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Mon/Wed 4:00-4:50Fall 2015
English 105 Reading and Composition
Professor Johnston
Class Code 6831
Table of ContentsImportant Documents
Quick Comma Rules Reference ____
Homework Calendar ____
Personal Attendance Record ____
Planner ____
Progress Reports ____
Class Vocabulary ____
Getting Started Class Contacts ____
Things We Have in Common ____
Creating our Classroom Environment ____
Big Assignments Explained Progress Reports ____
Reading Quizzes ____
Midterm Exam ____
Blog Posts ____
Introduction Essay ____
Synthesis Essays 1,2, and 3 ____
Classroom Reading Practices
Practices ____
Rubric ____
Metacognitive Reading Log ____
Reading Analysis Chart ____
Metacognitive Reading Strategies List ____
Classroom Writing Practices
Writing Practices ____
Personal Error Pattern Log ____
Unit 1: Overcoming Barriers to Success
Unit Reading List ____
Tough Pre-reading Activity ____
Who Gets to Graduate? ____
~ 1 ~
Reading Together Activity ____
Brainology ____
Learning and Leading with Habits of the Mind ____
Unit 2: Motivation and Perseverance
Unit Reading List ____
Academic Speed Dating ____
Alphabet Soup: My Life as a Reader ____
Unit 3: Planning a Path to Success
Unit Reading List ____
Quick References
Coordination and Subordination Options ____
Clauses: Independent and Dependent ____
Sentence-level Transitions ____
Citing Sources with Signal Phrases ____
Apostrophes ____
Run on Sentences ____
Appendix
Metacognitive Reading logs ____
Quick Comma Rules Reference ____
~ 2 ~
Important Documents Quick Comma Rules Reference
Adapted from The Successful Writer’s Handbook, by Kathleen T. McWhorter and Jane E. Aaron.
1. Separate independent clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction (AKA “FANBOYS”).
, {for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so}
I like ice cream, but I try not to eat it every night.
2. Set off most introductory elements.
,
Unfortunately, there is always ice cream in my freezer.
Although most ice cream is high in fat, it also has many nutritious qualities.
3. Set off nonessential elements
,
The ice cream in my freezer is chocolate, which is my absolute favorite.
Ice cream, although yummy and delicious, is not the best thing to eat for dinner.
4. Separate items in a series
A healthy dinner contains protein, fruit, vegetables, and grains.
5. Separate adjectives that equally modify the same word.
The smooth , creamy ice cream was difficult to resist.
Other uses for the comma: Separate parts of dates, addresses, long numbers Separate quotations and signal phrases
~ 3 ~
end of main clause.
Main Clause
Main Clause.
Main Clause.
Main Clause
Introductory Element
Nonessential Element.
Beginning of main clause
Nonessential Element
, ,
item 2 and item 4 . . .
. . .item 1
item 3, , ,
. . . first adjective
second adjective
word modified . . .
,
~ 4 ~
Homework Calendar—Fall 2015
Date HomeworkMon. 8/17
Wed. 8/19
Mon. 8/24
Wed. 8/26
Mon. 8/31
~ 5 ~
Wed. 9/02
Note: Instructors: (1) Friday, 09/04 drop No shows for Census Roster Clearance(2) Tuesday, 09/08 – Census Date – Submit active roster of studentsStudent: Friday, 09/04 – last day to drop class(es) without a “W” grade(s) on permanent record
Mon. 9/07NO CLASS LABOR DAY – NO CLASS
Census Date for full-time classes – Submit active roster of students
Wed. 9/09
Mon. 9/14
Progress Report # 1 due
Wed. 9/16
~ 6 ~
Mon. 9/21
Wed. 9/23
Mon. 9/28
Wed. 9/30
Mon. 10/05
Wed. 10/07
~ 7 ~
Mon. 10/12
Progress Report # 2 due
Wed. 10/14
Mon. 10/19
Wed. 10/21
Mon. 10/26
Wed. 10/28
Sunday, November 1 – Daylight Savings Time ends – Move clocks ahead an hour
~ 8 ~
Mon. 11/02
Wed. 11/04
Mon. 11/09
Progress Report # 3 due
Wed. 11/11NO CLASS Veteran’s Day Observance – Academic/Administrative Holiday – NO
CLASS
Freedom isn’t free….it comes with a cost, often buried in the ground
Note: Friday, November 13, - Last day to drop class(es) with a “W” grade on permanent record
Mon. 11/16
Wed. 11/18
~ 9 ~
Mon. 11/23
Wed. 11/25
(Thanksgiving Holiday - Thursday, Friday, 11/26-27)I am thankful for……….
Mon. 11/30
Wed. 12/02
Mon. 12/07
Progress Report # 4 due
Wed. 12/09FINAL EXAM
~ 10 ~
Name________________________________________ Total Units______________________
School/Study/Work/Meeting Schedule—Plan your study time!
Mark each study hour with the words “Study.” Mark class time, work schedule and any other regular activities--you need at least 2 hours of study time for each unit.
SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY
6-7
7-8
8-9
9-10
10-11
11-12
12-1
1-2
2-3
3-4
~ 11 ~
4-5
5-6
6-7
7-8
8-9
9-10
10-11
PERSONAL ATTENDANCE RECORD
Place an X under a date that you miss class.
Mon 8/17 Wed 8/19 Mon 8/24 Wed 8/26 Mon 8/31 Wed 9/2
Mon 9/7 Wed 9/9 Mon 9/14 Wed 9/16 Mon 9/21 Wed 9/23
HOLIDAY
Mon 9/28 Wed 9/30 Mon 10/5 Wed 10/7 Mon 10/12 Wed 10/14
Mon 10/19 Wed 10/21 Mon 10/26 Wed 10/28 Mon 11/2 Wed 11/4
Mon 11/9 Wed 11/11 Mon 11/16 Wed 11/18 Mon 11/23 Wed 11/25
HOLIDAY
Mon 11/30 Wed 12/2 Mon 12/7 Wed 12/9
~ 12 ~
~ 13 ~
PROGRESS REPORT # 1 – Due Monday, September 14 th
Name: _________________________ Student ID # ___________________
1. Place an X under the days you missed class.
Mon 8/17 Wed 8/19 Mon 8/24 Wed 8/26 Mon 8/31 Wed 9/2
Mon 9/7 Wed 9/9HOLIDAY
2. What do you think about your attendance/participation? Circle one Excellent Good Poor Very Bad
3. How many of the course assignments have you done? Circle oneAll of them Most of them Some of them None of them
4. What is your current course grade? _____% (You can find this in Canvas.) 5. If you continue as you have been, do you think you will pass this course?
(Remember, you need at least 70% to pass the course).Yes Maybe No
ACTION PLAN Do you think you need to modify your behavior/participation to receive a passing grade in this course and get the most out of it you can? If so, how? What is your action plan? Use a separate piece of paper if needed. Staple it to this one.
~ 14 ~
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What do you need help with? _________________________________________
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~ 15 ~
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Teacher’s Notes:
PROGRESS REPORT # 2 – Due Monday, October 12th
Name: _________________________ Student ID # ___________________
1. Place an X under the days you missed class.
Mon 9/14 Wed 9/16 Mon 9/21 Wed 9/23HOLIDAYMon 9/28 Wed 9/30 Mon 10/5 Wed 10/7
How many classes have you missed this semester so far? _____
2. What do you think about your attendance/participation? Circle one Excellent Good Poor Very Bad
3. How many of the course assignments have you done? Circle oneAll of them Most of them Some of them None of them
4. What is your current course grade? _____% (You can find this in Canvas.) 5. If you continue as you have been, do you think you will pass this course?
(Remember, you need at least 70% to pass the course). Yes Maybe No
REFLECTION AND ACTION PLAN What have you done differently since the first progress report? Has it helped? Do you think you still need to modify your behavior/participation to receive a passing grade in this course and get the most out of it you can? If so, how? What is your action plan? Use a separate piece of paper if needed. Staple it to this one.
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What do you need help with? _________________________________________
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~ 17 ~
__________________________________________________________________
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Teacher’s Notes:
PROGRESS REPORT # 3 – Due Monday, November 9th
Name: _________________________ Student ID # ___________________
1. Place an X under the days you missed class.
Mon 10/12 Wed 10/14
Mon 10/19 Wed 10/21 Mon 10/26 Wed 10/28 Mon 11/2 Wed 11/4
How many classes have you missed this semester so far? _____
2. What do you think about your attendance/participation? Circle one Excellent Good Poor Very Bad
3. How many of the course assignments have you done? Circle oneAll of them Most of them Some of them None of them
4. What is your current course grade? _____% (You can find this in Canvas.) 5. If you continue as you have been, do you think you will pass this course?
(Remember, you need at least 70% to pass the course). Yes Maybe No
REFLECTION AND ACTION PLAN What have you done differently since the first progress report? Has it helped? Do you think you still need to modify your behavior/participation to receive a passing grade in this course and get the most out of it you can? If so, how? What is your action plan? Use a separate piece of paper if needed. Staple it to this one.
~ 18 ~
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What do you need help with? _________________________________________
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__________________________________________________________________
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Teacher’s Notes:
PROGRESS REPORT # 4 – Due Monday, December 7 th
Name: _________________________ Student ID # ___________________
1. Place an X under the days you missed class.
Mon 11/9 Wed 11/11 Mon 11/16 Wed 11/18 Mon 11/23 Wed 11/25HOLIDAY
Mon 11/30 Wed 12/2
2. How many classes did you miss this semester _____
3. What do you think about your attendance/participation this semester?
Excellent Good Poor Very Bad
4. What is your current course grade? _____% (You can find this in Canvas.)
5. Write a paragraph responding to the following questions. Staple it to this
paper.
~ 20 ~
How many of the course assignments did you do? Were you dedicated
or not? What difficulties did you overcome? Do you feel ready for the
final exam?
6. What grade do you think you deserve in this course? A B C D or F
______
Teacher’s Notes:
~ 21 ~
Classroom Vocabulary
Metacognition: a conscious examination of what you are understanding and what you are not understanding while you are reading or thinking
Schema: What you already know before you try to read or learn something new
Engagement: a connection to something
Fluency: The ability to do something so quickly and easily that you hardly have to think about it
Competence: Skill in something
Text: anything that communicates using language (written or oral)
Chunking: breaking up sentences into pieces small enough for you to understand
Strategy: a plan of action~ 22 ~
Summarizing: deciding what is most important in a text and putting it in your own words
Paraphrasing: putting ideas in a text into your own words
Critical Voice: Entering a discussion. When you use your own voice to give your opinion about a text (agree/disagree/or somewhere in-between).
Getting Started Class Contacts: get contact information from several of your classmates. You can contact them if you miss class and need to find out the homework.
Name: _______________________ Contact Information: _______________________________
Name: _______________________ Contact Information: _______________________________
Name: _______________________ Contact Information: _______________________________
Name: _______________________ Contact Information: _______________________________
Name: _______________________ Contact Information: _______________________________
Class Roster: I expect that you refer to your classmates by their names when you talk to them. On this page you will keep a list of everyone’s name just in case you forget.
1. ___________________________ 16. ___________________________
2. ___________________________ 17. ___________________________
3. ___________________________ 18. ___________________________
~ 23 ~
4. ___________________________ 19. ___________________________
5. ___________________________ 20. ___________________________
6. ___________________________ 21. ___________________________
7. ___________________________ 22. ___________________________
8. ___________________________ 23. ___________________________
9. ___________________________ 24. ___________________________
10. ___________________________ 25. ___________________________
11. ___________________________ 26. ___________________________
12. ___________________________ 27. ___________________________
13. ___________________________ 28. ___________________________
Things we have in common: in small groups, have a discussion and find five things all of you have in common. The things you find can’t relate to school or work. Find things about your personalities, hobbies, or lives.
Name: _______________________
Name: _______________________
Name: _______________________
Name: _______________________
Name: _______________________
Things in common: (Example: We all like to listen to classical music).
