in the reading choices eventually, plateau in one so then opt for something quite different. But you have to start somewhere and detective fiction, which is not so au courant, seems to me a good place to start.
The next piece I'd suggest is this one from Scientific American,
The Expert Mind, by Philip Ross. It made quite a splash when it came out and I believe students now will find it a good read, because it touches all the buttons about learning and performance - talent, motivation, and practice (of the right sort) and in that way gives the students some insight into their own learning and performance. It might also get the students to ask this question - do we put in a lot of time practicing incorrectly and yet not put in much time at all at a more productive form of practice? If so, why? Can this camp help in getting students to practice in a better way?
Rather than make a long list of other pieces to read, let me just suggest one more here. It is
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. The students should hold off reading this till each has been interviewed at least once by the evaluation team and done a focus group with the class as well. So the students will understand that they are human subjects in an ongoing experiment. That will help them with the right frame of mind in reading the story and empathizing with the main character, Charlie. It might also be a pathway for the students to reflect on the experiment in which they are like Algernon, the mouse, and then perhaps themselves get engaged in experimental modification to improve how things are going.
Please note that in these suggestions that I've refrained from anything too current and certainly nothing about national politics or pressing social issues. It's not that I don't think students should read about these things, but I suspect they would come at those topics with strong prior beliefs, some of which may be conflicting. Opening up to such conflicts, particularly early on in the camp, is likely to be counterproductive, as it will encourage many students to shut down and not want to participate. So I'm suggesting a safer approach, particularly at the beginning, where everyone in attendance can become comfortable with each other and interact in a relaxed manner. I believe that tone is necessary for the camp to make progress on its main task.
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Let me wrap up this very long post. The fantasy that this post flirts with is that it is possible to make ordinary but committed students into deep learners. Given that as the belief, it then sketches a way forward for making it happen. I would expect that if such summer camps ever got off the ground, they would fail in a variety of ways I haven't anticipated here. But they also might produce some modest successes that would be sufficient to try again the following year with a modified approach.
I do think deep reading is the key to keeping college as a meaningful experience for most students and we in higher education have not addressed the matter squarely. So, if not the suggestions in this piece what else might be done? That's the question that thoughtful readers of this essay should be asking.