1. _____________________________________________________________
2. _____________________________________________________________
3. _____________________________________________________________
~ 24 ~
4. _____________________________________________________________
5. _____________________________________________________________
Creating Our Classroom Learning Environment
It’s important that we create classroom policies that will develop a comfortable learning environment. With your group, discuss the questions below:
What makes you feel comfortable in a classroom? What makes you feel uncomfortable in a classroom? What are some things the teacher can do to support your learning? What are some things teachers do that are harmful to learning? What are some things that classmates can do to support each other’s learning? What are some things classmates can do that are harmful to learning?
Keeping in mind what you talked about for the previous questions, work with your group to create a list of classroom policies that our class will abide by. These are the policies that we will follow in our class. Create a list of…
Thinks we should do:
~ 25 ~
Things we shouldn’t do:
Big Assignments Explained It is possible that these assignments may be modified throughout the semester if needed. If I modify any of the assignments, I will pass out an updated version.
Progress Reports Reading Quizzes Midterm Exam Blog Posts Introduction Essay Synthesis Essay 1 Synthesis Essay 2 Synthesis Essay 3
Progress ReportsYou will be required to turn in four separate progress reports throughout the semester. These are located in this packet. The purpose of these is to keep you on track so that you pass this course and learn as much as you can. If you notice near the beginning the semester that you aren’t putting in enough effort, it’s not too late to change.
Progress Report Grading Rubric
50 points 30 points 10 points Completed on time. All sections are
completed in detail. Information provided
is accurate and honest.
Completed on time. All sections are
completed but only with a brief description.
Information is mostly accurate.
Turned in late. Missing many sections
and was obviously rushed and not thought through.
Much information is inaccurate.
~ 26 ~
Reading Quizzes The success of this class depends on you. It’s important that everyone keeps up on the readings, so we can have interesting and productive discussions. If half of the people who come to class didn’t do the reading, then the class won’t be as engaging or useful. Furthermore, if you don’t do the readings, you will not be able to write good essays because the essays require you to use the readings. The reading quizzes are a way to reward those who did do the reading, and encourage everyone to stay caught up. If you do the readings, then you should have no trouble acing the quizzes.
Midterm Exam The midterm exam is just like the final exam, and will therefore serve a check in point to see how you are doing. The midterm will be an in-class essay that you write in response to a short article you will read the day of the midterm. During the midterm you can use a print dictionary (no electronic devices).
Blog Posts Throughout the semester, I will give you different questions or topics for discussion based on the readings and ideas we are discussing in class. You will write a response to the question/topic and post it to our blog for your classmates to read and comment on. Although these are not formal essays, I do expect you to put some thought and time into them.
Blog Grading Rubric
Excellent (10/10) Adequate (8/10) Poor (6/10)
Post directly answers/responds to the question or topic in detail. It isn’t too brief, and shows that thought was taken into writing. May use personal examples and/or connect other readings. The author proofread for errors.
Post mostly answers/responds to the question/topic though it may trail off in some unrelated directions. Doesn’t use any examples or connect to other readings. Post could be longer, and there are a few errors.
Post does not relate at all to the question or topic. Post is very short without detail. Post contains many errors.
Introduction Essay
~ 27 ~
Write an introduction to me and your classmates about yourself. Who are you? What do you like to do? What are some of your hobbies? Also, why are you taking this class? What is your ultimate goal in school? What are you doing to reach that goal?
Argument Synthesis Essay #1:
Essay Question: What barriers do college students encounter? How do we keep capable college students from failing or quitting?
In this thesis-driven essay, you will use ideas from our class readings and your own experience and logic to think about possible causes and solutions to the questions above. Audience: Students who are at risk of failing or quitting and teachers who are trying to helpPurpose: Persuade students and teachers to adopt specific ways of thinking and take specific actionsGenre: Academic argument essay that follows the conventions of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Use at least 3 (or more) of the following readings to help you make your case, but make sure that your essay is dominated by your own opinion and voice (personality):
“Who gets to Graduate?” by Paul Tough (in your class packet) “The Gap between Ability and Sustainability” a website by Katie Hern “Brainology” (in your class packet) by Carol Dweck (or Ch 1 of Mindsets) “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind” Edited by Costa and Kallick (in your class
packet)
Your essay should have an introduction, body, conclusion, and Works Cited page. It should also be in MLA format, including in-text citation. It will be a minimum of 3 typed pages and a maximum of 6, not including the Works Cited page. Your introduction should:
1. Grab the reader’s attention and introduce the topic
~ 28 ~
2. Give a clear thesis statement: this gives your clear, strong opinion about what things cause capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement will control the body of your paper. It is good to draft a “working thesis statement” and then adjust it as necessary after you have written the body.
The body of your paper should: Consist of several paragraphs that clearly prove your thesis Contain body paragraphs that lead with your voice. Give several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by your
voice). These topic sentences clearly state the claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesis
Contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support your main claims and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings, personal experience, the experience of others, other things you have read, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources), and/or things you have heard from reputable sources. When quoting or paraphrasing, be sure to use proper MLA in-text citation.
The conclusion of your paper should:Sum up your argument and give your final thoughts. There are many interesting ways to conclude a paper. A few ideas are listed below. May answer a question that you posed in your introduction May comment on a story that you used in your introduction May restate your thesis using different words (hint: unless done with pizzazz, this is often
boring for readers) May include a quote that illustrates your thesis May include a call to action that asks your audience to do something differently
Grading Rubric for Essay #1Name:____________________________Final score_____________________________
Assignment requirements for introduction, body and conclusion Not Done
Needs Work
FairWell Done
Introduction grabs the reader’s attention, introduces the topic, and is dominated by the writer’s voice (personality)Introduction contains a clear thesis statement about what causes capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement controls the body of the essayThe body consists of several paragraphs that lead with the writer’s voice and clearly prove the thesisThe body gives several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by the writer’s voice). These topic sentences clearly state a claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesisBody paragraphs contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support main claims/reasons and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings,
~ 29 ~
personal experience, the experience of others, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources) and/or things you have heard from reputable sources.The essay uses at least three sources from our class readings to help support the argumentIdeas and information are explained fully enough for readers not in our class to followPresent ideas in an order that makes sense to readersUse strong attribution (signal) verbs for introducing summaries, paraphrases, and quotationsClearly explain quotes and show how they support your argumentIncludes a memorable conclusionIs a minimum of 3, maximum of 6 typed pages, not including the Works Cited page
Mechanics—As a writer, you should…Proofread carefully so that sentences are clear, concise, and free of errors—pay special attention to your personal error patternsParaphrase skillfully so that the author’s meaning remains true but sentences and words are significantly different (not just a few words changed)Use “quotation marks” when including an author’s exact wordsInclude MLA style in-text citation when you use ideas from others—this includes paraphrasing as well as quotingFollow MLA format: standard 12-point, Times New Roman font; proper heading; proper, unique title; page numbers; double spaced; 1-inch margins; and no extra spaces between paragraphs (after spacing of “0” under “paragraphs” in Word)
~ 30 ~
~ 31 ~
Argument Synthesis Essay #2
Essay Question: What are the ingredients to making motivation a reality? How does someone stay motivated despite challenges and setbacks? How can a student maintain this motivation in school?
In this thesis-driven essay, you will use ideas from our class readings and your own experience and logic to think about possible causes and solutions to the questions above. Audience: Students lacking motivation and teacher who are trying to develop motivation in their studentsPurpose: Persuade students and teachers to adopt specific ways of thinking and take specific actionsGenre: Academic argument essay that follows the conventions of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Use at least 3 (or more) of the following readings to help you make your case, but make sure that your essay is dominated by your own opinion and voice (personality):
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink The Power of Habit , Ch 4: Keystone Habits “The 10,000-Hour Rule” and or “The Matthew Effect” from Outliers by Malcom
Gladwell “Brainology” (in your class packet) by Carol Dweck (or Ch 1 of Mindsets) “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind” Edited by Costa and Kallick (in your class
packet)Your essay should have an introduction, body, conclusion, and Works Cited page. It should also be in MLA format, including in-text citation. It will be a minimum of 3 typed pages and a maximum of 6, not including the Works Cited page.
~ 32 ~
Your introduction should:3. Grab the reader’s attention and introduce the topic 4. Give a clear thesis statement: this gives your clear, strong opinion about what things
cause capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement will control the body of your paper. It is good to draft a “working thesis statement” and then adjust it as necessary after you have written the body.
The body of your paper should: Consist of several paragraphs that clearly prove your thesis Contain body paragraphs that lead with your voice. Give several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by your
voice). These topic sentences clearly state the claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesis
Contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support your main claims and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings, personal experience, the experience of others, other things you have read, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources), and/or things you have heard from reputable sources. When quoting or paraphrasing, be sure to use proper MLA in-text citation.
The conclusion of your paper should:Sum up your argument and give your final thoughts. There are many interesting ways to conclude a paper. A few ideas are listed below. May answer a question that you posed in your introduction May comment on a story that you used in your introduction May restate your thesis using different words (hint: unless done with pizzazz, this is often
boring for readers) May end with a quote that illustrates your thesis May include a call to action that asks your audience to do something differently
Grading Rubric for Essay # 2Name:____________________________Final score_____________________________Assignment requirements for introduction, body and
conclusionNot
DoneNeeds Work
FairWell Done
Introduction grabs the reader’s attention, introduces the topic, and is dominated by the writer’s voice (personality)Introduction contains a clear thesis statement about what causes capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement controls the body of the essayThe body consists of several paragraphs that lead with the
~ 33 ~
writer’s voice and clearly prove the thesisThe body gives several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by the writer’s voice). These topic sentences clearly state a claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesisBody paragraphs contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support main claims/reasons and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings, personal experience, the experience of others, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources), and/or things you have heard from reputable sources. When quoting or paraphrasing be sure to use proper MLA in-text citation.The essay uses at least two sources from our class readings to help support the argumentIdeas and information are explained fully enough for readers not in our class to followPresent ideas in an order that makes sense to readersUse strong attribution (signal) verbs for introducing summaries, paraphrases, and quotationsClearly explain how quotes connect to the paperIncludes a memorable conclusionIs a minimum of 3, maximum of 6 typed pages, not including the Works Cited page
Mechanics—As a writer, you should…Proofread carefully so that sentences are clear, concise, and free of errors—pay special attention to your personal error patternsParaphrase skillfully so that the author’s meaning remains true but sentences and words are significantly different (not just a few words changed)Use “quotation marks” when including an author’s exact wordsInclude MLA style in-text citation when you use ideas from others—this includes paraphrasing as well as quotingFollow MLA format: standard 12-point, Times New Roman font; proper heading; proper, unique title; page numbers; double spaced; 1-inch margins; and no extra spaces between paragraphs (after spacing of “0” under “paragraphs” in Word)
~ 34 ~
~ 35 ~
Argument Synthesis Essay #3:
How will you get to where you want to be in your career or profession? What barriers will you need to overcome? How will you find and maintain motivation?
orHow will you get to where you want to be in health, athletics, relationships, or some other important aspect of your life? If you choose a non-career option, please make sure to speak with me first.
In this thesis-driven essay, you will use ideas from our class readings, primary and secondary research, and your own experience and logic to think about your path to success.
Audience: Figure it out for yourselfPurpose: Figure it out for yourselfGenre: Academic argument essay that follows the conventions of the Modern Language Association (MLA)
Use at least 5 (or more) sources, one of which must be primary research (interview or survey) of the following readings to help you make your case, but make sure that your essay is dominated by your own opinion and voice (personality):
Philip Gerard “How to conduct an interview” Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink The Power of Habit , Ch 4: Keystone Habits “The 10,000-Hour Rule” and or “The Matthew Effect” from Outliers by Malcom
Gladwell “Brainology” (in your class packet) by Carol Dweck (or Ch 1 of Mindsets) “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind” Edited by Costa and Kallick (in your class
packet)
Your essay should have an introduction, body, conclusion, and Works Cited page. It should also be in MLA format, including in-text citation. It will be a minimum of 3 typed pages and a maximum of 6, not including the Works Cited page.
~ 36 ~
Your introduction should:5. Grab the reader’s attention and introduce the topic 6. Give a clear thesis statement: this gives your clear, strong opinion about what things
cause capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement will control the body of your paper. It is good to draft a “working thesis statement” and then adjust it as necessary after you have written the body.
The body of your paper should: Consist of several paragraphs that clearly prove your thesis Contain body paragraphs that lead with your voice. Give several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by your
voice). These topic sentences clearly state the claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesis
Contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support your main claims and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings, personal experience, the experience of others, other things you have read, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources), and/or things you have heard from reputable sources. When quoting or paraphrasing, be sure to use proper MLA in-text citation.
The conclusion of your paper should:Sum up your argument and give your final thoughts. There are many interesting ways to conclude a paper. A few ideas are listed below. May answer a question that you posed in your introduction May comment on a story that you used in your introduction May restate your thesis using different words (hint: unless done with pizzazz, this is often
boring for readers) May end with a quote that illustrates your thesis May include a call to action that asks your audience to do something differently
Grading Rubric for Essay #1Name:____________________________Final score_____________________________Assignment requirements for introduction, body and
conclusionNot
DoneNeeds Work
FairWell Done
Introduction grabs the reader’s attention, introduces the topic, and is dominated by the writer’s voice (personality)Introduction contains a clear thesis statement about what causes capable students to fail and what can be done about it. This statement controls the body of the essayThe body consists of several paragraphs that lead with the writer’s voice and clearly prove the thesis
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The body gives several main claims/reasons (expressed in clear topic sentences dominated by the writer’s voice). These topic sentences clearly state a claim/reason and connect to (prove) the thesisBody paragraphs contain specific (not just general) examples, reasoning, and evidence that clearly support main claims/reasons and thesis. This evidence can be drawn from our class readings, personal experience, the experience of others, things you have researched outside of our class readings (use credible sources), and/or things you have heard from reputable sources. When quoting or paraphrasing be sure to use proper MLA in-text citation.The essay uses at least two sources from our class readings to help support the argumentIdeas and information are explained fully enough for readers not in our class to followPresent ideas in an order that makes sense to readersUse strong attribution (signal) verbs for introducing summaries, paraphrases, and quotationsClearly explain how quotes connect to the paperIncludes a memorable conclusionIs a minimum of 3, maximum of 6 typed pages, not including the Works Cited page
Mechanics—As a writer, you should…Proofread carefully so that sentences are clear, concise, and free of errors—pay special attention to your personal error patternsParaphrase skillfully so that the author’s meaning remains true but sentences and words are significantly different (not just a few words changed)Use “quotation marks” when including an author’s exact wordsInclude MLA style in-text citation when you use ideas from others—this includes paraphrasing as well as quotingFollow MLA format: standard 12-point, Times New Roman font; proper heading; proper, unique title; page numbers; double spaced; 1-inch margins; and no extra spaces between paragraphs (after spacing of “0” under “paragraphs” in Word)
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Classroom Reading PracticesReading your English texts effectively is a sophisticated process; however, all students can acquire reading expertise through practice and engagement with metacognitive processes, including deliberate classroom conversations about how people read challenging texts.
For all of the readings we do in this course, we will apply metacognitive strategies to help us understand the readings, as well as understand the reading strategies that we utilized so that we can work to develop them more. Below the two reading tools we will be using are described. You will turn these in as homework for the readings.
Metacognitive Reading Logs and Reading Analysis Charts These metacognitive reading tools will be assigned as homework, and they will be graded according to the rubric provided. These tools are designed to help you learn to pay special attention to the authors’ rhetorical strategies and key ideas; in addition, they ask you to question the text and relate essential information to your own experiences, prior knowledge, and personal learning processes. Note: extra reading logs for your homework can be found at the end of this packet in the appendix.
Reading Logs: Write key ideas from the reading in the left hand column (be sure to record page #’s), and personal connections and reflections in the right column.
Analysis Charts: Write the author’s main ideas/claims in the left-hand column, and write how the authors support those ideas/claims the middle column (be sure to record page #’s). Record your personal connections and reflections (in response to the information in the other two columns) in the right-hand column.
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Reflective reading is a personal activity. We all have unique experiences and thinking processes and this will make our reflections different from one another.
In class you will have opportunities to share your thoughts and ask questions recorded in your reading logs. Your questions and comments help me plan lessons that meet your learning needs. I grade heavily for best effort—please see the rubric to get an idea of what I expect
Reading Log and Reading Analysis Chart Grading Rubric
Accomplished20
Proficient18
Basic15
Novice10
Completed on time Completed on time Completed on time Turned in Late
The left and center columns contain plentiful essential information from each section of the text.
The left and center columns contain most essential information from each section of the text.
The left and center columns contain some essential information from each section of the text.
The left and center columns contain little essential information from each section of the text.
Correct in-text citation with each entry.
Correct in-text citation with most entries.
Correct in-text citation with some entries.
Correct in-text citation with few or no entries
The right column contains reflections for each entry that clearly show thoughtful reading.
The right column contains reflections for most entries that show thoughtful reading.
The right column contains reflections for some entries that show thoughtful reading.
The right column contains reflections for few entries that show thoughtful reading.
Upgrades: Students earning Novice on a reading log or analysis chart are invited to redo the reading log to meet Proficient criteria for an upgrade to Basic score.
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No Credit: there are three ways to receive no credit
Do not do a reading log/analysis chart Do not turn in your log/chart Copy another student’s log/chart and turn it in as your own.
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Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
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Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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Metacognitive Reading Strategies List
Strategies Your notes about this reading strategyPredictingI predict…In the next part…I think this is…
PicturingI picture…I see…
Making ConnectionsThis is like…This reminds me of….
QuestioningI wonder what this means…?Why…?How..?Where…?When…?What…?Who…?Identifying a ProblemI got confused when…I’m not sure of…I didn’t expect…
Using fix-upsI think I’ll have to…
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(reread or take some other action)Maybe I’ll need to (read on or persevere in some other way).SummarizingSo the author is saying…What he/she means is…In other words…
As our class discussion of reading continues and we learn about the different reading strategies everyone in our class uses to help them understand a text, we will compile a list of these strategies. This will give you even more tools to use when you’re reading. As we discuss them in class, write them down in the chart below and take some notes about them.
Strategy Notes about it
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Classroom Writing Practices In this class, we’ll consider writing as a recursive process that requires dedication and practice. Good writers aren’t somehow writing geniuses; they are people who have put in time and effort to practice this skill. Remember, good writers make mistakes and must revise and improve their writing. This class is a place where you can practice your writing skills to become a better writer. Remember, struggling with a writing task and making mistakes is okay. It’s how we are going to learn. So, don’t get discouraged if you find this class difficult. Stick to it, and I’m sure you’ll be rewarded.
On the next few pages is a personal error chart where you can track errors that you tend to make in your writing.
Personal Error Pattern LogProofread your papers for the following errors.
Error Notes for Study
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Error Notes for Study
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What is academic writing?
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Unit 1: Overcoming Barriers to Success Reading List
“Who gets to Graduate?” by Paul Tough
“Brainology” by Carol Dweck
“Learning and Leading with Habits of the Mind” Edited by Costa and
Kallick
“The Gap between Ability and Sustainability” A website by Katie Hern
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Who Gets to Graduate?
Skim through the reading. What do you think it is going to be about? Work with a partner to make some predictions about the reading and to come up with some questions you hope the reading will answer.
Predictions:
Question:
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Research Terminology
Nouns
A study _________________________________________________________________
Results _________________________________________________________________
Findings ________________________________________________________________
Control group ____________________________________________________________
Research group ___________________________________________________________
Participants ______________________________________________________________
Placebo _________________________________________________________________
Hypothesis ______________________________________________________________
Correlation ______________________________________________________________
A sample _______________________________________________________________
Verbs
To study ________________________________________________________________
To investigate ____________________________________________________________
To discover ______________________________________________________________
To hypothesize __________________________________________________________
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Who Gets to Graduate?
By PAUL TOUGH MAY 15, 2014Vanessa Brewer Credit Bill McCullough for The New York TimesThis story is included with an NYT Now subscription.
For as long as she could remember, Vanessa
Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image
of herself as a college student appealed to her —
independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential
— but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite
the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years
earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving
high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became
pregnant with Vanessa.
Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage
mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and
when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-
class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage
company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they
raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother,
Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell
her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-
year college degree.
There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have
chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University
of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in
high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at
U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a
hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a
checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she
were checking off the first item.
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Vanessa Brewer Credit Bill McCullough for The New York Times
Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was
nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was
finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought:
Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”
And then, a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. She failed her first test in
statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing program. She was surprised at how bad it
felt. Failure was not an experience she was used to. At Mesquite High, she never had to study for
math tests; she aced them all without really trying. (Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her
39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of
about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.)
Vanessa called home, looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so
supportive, but now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to succeed
at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there,” she
said. “Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first.”
“I died inside when she said that,” Vanessa told me. “I didn’t want to leave. But it felt
like that was maybe the reality of the situation. You know, moms are usually right. I just started
questioning everything: Am I supposed to be here? Am I good enough?”
There are thousands of students like Vanessa at the University of Texas, and millions like
her throughout the country — high-achieving students from low-income families who want
desperately to earn a four-year degree but who run into trouble along the way. Many are derailed
before they ever set foot on a campus, tripped up by complicated financial-aid forms or held
back by the powerful tug of family obligations. Some don’t know how to choose the right
college, so they drift into a mediocre school that produces more dropouts than graduates. Many
are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans. And some do what Vanessa was on the
verge of doing: They get to a good college and encounter what should be a minor obstacle, and
they freak out. They don’t want to ask for help, or they don’t know how. Things spiral, and
before they know it, they’re back at home, resentful, demoralized and in debt.
When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big
trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to
college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More
than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree
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after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is
more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.
The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost
entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms:
Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a
quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to
collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in
the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.
When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with
ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns
out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the
same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their
educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like
Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out
of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students
come from families in the top-income
quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of
graduating with a four-year degree. If
they come from families in the bottom
quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance
of making it to graduation.
The good news for Vanessa is
that she had improved her odds by
enrolling in a highly selective college.
Many low-income students
“undermatch,” meaning that they don’t
attend — or even apply to — the most
selective college that would accept
them. It may seem counterintuitive, but
the more selective the college you
choose, the higher your likelihood of
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graduating. But even among the highly educated students of U.T., parental income and education
play a huge role in determining who will graduate on time. An internal U.T. report published in
2012 showed that only 39 percent of first-generation students (meaning students whose parents
weren’t college graduates) graduated in four years, compared with 60 percent whose parents both
graduated from college. So Vanessa was caught in something of a paradox. According to her
academic record, she had all the ability she needed to succeed at an elite college; according to the
demographic statistics, she was at serious risk of failing.
But why? What was standing in her way? This year, for the first time, the University of
Texas is trying in a serious way to answer that question. The school’s administrators are
addressing head-on the problems faced by students like Vanessa. U.T.’s efforts are based on a
novel and controversial premise: If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not
enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts
and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get
inside the mind of a college student.
The person at the University of Texas who has been given the responsibility for helping
these students succeed is a 56-year-old chemistry professor named David Laude. He is, by all
accounts, a very good college professor — he illustrates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
with quotations from Trent Reznor and Leonard Cohen and occasionally calls students to the
front of the class to ignite balloons filled with hydrogen into giant fireballs. But he was a lousy
college student. As a freshman at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., Laude felt
bewildered and out of place, the son of a working-class, Italian-American family from Modesto,
Calif., trying to find his way at a college steeped in Southern tradition, where students joined
secret societies and wore academic gowns to class. “It was a massive culture shock,” Laude told
me. “I was completely at a loss on how to fit in socially. And I was tremendously bad at
studying. Everything was just overwhelming.” He spent most of his freshman year on the brink
of dropping out.
But he didn’t drop out. He figured out college, then he figured out chemistry, then he got
really good at both, until he wound up, 20 years later, a tenured professor at U.T. teaching
Chemistry 301, the same introductory course in which he got a C as a freshman in Sewanee.
Perhaps because of his own precarious college experience, Laude paid special attention as a
professor to how students were doing in his class. And year after year, he noticed something
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curious: The distribution of grades in his Chemistry 301 section didn’t follow the nice sweeping
bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.” In
each class of 500 students, there would be 400 or so who did quite well, clustered around the A
and high-B range. They got it. Then there would be a second cluster of perhaps 100 students
whose grades were way down at the bottom — D’s and F’s. They didn’t get it.
To many professors, this pattern simply represents the natural winnowing process that
takes place in higher education. That attitude is especially common in the sciences, where
demanding introductory classes have traditionally been seen as a way to weed out weak students.
But Laude felt differently. He acknowledged that some of his failing students just weren’t cut out
for chemistry, but he suspected that many of them were — that they were smart but confused and
a little scared, much as he had been.
To get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records
from the provost’s office. It wasn’t hard to discern a pattern. The students who were failing were
mostly from low-income families. Many of them fit into certain ethnic, racial and geographic
profiles: They were white kids from rural West Texas, say, or Latinos from the Rio Grande
Valley or African-Americans from Dallas or Houston. And almost all of them had low SAT
scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.
The default strategy at U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into
remedial programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors instead of
chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the worst thing you could possibly imagine
doing,” Laude said. “It was saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the
data to see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into nonmajors
chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder. They were outsiders from the
beginning.”
In 1999, at the beginning of the fall semester, Laude combed through the records of every
student in his freshman chemistry class and identified about 50 who possessed at least two of the
“adversity indicators” common among students who failed the course in the past: low SATs, low
family income, less-educated parents. He invited them all to apply to a new program, which he
would later give the august-sounding name the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, or TIP. Students in
TIP were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by Laude. But rather than
dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same
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challenging material as the students in his larger section. In fact, he scheduled his two sections
back to back. “I taught my 500-student chemistry class, and then I walked upstairs and I taught
this 50-student chemistry class,” Laude explained. “Identical material, identical lectures,
identical tests — but a 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections.”
Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that
small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to
think they were just going to show up and start getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with
the kind of support that would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he
supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each
week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and
intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with
the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his
lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They
weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving
scholars.
Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them
the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was
over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades
as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of
students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above
average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were
also above the U.T. average.
Two years ago, Laude was promoted to his current position — senior vice provost for
enrollment and graduation management. His official mission now is to improve U.T.’s four-year
graduation rate, which is currently languishing at around 52 percent, to 70 percent — closer to
the rates at U.T.’s state-university peers in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va. —
and to achieve this leap by 2017. The best way to do that, Laude decided, was to take the
principles and practices that he introduced 15 years earlier with TIP and bring them to the whole
Austin campus.
One complicating factor for administrators at the University of Texas — and, indeed, one
reason the school makes for such an interesting case study — is that U.T. has a unique
~ 64 ~
admissions policy, one that is the legacy of many years of legal and legislative battles over
affirmative action. After U.T.’s use of race in admissions was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth
Circuit in 1996, the Texas Legislature came up with an alternative strategy to maintain a diverse
campus: the Top 10 percent law, which stipulated that students who ranked in the top tenth of
their graduating classes in any high school in Texas would be automatically admitted to the
campus of their choice in the U.T. system. (As U.T. Austin has grown more popular over the last
decade, the criterion for automatic admission has tightened; Texas high-school seniors now have
to be in the top 7 percent of their class to earn admission. Automatic admits — Vanessa Brewer
among them — make up about three-quarters of each freshman class.)
At high schools in the wealthier suburbs of Dallas, the top 7 percent of students look a lot
like the students anywhere who go on to attend elite colleges. They are mostly well off and
mostly white, and most of them rack up high SAT scores. What sets U.T. apart from other
selective colleges is that the school also admits the top 7 percent of students from high schools in
Brownsville and the Third Ward of Houston, who fit a very different demographic and have, on
average, much lower SAT scores.
The good news about these kids, from U.T.’s point of view, is that they are very good
students regardless of their test scores. Even if their high schools weren’t as well funded or as
academically demanding as schools in other parts of the state, they managed to figure out how to
learn, how to study and how to overcome adversity. Laude’s experience teaching Chemistry 301
convinced him that they could succeed and even excel at the University of Texas. But when he
looked at the campuswide data, it was clear that these were the students who weren’t succeeding.
“There are always going to be both affluent kids and kids who have need who come into
this college,” Laude said. “And it will always be the case that the kids who have need are going
to have been denied a lot of the academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation
that the affluent kids have been given. The question is, can we do something for those students in
their first year in college that can accelerate them and get them up to the place where they can be
competitive with the affluent, advantaged students?”
Before he could figure out how to help those disadvantaged students, though, Laude first
had to find out exactly who they were. This was relatively simple to determine in a single
chemistry class, but with more than 7,000 students arriving on campus each year, finding the
most vulnerable would be a challenge. Laude turned to a newly formed data team in the
~ 65 ~
provost’s office called Institutional Research. Like every big university, U.T. had long had an in-
house group of researchers who compiled statistics and issued government-mandated reports, but
with Institutional Research, the school had created a data unit for the Nate Silver era, young
statisticians and programmers who focused on predictive analytics, sifting through decades’
worth of student data and looking for patterns that could guide the administration’s decision-
making on everything from faculty career paths to financial aid.
Laude wanted something that would help him predict, for any given incoming freshman,
how likely he or she would be to graduate in four years. The Institutional Research team
analyzed the performance of tens of thousands of recent U.T. students, and from that analysis
they produced a tool they called the Dashboard — an algorithm, in spreadsheet form, that would
consider 14 variables, from an incoming student’s family income to his SAT score to his class
rank to his parents’ educational background, and then immediately spit out a probability, to the
second decimal place, of how likely he was to graduate in four years.
In the spring of 2013, Laude and his staff sat down with the Dashboard to analyze the
7,200 high-school seniors who had just been admitted to the class of 2017. When they ran the
students’ data, the Dashboard indicated that 1,200 of them — including Vanessa Brewer — had
less than a 40 percent chance of graduation on time. Those were the kids Laude decided to target.
He assigned them each to one or more newly created or expanded interventions. The heart of the
project is a portfolio of “student success programs,” each one tailored, to a certain extent, for a
different college at U.T. — natural sciences, liberal arts, engineering — but all of them following
the basic TIP model Laude dreamed up 15 years ago: small classes, peer mentoring, extra
tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and community-building exercises.
Laude’s most intensive and innovative intervention, though, is the University Leadership
Network, a new scholarship program that aims to develop not academic skills but leadership
skills. In order to be selected for U.L.N., incoming freshmen must not only fall below the 40-
percent cutoff on the Dashboard; they must also have what the financial-aid office calls unmet
financial need. In practice, this means that students in U.L.N. are almost all from families with
incomes below the national median. (When you enter a family income at that level into the
Dashboard, the predicted on-time graduation rate falls even further; for U.L.N. students, Laude
estimates, it is more like 20 percent than 40 percent.) The 500 freshmen in U.L.N. perform
community service, take part in discussion groups and attend weekly lectures on topics like time
~ 66 ~
management and team building. The lectures have a grown-up, formal feel; students are required
to wear business attire. In later years, U.L.N. students will serve in internships on campus and
move into leadership positions as mentors or residence-hall advisers or student government
officials. In exchange for all this, they receive a $5,000 scholarship every year, paid in monthly
increments.
Perhaps the most striking fact about the success programs is that the selection criteria are
never disclosed to students. “From a numbers perspective, the students in these programs are all
in the bottom quartile,” Laude explained. “But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re
in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk
about the Dashboard. Laude says he assumes that most U.L.N. students understand on some level
that they were chosen in part because of their financial need, but he says it is important for the
university to play down that fact when dealing directly with students. It is an extension of the
basic psychological strategy that he has used ever since that first TIP program: Select the
students who are least likely to do well, but in all your communications with them, convey the
idea that you have selected them for this special program not because you fear they will fail, but
because you are confident they can succeed.
Which, from Laude’s perspective, has the virtue of being true. I sat with him in his office
one morning in late January, not long after students had arrived back on campus for the spring
semester. The university was closed for the day because of a freak ice storm, and he and I were
more or less alone in the administration building, a huge clock tower in the center of campus. We
were talking about his experience in Sewanee, specifically a low moment almost exactly 38
years earlier when he arrived back on campus for spring semester of his freshman year, plagued
with doubt, longing to give up and go home. “Everybody has moments like that,” Laude said.
“There are probably 50 or 60 kids in the U.L.N. who are on academic probation right now.
They’re coming back, and we’ve got all these great support networks set up for them. But still,
there’s got to be a part of them that is afraid, a part of them that wonders if they can make it. My
bet is that the vast majority of them will make it. And they will, because nobody will give them
the chance to simply give up.”
Though Laude is a chemist by training, he spends much of his time thinking like a
psychologist, pondering what kind of messages or environmental cues might affect the decisions
that the students in his programs make. He’s the first to admit that he is an amateur psychologist
~ 67 ~
at best. But he has found an ally and a kindred spirit in a psychological researcher at U.T. named
David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is emerging as one of the world’s leading
experts on the psychology of education. In his research, Yeager is trying to answer the question
that Laude wrestles with every day: How, precisely, do you motivate students to take the steps
they need to take in order to succeed?
Before he arrived at U.T. in the winter of 2012, Yeager worked as a graduate student in
the psychology department at Stanford, during an era when that department had become a hotbed
of new thinking on the psychology of education. Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude
Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of
students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford
researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from
living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their
ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the
freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly
debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or
scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans
in the Ivy League.
The negative thoughts took different forms in each individual, of course, but they mostly
gathered around two ideas. One set of thoughts was aboutbelonging. Students in transition often
experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged — or could ever belong — in
their new institution. The other was connected to ability. Many students believed in what Carol
Dweck had named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed quality that
was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so when they experienced cues that
might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance
— they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about
belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of
helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why
study if I can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want to talk to me
anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.
When Yeager arrived at Stanford in 2006, many of the researchers there had begun to move
beyond trying to understand this phenomenon to trying to counteract it. In a series of
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experiments, they found that certain targeted messages, delivered to students in the right way at
the right time, seemed to overcome the doubts about belonging and ability that were
undermining the students’ academic potential.
Yeager began working with a professor of social psychology named Greg Walton, who
had identified principles that seemed to govern which messages, and which methods of
delivering those messages, were most persuasive to students. For instance, messages worked
better if they appealed to social norms; when college students are informed that most students
don’t take part in binge drinking, they’re less likely to binge-drink themselves. Messages were
also more effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a sense of
autonomy. If you march all the high-school juniors into the auditorium and force them to watch a
play about tolerance and inclusion, they’re less likely to take the message to heart than if they
feel as if they are independently seeking it out. And positive messages are more effectively
absorbed when they are experienced through what Walton called “self-persuasion”: if students
watch a video or read an essay with a particular message and then write their own essay or make
their own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more deeply.
In one experiment after another, Yeager and Walton’s methods produced remarkable
results. At an elite Northeastern college, Walton, along with another Stanford researcher named
Geoffrey Cohen, conducted an experiment in which first-year students read brief essays by
upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The upperclassmen conveyed in
their own words a simple message about belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only
one who felt left out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and everyone gets
over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays, the students in the experiment then wrote
their own essays and made videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole
intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the white students who took
part in the experiment. But it had a transformative effect on the college careers of the African-
American students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment tripled the
percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top quarter of their class, and it cut in
half the black-white achievement gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health —
the black students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer doctor visits
three years after the intervention.
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Next, Yeager did an
experiment with 600 students
just entering ninth grade at
three high schools in Northern
California. The intervention
was 25 minutes long; students
sat at a terminal in the school
computer lab and read scientific
articles and testimonials from
older students with another
simple message: People change.
If someone is being mean to
you or excluding you, the
essays explained, it was most
likely a temporary thing; it
wasn’t because of any
permanent trait in him or you. Yeager chose ninth grade because it is well known as a
particularly bad time for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over the
transition to high school. Indeed, among the control group in Yeager’s experiment, symptoms of
depression rose by 39 percent during that school year. Among the group who had received the
message that people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive symptoms.
The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other words, but it did stop the appearance
of depressive symptoms during a traditionally depressive period. And it did so in just 25 minutes
of treatment.
After the depression study, Yeager, Walton and two other researchers did an experiment
with community-college students who were enrolled in remedial or “developmental” math
classes. Education advocates have identified remedial math in community college as a
particularly devastating obstacle to the college hopes of many students, especially low-income
students, who disproportionately attend community college. The statistics are daunting: About
two-thirds of all community-college students are placed into one or more remedial math classes,
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and unless they pass those classes, they can’t graduate. More than two-thirds of them don’t pass;
instead, they often drop out of college altogether.
Clearly, part of the developmental-math crisis has to do with the fact that many students
aren’t receiving a good-enough math education in middle or high school and are graduating from
high school underprepared for college math. But Yeager and Walton and a growing number of
other researchers believe that another significant part of the problem is psychological. They echo
David Laude’s intuition from the early days of TIP: When you send college students the message
that they’re not smart enough to be in college — and it’s hard not to get that message when
you’re placed into a remedial math class as soon as you arrive on campus — those students
internalize that idea about themselves.
In the experiment, 288 community-college students enrolled in developmental math were
randomly assigned, at the beginning of the semester, to read one of two articles. The control
group read a generic article about the brain. The treatment group read an article that laid out the
scientific evidence against the entity theory of intelligence. “When people learn and practice new
ways of doing algebra or statistics,” the article explained, “it can grow their brains — even if
they haven’t done well in math in the past.” After reading the article, the students wrote a
mentoring letter to future students explaining its key points. The whole exercise took 30 minutes,
and there was no follow-up of any kind. But at the end of the semester, 20 percent of the students
in the control group had dropped out of developmental math, compared with just 9 percent of the
treatment group. In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had
apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half.
Soon after Yeager arrived at the University of Texas, in the winter of 2012, he got an
email from a vice provost at the university named Gretchen Ritter, who had heard about his work
and wanted to learn more. At Ritter’s invitation, Yeager gave a series of presentations to various
groups of administrators at the university; each time, he mentioned that he and Walton were
beginning to test whether interventions that addressed students’ anxieties about ability and
belonging could improve the transition to college, especially for first-generation students. Ritter
asked Yeager if the approach might work in Austin. Could he create an intervention not for just a
few hundred students, but for every incoming U.T. freshman? In theory, yes, Yeager told her.
But at that scale, it would need to be done online. And if he did it, he said, he would want to do it
as a randomized controlled experiment, so he and Walton could collect valuable new data on
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what worked. In April 2012, Ritter asked Yeager to test his intervention on the more than 8,000
teenagers who made up the newly admitted U.T. class of 2016. It would be one of the largest
randomized experiments ever undertaken by social or developmental psychologists. And it
would need to be ready to go in three weeks.
Yeager was already feeling overwhelmed. He and his wife had just moved to Austin.
Three weeks earlier, they had their second child. He was swamped with lingering commitments
from Stanford and scrambling to stay on top of the classes he was teaching for the first time. But
he was painfully aware of the statistics on the graduation gaps at U.T., and he had enough faith
in the interventions that he and Walton were developing to think that a well-orchestrated large-
scale version could make a difference. “I went home to Margot, my wife,” he told me, “and I
said: ‘O.K., I know I’m already overworked. I know I’m already never at home. But bear with
me for three more weeks. Because this has the potential to be one of the most important things I
ever do.’ ”
Yeager immediately began holding focus groups and one-on-one discussions with current
U.T. students, trying to get a clearer understanding of which messages would work best at U.T.
It’s an important point to remember about these interventions, and one Yeager often emphasizes:
Even though the basic messages about belonging and ability recur from one intervention to the
next, he and Walton believe that the language of the message needs to be targeted to the
particular audience for each intervention. The anxieties that a high-achieving African-American
freshman at an Ivy League college might experience are distinct from the anxieties experienced
by a community-college student who was just placed into remedial math.
Yeager and Ritter decided that the best way to deliver the chosen messages to the
incoming students was to make them a part of the online pre-orientation that every freshman was
required to complete before arriving on campus. That May, rising freshmen began receiving the
usual welcome-to-U.T. emails from the registrar’s office, inviting them to log on to U.T.’s
website and complete a series of forms and tasks. Wedged in between the information about the
meningococcal vaccine requirements and the video about the U.T. honor code was a link to
Yeager’s interactive presentation about the “U.T. Mindset.”
Students were randomly sorted into four categories. A “belonging” treatment group read
messages from current students explaining that they felt alone and excluded when they arrived
on campus, but then realized that everyone felt that way and eventually began to feel at home. A
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“mind-set” treatment group read an article about the malleability of the brain and how practice
makes it grow new connections, and then read messages from current students stating that when
they arrived at U.T., they worried about not being smart enough, but then learned that when they
studied they grew smarter. A combination treatment group received a hybrid of the belonging
and mind-set presentations. And finally, a control group read fairly banal reflections from current
students stating that they were surprised by Austin’s culture and weather when they first arrived,
but eventually they got used to them. Students in each group were asked, after clicking through a
series of a dozen or so web pages, to write their own reflections on what they’d read in order to
help future students. The whole intervention took between 25 and 45 minutes for students to
complete, and more than 90 percent of the incoming class completed it.
Going in, Yeager thought of the 2012 experiment as a pilot — simply a way to test out
the mechanics of a large-scale intervention. He didn’t have much confidence that it would
produce significant results, so he was surprised when, at the end of the fall semester, he looked at
the data regarding which students had successfully completed at least 12 credits. First-semester
credit-completion has always been an early indicator of the gaps that appear later for U.T.
students. Every year, only 81 or 82 percent of “disadvantaged” freshmen — meaning, in this
study, those who are black, Latino or first-generation — complete those 12 credits by Christmas,
compared with about 90 percent of more advantaged students.
In January 2013, when Yeager analyzed the first-semester data, he saw the advantaged
students’ results were exactly the same as they were every year. No matter which message they
saw in the pre-orientation presentation, 90 percent of that group was on track. Similarly, the
disadvantaged students in the control group, who saw the bland message about adjusting to
Austin’s culture and weather, did the same as disadvantaged students usually did: 82 percent
were on track. But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set
messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by
Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.
A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager
and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists
over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-
generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on
time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a
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one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was
encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-
orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.
When Yeager and Walton present their work to fellow researchers, the first reaction they
often hear is that their results can’t possibly be true. Early on, they each had a scientific paper or
grants rejected not because there were flaws in their data or their methodology, but simply
because people didn’t believe that such powerful effects could come from such minimal
interventions. Yeager admits that their data can seem unbelievable — they contradict many of
our essential assumptions about how the human mind works. But he can articulate an entirely
plausible explanation for what’s happening when students hear or read these messages, whether
they’re at U.T. or in community college or in ninth grade.
Our first instinct, when we read about these experiments, is that what the interventions
must be doing is changing students’ minds — replacing one deeply held belief with another. And
it is hard to imagine that reading words on a computer screen for 25 minutes could possibly do
that. People just aren’t that easy to persuade. But Yeager believes that the interventions are not in
fact changing students’ minds — they are simply keeping them from overinterpreting
discouraging events that might happen in the future. “We don’t prevent you from experiencing
those bad things,” Yeager explains. “Instead, we try to change the meaning of them, so that they
don’t mean to you that things are never going to get better.”
Every college freshman — rich or poor, white or minority, first-generation or legacy —
experiences academic setbacks and awkward moments when they feel they don’t belong. But
white students and wealthy students and students with college-graduate parents tend not to take
those moments too seriously or too personally. Sure, they still feel bad when they fail a test or
get in a fight with a roommate or are turned down for a date. But in general, they don’t interpret
those setbacks as a sign that they don’t belong in college or that they’re not going to succeed
there.
It is only students facing the particular fears and anxieties and experiences of exclusion
that come with being a minority — whether by race or by class — who are susceptible to this
problem. Those students often misinterpret temporary setbacks as a permanent indication that
they can’t succeed or don’t belong at U.T. For those students, the intervention can work as a kind
of inoculation. And when, six months or two years later, the germs of self-doubt try to infect
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them, the lingering effect of the intervention allows them to shrug off those doubts exactly the
way the advantaged students do.
When I spoke with Vanessa Brewer in January, she was deep in the grip of those doubts.
She had made it through the fall with a perfectly decent 3.0 G.P.A., and she even pulled out a B-
plus in statistics, but she looked back on it as a very difficult stretch. “I felt like no one really
believed in me,” she said. Her mother was the only person she really confided in, but even those
conversations sometimes made her feel more aware of the lack of a support system around her.
“She told me I sounded different,” Vanessa said. “She was like: ‘Are you O.K.? Are you taking
care of yourself?’ I’m normally a pretty happy person, but I guess when I called her, it was more
monotone, uninterested.”
When Vanessa thought about the semester ahead of her, she felt stressed out, and she told
me that her anxiety about whether she belonged at U.T. was with her every time she stepped into
a classroom. “Everybody else seems like they have it in the bag,” she said. “They look
intimidating, even when they’re just sitting in class — even the way they’re taking notes. They
seem so confident. I sometimes feel like I am the only one who is lost, you know?”
But as the spring semester progressed, things started to look up for Vanessa. She was
taking the dreaded Chemistry 301, and while she found it a real challenge, she was also
determined not to fall behind. She was enrolled in U.L.N. and in Discovery Scholars, another of
the programs David Laude oversaw, and her advisers arranged for her to get free help at the
campus tutoring center. She spent six or more hours there each week, going over chemistry
problems, and by March she was getting A’s and B’s on every test.
Gradually, Vanessa started to feel a greater sense of belonging. She told me about a day
in February when she was hanging out in the Discovery Scholars office and suddenly had an
impulse to “do a little networking.” She went up to the young woman working at the front desk,
an African-American undergrad like Vanessa, and asked her on a whim if she knew any students
in the nursing program. As it happened, the woman’s two best friends were in nursing, and they
had just helped start an African-American nursing association at U.T.
Vanessa got their numbers and started texting with them, and they invited her to one of
their meetings. They were juniors, a couple of years older than Vanessa, and they took her under
their wing. “I like having someone to look up to,” Vanessa told me. “I felt like I was alone, but
then I found people who said, you know, ‘I cried just like you.’ And it helped.”
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The messages about belonging and ability that Vanessa was hearing from her mentors
and tutors weren’t the only things getting her through Chemistry 301, of course. But they were
important in lots of subtle but meaningful ways, helping to steer her toward some seemingly
small decisions that made a big difference in her prospects at U.T. Like walking into the tutoring
center and asking for help. Or working up the nerve to ask a stranger if she knew any friendly
nursing students.
I spoke to dozens of freshmen during the months I spent reporting in Austin, most of
them, like Vanessa, enrolled in U.L.N. or another of Laude’s programs. And while each student’s
story was different, it was remarkable how often the narratives of their freshman years followed
the same arc: arriving on campus feeling confident because of their success in high school, then
being laid low by an early failure. One student told me he fell into a depression and couldn’t
sleep. Another said she lost weight and broke out in a rash. But then, sometimes after weeks or
months of feeling lost and unhappy, most of them found their way back to a deeper kind of
confidence. Often the support necessary for that recovery came from a U.L.N. adviser or a TIP
mentor; sometimes it came from a family member or a church community or a roommate. But
one way or another, almost all of the students I spoke to were able to turn things around, often
pulling themselves back from some very low places.
“What I like about these interventions is that the kids themselves make all the tough
choices,” Yeager told me. “They deserve all the credit. We as interveners don’t. And that’s the
best way to intervene. Ultimately a person has within themselves some kind of capital, some
kind of asset, like knowledge or confidence. And if we can help bring that out, they then carry
that asset with them to the next difficulty in life.”
My conversations with the U.L.N. students left me feeling optimistic about their chances.
But they also served as a reminder of how easy it is for things to tip the other way — for those
early doubts to metastasize into crippling anxieties. What Laude and Yeager are helping to
demonstrate is that with the right support, both academic and psychological, these students can
actually graduate at high rates from an elite university like the University of Texas. Which is
exactly why the giant educational experiment now taking place there has meaning well beyond
the Austin campus.
It matters, in all sorts of ways, whether students like Vanessa and her fellow U.L.N.
members are able to graduate from a four-year college. The data show that today, more than
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ever, the most powerful instrument of economic mobility for low-income Americans is a four-
year college degree. If a child is born into a family in the lowest economic quintile (meaning a
family that earns $28,000 or less), and she doesn’t get a college degree, she has only a 14 percent
chance of winding up in one of the top two quintiles, and she has a 45 percent chance of never
making it out of that bottom bracket. But if she does earn a four-year degree, her prospects
change completely. Suddenly, there is a 40 percent chance that she’ll make it into one of the top
two quintiles — and just a 16 percent chance that she’ll remain stuck at the bottom.
Beyond the economic opportunities for the students themselves, there is the broader cost
of letting so many promising students drop out, of losing so much valuable human capital. For
almost all of the 20th century, the United States did a better job of producing college graduates
than any other country. But over the past 20 years, we have fallen from the top of those
international lists; the United States now ranks 12th in the world in the percentage of young
people who have earned a college degree. During the same period, a second trend emerged:
American higher education became more stratified; most well-off students now do very well in
college, and most middle- and low-income students struggle to complete a degree. These two
trends are clearly intertwined. And it is hard to imagine that the nation can regain its global
competitiveness, or improve its level of economic mobility, without reversing them.
To do so will take some sustained work, on a national level, on a number of fronts. But a
big part of the solution lies at colleges like the University of Texas at Austin, selective but not
superelite, that are able to perform, on a large scale, what used to be a central mission —
arguably the central mission — of American universities: to take large numbers of highly
motivated working-class teenagers and give them the tools they need to become successful
professionals. The U.T. experiment reminds us that that process isn’t easy; it never has been. But
it also reminds us that it is possible.
Paul Tough is a contributing writer and the author of “How Children Succeed.” He last wrote about
the rescue of John Aldridge, a Montauk lobsterman.
Editor: Joel Lovell
A version of this article appears in print on May 18, 2014, on page MM26 of the Sunday Magazine
with the headline: Who Gets to Graduate?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
~ 77 ~
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Post Reading Quick Write: it’s a good idea to write down a few of your initial thoughts and
ideas about a reading that are in your mind right when you finish. What did you think of the
reading? What were some of your questions and thoughts? Don’t worry about spelling or
grammar. Just get some ideas on paper before the reading fades.
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Activity: Work in groups to answer these questions about the reading. Discussion your opinions
and ideas and then have someone write down your group’s responses to help you during the
class discussion time.
1. What was the first setback Vanessa experienced?
2. What two trends does the author talk about at the end of page 33?
3. What does the author say about student ability in paragraph two of page 34?
4. Why was Vanessa at risk of failing according to her demographic statistics? (page 35)
5. What did Laude notice in his classes? (starting on page 35)
6. What did Laude mean by the term “bimodal distribution”? (page 35/36)
7. On page 37, when referring to Laude’s TIP program, the author states “And he did
everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP
students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they
were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.” Why do you think identity
formation was so important for these students? What does identity have to do with
success?
8. What is the Dashboard? (page 39)
9. How do you think leadership skills/opportunities helped student in U.L.N be more
successful? (page 39)
10. Read the second paragraph on page 40 that starts “Perhaps the most…” Why was it so
important to not let students know why they were selected for the special programs?
11. How does a sense of belonging or lack thereof affect student success?
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Focused Reading: research Research Terms:
experiment researcher research (study) methods results control group: treatment group
Directions: Work with your group to look carefully at the experiment from the reading your group was given. Together as a group, read the section carefully and then answer the following questions about it. Your group will present about the experiment to the rest of the class.
Who conducted (did) the study?
Who were the participants of the study?
What information (data) did the researchers collect?
What were the results of the study?
What do the results show about the nature of student success or failure? How can student failure be prevented?
~ 82 ~
Read each sentence below and then circle the one number that shows how much you agree or disagree with it. There is no right or wrong answer.
1. You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you really can’t do much to change it.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
2. Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
3. You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
4. No matter who you are, you can change your intelligence a lot.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
5. You can always greatly change how intelligent you are.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
6. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
7. It is important to tell children how intelligent they are. 1 2 3 4 5 6Strongly Agree Mostly Mostly Disagree Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Disagree
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Reading Together—“Brainology” by Carol Dweck
As your group reads a section of the text, you will clarify, question, summarize, and predict as
outlined in the instructions below. You will read individually first, and then the group leader will
facilitate a discussion after each section:
1) Read individually: Each group member will read a specific section of text (see sections
below). While you read, do the following:
Clarify: Note places in the text that need clarification: Mark places that seem a bit
muddy at first. These are places where you notice that you run into some difficulty with
understanding. Note which reading strategies you use as you work to understand the
text (for example, look up the definition of a word). It’s OK if you don’t solve the
difficulty on the first time through—just put a question mark in the margin so you can
come back to it in your group discussion.
Question: As you read, ask and write down questions in the margins or on a separate
piece of paper (for example, what does Dweck mean when she writes “Does this have
implications for students’ motivation and learning?” (Dweck 113).
If you finish before your group members are done, do the following:
Summarize: When you are finished reading the section, summarize the author’s big
ideas. Write your summary on a piece of paper.
Predict: Try to make a prediction about what Dweck will write next. Write your
prediction down on a separate piece of paper.
2) Group discussion: The group leader will lead the group in a discussion, and each group will
complete a collaborative sheet that outlines the following for each section read. If your group
has a laptop, you will post your work on the blog. The group leader is in charge of keeping the
group on task and making sure each member has a chance to participate. Take turns being the
person to write down the notes on the following tasks (this will be turned in at the end of class).
Clarify: discuss which places in the text were a bit muddy and share which reading
strategies were used to help clarify the difficulty. Note the page and paragraph numbers
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on your answer sheet. If there are still muddy places, work together as a group to
make the meaning clear.
Question: Write down several questions group members asked as they read. Were the
questions answered? If not, see if you can find answers to the questions.
Summarize: Once your group has clarified the difficult places in the text, create a
collaborative summary of the text—use your own words. Write it down.
Predict: After you summarize the big ideas, write down your predictions about what
Dweck will write about in the next section.
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Group Member Names:
Group Reading Strategies Documentation Sheet
* Write down your group notes under the headings below. For sections 2-8 use a separate sheet of paper with, the headings as shown below. Staple all group work to this sheet and turn in at the end of class.
Why Clarify? Effective readers look for the parts of a text that are confusing them and use fix-up strategies to help clarify confusions
Why Question? Effective readers ask and answer questions as they read to help build interest and stay engaged. They also ask questions to help remember what they read.
Why summarize? Effective readers paraphrase, visualize, and summarize while reading to check for understanding, to help themselves remember and to get the big ideas.
Why Predict? Effective readers make predictions about what is coming next in the text by using text information as well as their own knowledge. Predicting is a way to surface relevant schema, focus the reading, and check understanding.
Sections: 1) par 1-3; 2) par 4-7; 3) par 8-12; 4) par 13-15; 5) par 16-22; 6) par 23-25; 7) par 26-29; 8) par 30-32
Section #_______:
Clarifications:
Questions:
Summary:
Predictions:
Brainology~ 86 ~
Transforming Students’ Motivation to LearnCarol S. Dweck Winter 2008
(1) This is an exciting time for our brains. More and more
research is showing that our brains change constantly with
learning and experience and that this takes place throughout our
lives.
(2) Does this have implications for students' motivation and learning? It certainly does. In my
research in collaboration with my graduate students, we have shown that what students believe
about their brains — whether they see their intelligence as something that's fixed or something
that can grow and change — has profound effects on their motivation, learning, and school
achievement (Dweck, 2006). These different beliefs, or mindsets, create different psychological
worlds: one in which students are afraid of challenges and devastated by setbacks, and one in
which students relish challenges and are resilient in the face of setbacks.
(3) How do these mindsets work? How are the mindsets communicated to students? And, most
important, can they be changed? As we answer these questions, you will understand why so
many students do not achieve to their potential, why so many bright students stop working when
school becomes challenging, and why stereotypes have such profound effects on students'
achievement. You will also learn how praise can have a negative effect on students' mindsets,
harming their motivation to learn.
Mindsets and Achievement
(4) Many students believe that intelligence is fixed, that each person has a certain amount and
that's that. We call this a fixed mindset, and, as you will see, students with this mindset worry
about how much of this fixed intelligence they possess. A fixed mindset makes challenges
threatening for students (because they believe that their fixed ability may not be up to the task)
and it makes mistakes and failures demoralizing (because they believe that such setbacks reflect
badly on their level of fixed intelligence).
~ 87 ~
Photoillustration: Michael Northrup
(5) Other students believe that intelligence is something that can be cultivated through effort and
education. They don't necessarily believe that everyone has the same abilities or that anyone can
be as smart as Einstein, but they do believe that everyone can improve their abilities. And they
understand that even Einstein wasn't Einstein until he put in years of focused hard work. In short,
students with this growth mindset believe that intelligence is a potential that can be realized
through learning. As a result, confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in
the face of setbacks become ways of getting smarter.
(6) To understand the different worlds these mindsets create, we followed several hundred
students across a difficult school transition — the transition to seventh grade. This is when the
academic work often gets much harder, the grading gets stricter, and the school environment gets
less personalized with students moving from class to class. As the students entered seventh
grade, we measured their mindsets (along with a number of other things) and then we monitored
their grades over the next two years.
(7) The first thing we found was that students with different mindsets cared about different
things in school. Those with a growth mindset were much more interested in learning than in just
looking smart in school. This was not the case for students with a fixed mindset. In fact, in many
of our studies with students from preschool age to college age, we find that students with a fixed
mindset care so much about how smart they will appear that they often reject learning
opportunities — even ones that are critical to their success (Cimpian, et al., 2007; Hong, et al.,
1999; Nussbaum and Dweck, 2008; Mangels, et al., 2006).
(8) Next, we found that students with the two mindsets had radically different beliefs about
effort. Those with a growth mindset had a very straightforward (and correct) idea of effort — the
idea that the harder you work, the more your ability will grow and that even geniuses have had to
work hard for their accomplishments. In contrast, the students with the fixed mindset believed
that if you worked hard it meant that you didn't have ability, and that things would just come
naturally to you if you did. This means that every time something is hard for them and requires
effort, it's both a threat and a bind. If they work hard at it that means that they aren't good at it,
but if they don't work hard they won't do well. Clearly, since just about every worthwhile pursuit
~ 88 ~
involves effort over a long period of time, this is a potentially crippling belief, not only in school
but also in life.
(9) Students with different mindsets also had very different reactions to setbacks. Those with
growth mindsets reported that, after a setback in school, they would simply study more or study
differently the next time. But those with fixed mindsets were more likely to say that they would
feel dumb, study less the next time, and seriously consider cheating. If you feel dumb —
permanently dumb — in an academic area, there is no good way to bounce back and be
successful in the future. In a growth mindset, however, you can make a plan of positive action
that can remedy a deficiency. (Hong. et al., 1999; Nussbaum and Dweck, 2008; Heyman, et al.,
1992)
(10) Finally, when we looked at the math grades they went on to earn, we found that the students
with a growth mindset had pulled ahead. Although both groups had started seventh grade with
equivalent achievement test scores, a growth mindset quickly propelled students ahead of their
fixed-mindset peers, and this gap only increased over the two years of the study.
(11) In short, the belief that intelligence is fixed dampened students' motivation to learn, made
them afraid of effort, and made them want to quit after a setback. This is why so many bright
students stop working when school becomes hard. Many bright students find grade school easy
and coast to success early on. But later on, when they are challenged, they struggle. They don't
want to make mistakes and feel dumb — and, most of all, they don't want to work hard and feel
dumb. So they simply retire.
(12) It is the belief that intelligence can be developed that opens students to a love of learning, a
belief in the power of effort and constructive, determined reactions to setbacks.
How Do Students Learn These Mindsets?
(13) In the 1990s, parents and schools decided that the most important thing for kids to have was
self-esteem. If children felt good about themselves, people believed, they would be set for life. In
some quarters, self-esteem in math seemed to become more important than knowing math, and
self-esteem in English seemed to become more important than reading and writing. But the
biggest mistake was the belief that you could simply hand children self-esteem by telling them
~ 89 ~
how smart and talented they are. Even though this is such an intuitively appealing idea, and even
though it was exceedingly well-intentioned, I believe it has had disastrous effects.
(14) In the 1990s, we took a poll among parents and found that almost 85 percent endorsed the
notion that it was necessary to praise their children's abilities to give them confidence and help
them achieve. Their children are now in the workforce and we are told that young workers
cannot last through the day without being propped up by praise, rewards, and recognition.
Coaches are asking me where all the coachable athletes have gone. Parents ask me why their
children won't work hard in school.
(15) Could all of this come from well-meant praise? Well, we were suspicious of the praise
movement at the time. We had already seen in our research that it was the most vulnerable
children who were already obsessed with their intelligence and chronically worried about how
smart they were. What if praising intelligence made all children concerned about their
intelligence? This kind of praise might tell them that having high intelligence and talent is the
most important thing and is what makes you valuable. It might tell them that intelligence is just
something you have and not something you develop. It might deny the role of effort and
dedication in achievement. In short, it might promote a fixed mindset with all of its
vulnerabilities.
(16) The wonderful thing about research is that you can put questions like this to the test — and
we did (Kamins and Dweck, 1999; Mueller and Dweck, 1998). We gave two groups of children
problems from an IQ test, and we praised them. We praised the children in one group for their
intelligence, telling them, "Wow, that's a really good score. You must be smart at this." We
praised the children in another group for their effort: "Wow, that's a really good score. You must
have worked really hard." That's all we did, but the results were dramatic. We did studies like
this with children of different ages and ethnicities from around the country, and the results were
the same.
(17) Here is what happened with fifth graders. The children praised for their intelligence did not
want to learn. When we offered them a challenging task that they could learn from, the majority
~ 90 ~
opted for an easier one, one on which they could avoid making mistakes. The children praised
for their effort wanted the task they could learn from.
(18) The children praised for their intelligence lost their confidence as soon as the problems got
more difficult. Now, as a group, they thought they weren't smart. They also lost their enjoyment,
and, as a result, their performance plummeted. On the other hand, those praised for effort
maintained their confidence, their motivation, and their performance. Actually, their performance
improved over time such that, by the end, they were performing substantially better than the
intelligence-praised children on this IQ test.
(19) Finally, the children who were praised for their intelligence lied about their scores more
often than the children who were praised for their effort. We asked children to write something
(anonymously) about their experience to a child in another school and we left a little space for
them to report their scores. Almost 40 percent of the intelligence-praised children elevated their
scores, whereas only 12 or 13 percent of children in the other group did so. To me this suggests
that, after students are praised for their intelligence, it's too humiliating for them to admit
mistakes.
(20) The results were so striking that we repeated the study five times just to be sure, and each
time roughly the same things happened. Intelligence praise, compared to effort (or "process")
praise, put children into a fixed mindset. Instead of giving them confidence, it made them fragile,
so much so that a brush with difficulty erased their confidence, their enjoyment, and their good
performance, and made them ashamed of their work. This can hardly be the self-esteem that
parents and educators have been aiming for.
(21) Often, when children stop working in school, parents deal with this by reassuring their
children how smart they are. We can now see that this simply fans the flames. It confirms the
fixed mindset and makes kids all the more certain that they don't want to try something difficult
— something that could lose them their parents' high regard.
(22) How should we praise our students? How should we reassure them? By focusing them on
the process they engaged in — their effort, their strategies, their concentration, their
perseverance, or their improvement.
~ 91 ~
"You really stuck to that until you got it. That's wonderful!"
"It was a hard project, but you did it one step at a time and it turned out great!"
"I like how you chose the tough problems to solve. You're really going to stretch yourself and
learn new things."
"I know that school used to be a snap for you. What a waste that was. Now you really have an
opportunity to develop your abilities."
Brainology
(23) Can a growth mindset be taught directly to kids? If it can be taught, will it enhance their
motivation and grades? We set out to answer this question by creating a growth mindset
workshop (Blackwell, et al., 2007). We took seventh graders and divided them into two groups.
Both groups got an eight-session workshop full of great study skills, but the "growth mindset
group" also got lessons in the growth mindset — what it was and how to apply it to their
schoolwork. Those lessons began with an article called "You Can Grow Your Intelligence: New
Research Shows the Brain Can Be Developed Like a Muscle." Students were mesmerized by this
article and its message. They loved the idea that the growth of their brains was in their hands.
(24) This article and the lessons that followed changed the terms of engagement for students.
Many students had seen school as a place where they performed and were judged, but now they
understood that they had an active role to play in the development of their minds. They got to
work, and by the end of the semester the growth-mindset group showed a significant increase in
their math grades. The control group — the group that had gotten eight sessions of study skills
— showed no improvement and continued to decline. Even though they had learned many useful
study skills, they did not have the motivation to put them into practice.
(25) The teachers, who didn't even know there were two different groups, singled out students in
the growth-mindset group as showing clear changes in their motivation. They reported that these
students were now far more engaged with their schoolwork and were putting considerably more
effort into their classroom learning, homework, and studying.
~ 92 ~
(26) Joshua Aronson, Catherine Good, and their colleagues had similar findings (Aronson, Fried,
and Good, 2002; Good, Aronson, and Inzlicht, 2003). Their studies and ours also found that
negatively stereotyped students (such as girls in math, or African-American and Hispanic
students in math and verbal areas) showed substantial benefits from being in a growth-mindset
workshop. Stereotypes are typically fixed-mindset labels. They imply that the trait or ability in
question is fixed and that some groups have it and others don't. Much of the harm that
stereotypes do comes from the fixed-mindset message they send. The growth mindset, while not
denying that performance differences might exist, portrays abilities as acquirable and sends a
particularly encouraging message to students who have been negatively stereotyped — one that
they respond to with renewed motivation and engagement.
(27) Inspired by these positive findings, we started to think about how we could make a growth
mindset workshop more widely available. To do this, we have begun to develop a computer-
based program called "Brainology." In six computer modules, students learn about the brain and
how to make it work better. They follow two hip teens through their school day, learn how to
confront and solve schoolwork problems, and create study plans. They visit a state-of-the-art
virtual brain lab, do brain experiments, and find out such things as how the brain changes with
learning — how it grows new connections every time students learn something new. They also
learn how to use this idea in their schoolwork by putting their study skills to work to make
themselves smarter.
(28) We pilot-tested Brainology in 20 New York City schools. Virtually all of the students loved
it and reported (anonymously) the ways in which they changed their ideas about learning and
changed their learning and study habits. Here are some things they said in response to the
question, "Did you change your mind about anything?"
I did change my mind about how the brain works…I will try harder because I know that the more
you try, the more your brain works.
Yes... I imagine neurons making connections in my brain and I feel like I am learning something.
My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u learn something, there are
connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I'm in school.
~ 93 ~
(29) Teachers also reported changes in their students, saying that they had become more active
and eager learners: "They offer to practice, study, take notes, or pay attention to ensure that
connections will be made."
What Do We Value?
(30) In our society, we seem to worship talent — and we often portray it as a gift. Now we can
see that this is not motivating to our students. Those who think they have this gift expect to sit
there with it and be successful. When they aren't successful, they get defensive and demoralized,
and often opt out. Those who don't think they have the gift also become defensive and
demoralized, and often opt out as well.
(31) We need to correct the harmful idea that people simply have gifts that transport them to
success, and to teach our students that no matter how smart or talented someone is — be it
Einstein, Mozart, or Michael Jordan — no one succeeds in a big way without enormous amounts
of dedication and effort. It is through effort that people build their abilities and realize their
potential. More and more research is showing there is one thing that sets the great successes
apart from their equally talented peers — how hard they've worked (Ericsson, et al., 2006).
(32) Next time you're tempted to praise your students' intelligence or talent, restrain yourself.
Instead, teach them how much fun a challenging task is, how interesting and informative errors
are, and how great it is to struggle with something and make progress. Most of all, teach them
that by taking on challenges, making mistakes, and putting forth effort, they are making
themselves smarter.
Carol S. Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University
and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006).
http://www.nais.org/ismagazinearticlePrint.cfm?print=Y&ItemNumber=150509
References
~ 94 ~
Aronson, J., Fried, C., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African
American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 38, 113–125.
Binet, A. (1909/1973). Les idées modernes sur les enfants [Modern ideas on children]. Paris:
Flamarion.
Blackwell, L., Trzesniewski, K., & Dweck, C.S. (2007). Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict
Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention. Child
Development, 78, 246–263.
Cimpian, A., Arce, H., Markman, E.M., & Dweck, C.S. (2007). Subtle linguistic cues impact
children's motivation. Psychological Science, 18, 314-316.
Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset. New York: Random House.
Ericsson, K.A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P.J., & Hoffman, R.R. (Eds.) (2006). The Cambridge
Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Good, C. Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2003). Improving adolescents' standardized test
performance: An Intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. Journal of Applied
Developmental Psychology, 24, 645-662.
Hong, Y.Y., Chiu, C., Dweck, C.S., Lin, D., & Wan, W. (1999) Implicit theories, attributions,
and coping: A meaning system approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77,
588–599.
Kamins, M., & Dweck, C.S. (1999). Person vs. process praise and criticism: Implications for
contingent self-worth and coping. Developmental Psychology, 35, 835–847.
Mangels, J. A., Butterfield, B., Lamb, J., Good, C.D., & Dweck, C.S. (2006). Why do beliefs
about intelligence influence learning success? A social-cognitive-neuroscience model. Social,
Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 75–86.
~ 95 ~
Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Intelligence praise can undermine motivation and
performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 33–52.
Nussbaum, A.D., & Dweck, C.S. (2007, in press). Defensiveness vs. Remediation: Self-Theories
and Modes of Self-Esteem Maintenance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
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Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind
Edited by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick
Chapter 2. Describing the Habits of Mind
by Arthur L. Costa
~ 96 ~
When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
—Wendell Berry
This chapter contains descriptions for 16 of the attributes that human beings display when
they behave intelligently. In this book, we refer to them as Habits of Mind. They are the
characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the
resolutions to which are not immediately apparent.
These Habits of Mind seldom are performed in isolation; rather, clusters of behaviors are
drawn forth and used in various situations. For example, when listening intently, we use the
habits of thinking flexibly, thinking about our thinking (metacognition), thinking and
communicating with clarity and precision, and perhaps even questioning and posing problems.
Do not conclude, based on this list, that humans display intelligent behavior in only 16
ways. The list of the Habits of Mind is not complete. We want this list to initiate a collection of
additional attributes. In fact, 12 attributes of "Intelligent Behavior" were first described in 1991
(Costa, 1991). Since then, through collaboration and interaction with many others, the list has
been expanded. You, your colleagues, and your students will want to continue the search for
additional Habits of Mind to add to this list of 16.
Habits of Mind as Learning Outcomes
Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student
knows. When we teach for the Habits of Mind, we are interested also in how students behave
when they don't know an answer. The Habits of Mind are performed in response to questions and
problems, the answers to which are not immediately known. We are interested in enhancing the
ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it. We want students
to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: inquiring, editing, thinking flexibly, and
~ 97 ~
learning from another person's perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is
not only having information but also knowing how to act on it.
What behaviors indicate an efficient, effective thinker? What do human beings do when
they behave intelligently? Vast research on effective thinking, successful people, and intelligent
behavior by Ames (1997), Carnegie and Stynes (2006), Ennis (1991), Feuerstein, Rand,
Hoffman, and Miller (1980), Freeley (as reported in Strugatch, 2004), Glatthorn and Baron
(1991), Goleman (1995), Perkins (1991), Sternberg (1984), and Waugh (2005) suggests that
effective thinkers and peak performers have identifiable characteristics. These characteristics
have been identified in successful people in all walks of life: lawyers, mechanics, teachers,
entrepreneurs, salespeople, physicians, athletes, entertainers, leaders, parents, scientists, artists,
teachers, and mathematicians.
Horace Mann, a U.S. educator (1796–1859), once observed that "habit is a cable; we
weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it." In Learning and Leading with
Habits of Mind, we focus on 16 Habits of Mind that teachers and parents can teach, cultivate,
observe, and assess. The intent is to help students get into the habit of behaving intelligently. A
Habit of Mind is a pattern of intellectual behaviors that leads to productive actions. When we
experience dichotomies, are confused by dilemmas, or come face-to-face with uncertainties, our
most effective response requires drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior. When we
draw upon these intellectual resources, the results are more powerful, of higher quality, and of
greater significance than if we fail to employ such patterns of intellectual behavior.
A Habit of Mind is a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past experiences, and
proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of intellectual behaviors over another; therefore,
it implies making choices about which patterns we should use at a certain time. It includes
sensitivity to the contextual cues that signal that a particular circumstance is a time when
applying a certain pattern would be useful and appropriate. It requires a level of skillfulness to
use, carry out, and sustain the behaviors effectively. It suggests that after each experience in
which these behaviors are used, the effects of their use are reflected upon, evaluated, modified,
and carried forth to future applications. Figure 2.1 summarizes some of these dimensions of the
Habits of Mind, which are elaborated in Chapter 3. The following sections describe each of the
16 Habits of Mind.
~ 98 ~
Figure 2.1. Dimensions of the Habits of Mind
The Habits of Mind incorporate the following dimensions:
Value: Choosing to employ a pattern of intellectual behaviors rather than other, less productive
patterns.
Inclination: Feeling the tendency to employ a pattern of intellectual behaviors.
Sensitivity: Perceiving opportunities for, and appropriateness of, employing the pattern of
behaviors.
Capability: Possessing the basic skills and capacities to carry through with the behaviors.
Commitment: Constantly striving to reflect on and improve performance of the pattern of
intellectual behaviors.
Policy: Making it a policy to promote and incorporate the patterns of intellectual behaviors into
actions, decisions, and resolutions of problematic situations.
Persisting
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they never quit.
—Conrad Hilton
Efficacious people stick to a task until it is completed. They don't give up easily. They
are able to analyze a problem, and they develop a system, structure, or strategy to attack it. They
have a repertoire of alternative strategies for problem solving, and they employ a whole range of
these strategies. They collect evidence to indicate their problem-solving strategy is working, and
if one strategy doesn't work, they know how to back up and try another. They recognize when a
theory or an idea must be rejected and another employed. They have systematic methods for
analyzing a problem, which include knowing how to begin, what steps must be performed, what
data must be generated or collected, and what resources are available to assist. Because they are
able to sustain a problem-solving process over time, they are comfortable with ambiguous
situations.
~ 99 ~
Students often give up when they don't immediately know the answer to a problem. They
sometimes crumple their papers and throw them away, exclaiming "I can't do this!" or "It's too
hard!" Sometimes they write down any answer to get the task over with as quickly as possible.
Some of these students have attention deficits. They have difficulty staying focused for any
length of time; they are easily distracted, or they lack the ability to analyze a problem and
develop a system, structure, or strategy of attack. They may give up because they have a limited
repertoire of problem-solving strategies, and thus they have few alternatives if their first strategy
doesn't work.
Managing Impulsivity
Goal-directed, self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup.
—Daniel Goleman
Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act. They intentionally
establish a vision of a product, an action plan, a goal, or a destination before they begin. They
strive to clarify and understand directions, they develop a strategy for approaching a problem,
and they withhold immediate value judgments about an idea before they fully understand it.
Reflective individuals consider alternatives and consequences of several possible directions
before they take action. They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information,
taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and
listening to alternative points of view.
Often, students blurt out the first answer that comes to mind. Sometimes they shout an
answer, start to work without fully understanding the directions, lack an organized plan or
strategy for approaching a problem, or make immediate value judgments about an idea
(criticizing or praising it) before they fully understand it. They may take the first suggestion
given or operate on the first idea that comes to mind rather than consider alternatives and the
consequences of several possible directions. Research demonstrates, however, that less
~ 100 ~
impulsive, self-disciplined students are more successful. For example, Duckworth and Seligman
(2005) found
Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every
academic performance variable, including report-card grades, standardized achievement test
scores, admission to a competitive high school and attendance. Self-discipline measured in the
fall predicted more variance in each of these outcomes than did IQ, and unlike IQ, self-discipline
predicted gains in academic performance over the school year. (p. 940)
Listening with Understanding and Empathy
Listening is the beginning of understanding. … Wisdom is the reward for a lifetime of listening. Let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance.
—Proverbs 1:5
Highly effective people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy listening (Covey,
1989). Some psychologists believe that the ability to listen to another person—to empathize with
and to understand that person's point of view—is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior.
The ability to paraphrase another person's ideas; detect indicators (cues) of feelings or emotional
states in oral and body language (empathy); and accurately express another person's concepts,
emotions, and problems—all are indicators of listening behavior. (Piaget called it "overcoming
egocentrism.")
People who demonstrate this Habit of Mind are able to see through the diverse
perspectives of others. They gently attend to another person, demonstrating their understanding
of and empathy for an idea or a feeling by paraphrasing it accurately, building upon it, clarifying
it, or giving an example of it.
Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, and Kleiner (1994) suggest that to listen fully means to pay
close attention to what is being said beneath the words—listening not only to the "music" but
also to the essence of the person speaking; not only for what someone knows but also for what
that person is trying to represent. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the
speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in
oneself, slowing the mind's hearing to the ears' natural speed and hearing beneath the words to
their meaning.
~ 101 ~
We spend 55 percent of our lives listening, but it is one of the least taught skills in
schools. We often say we are listening, but actually we are rehearsing in our head what we are
going to say when our partner is finished. Some students ridicule, laugh at, or put down other
students' ideas. They interrupt, are unable to build upon, can't consider the merits of, or don't
operate on another person's ideas.
We want students to learn to devote their mental energies to another person and to invest
themselves in their partner's ideas. We want students to learn to hold in abeyance their own
values, judgments, opinions, and prejudices so they can listen to and entertain another person's
thoughts. This is a complex skill requiring the ability to monitor one's own thoughts while at the
same time attending to a partner's words. Listening in this way does not mean we can't disagree
with someone. Good listeners try to understand what other people are saying. In the end, they
may disagree sharply, but because they have truly listened, they know exactly the nature of the
disagreement.
Thinking Flexibly
Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact. … but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing.
—Arthur Koestler
An amazing discovery about the human brain is its plasticity—its ability to "rewire,"
change, and even repair itself to become smarter. Flexible people have the most control. They
have the capacity to change their minds as they receive additional data. They engage in multiple
and simultaneous outcomes and activities, and they draw upon a repertoire of problem-solving
strategies. They also practice style flexibility, knowing when thinking broadly and globally is
appropriate and when a situation requires detailed precision. They create and seek novel
approaches, and they have a well-developed sense of humor. They envision a range of
consequences.
~ 102 ~
Flexible people can address a problem from a new angle using a novel approach, which
de Bono (1991) refers to as "lateral thinking." They consider alternative points of view or deal
with several sources of information simultaneously. Their minds are open to change based on
additional information, new data, or even reasoning that contradicts their beliefs. Flexible people
know that they have and can develop options and alternatives. They understand means-ends
relationships. They can work within rules, criteria, and regulations, and they can predict the
consequences of flouting them. They understand immediate reactions, but they also are able to
perceive the bigger purposes that such constraints serve. Thus, flexibility of mind is essential for
working with social diversity, enabling an individual to recognize the wholeness and distinctness
of other people's ways of experiencing and making meaning.
Flexible thinkers are able to shift through multiple perceptual positions at will. One
perceptual orientation is what Jean Piaget called egocentrism, or perceiving from our own point
of view. By contrast, allocentrismis the position in which we perceive through another person's
orientation. We operate from this second position when we empathize with another's feelings,
predict how others are thinking, and anticipate potential misunderstandings.
Another perceptual position is macrocentric. It is similar to looking down from a balcony
to observe ourselves and our interactions with others. This bird's-eye view is useful for
discerning themes and patterns from assortments of information. It is intuitive, holistic, and
conceptual. Because we often need to solve problems with incomplete information, we need the
capacity to perceive general patterns and jump across gaps of incomplete knowledge.
Yet another perceptual orientation is microcentric, examining the individual and
sometimes minute parts that make up the whole. This worm's eye view involves logical,
analytical computation, searching for causality in methodical steps. It requires attention to detail,
precision, and orderly progressions.
Flexible thinkers display confidence in their intuition. They tolerate confusion and
ambiguity up to a point, and they are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to
continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and
repertoire. Although many perceptual positions are possible—past, present, future, egocentric,
allocentric, macrocentric, microcentric, visual, auditory, kinesthetic—the flexible mind knows
when to shift between and among these positions.
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Some students have difficulty considering alternative points of view or dealing with more
than one classification system simultaneously. Their way to solve a problem seems to be
the only way. They perceive situations from an egocentric point of view: "My way or the
highway!" Their minds are made up: "Don't confuse me with facts. That's it!"
Thinking About Thinking (Metacognition)
When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
—Plato
The human species is known as Homo sapiens sapiens, which basically means "a being
that knows their knowing" (or maybe it's "knows they're knowing"). What distinguishes humans
from other forms of life is our capacity for metacognition—the ability to stand off and examine
our own thoughts while we engage in them.
Occurring in the neocortex, metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is our ability to
know what we know and what we don't know. It is our ability to plan a strategy for producing
the information that is needed, to be conscious of our own steps and strategies during the act of
problem solving, and to reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking.
Although inner language, thought to be a prerequisite for metacognition, begins in most children
around age 5, metacognition is a key attribute of formal thought flowering at about age 11.
The major components of metacognition are, when confronted with a problem to solve,
developing a plan of action, maintaining that plan in mind over a period of time, and then
reflecting on and evaluating the plan upon its completion. Planning a strategy before embarking
on a course of action helps us keep track of the steps in the sequence of planned behavior at the
conscious awareness level for the duration of the activity. It facilitates making temporal and
comparative judgments; assessing the readiness for more or different activities; and monitoring
our interpretations, perceptions, decisions, and behaviors. An example would be what superior
teachers do daily: developing a teaching strategy for a lesson, keeping that strategy in mind
throughout the instruction, and then reflecting upon the strategy to evaluate its effectiveness in
producing the desired student outcomes.
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Intelligent people plan for, reflect on, and evaluate the quality of their own thinking skills
and strategies. Metacognition means becoming increasingly aware of one's actions and the effect
of those actions on others and on the environment; forming internal questions in the search for
information and meaning; developing mental maps or plans of action; mentally rehearsing before
a performance; monitoring plans as they are employed (being conscious of the need for
midcourse correction if the plan is not meeting expectations); reflecting on the completed plan
for self-evaluation; and editing mental pictures for improved performance.
Interestingly, not all humans achieve the level of formal operations. As Russian
psychologist Alexander Luria found, not all adults metacogitate. Although the human brain is
capable of generating this reflective consciousness, generally we are not all that aware of how we
are thinking, and not everyone uses the capacity for consciousness equally (Chiabetta, 1976;
Csikszentmihalyi, 1993; Whimbey, Whimbey, & Shaw, 1975; Whimbey, 1980). The most likely
reason is that all of us do not take the time to reflect on our experiences. Students often do not
take the time to wonder why they are doing what they are doing. They seldom question
themselves about their own learning strategies or evaluate the efficiency of their own
performance. Some children virtually have no idea of what they should do when they confront a
problem, and often they are unable to explain their decision-making strategies (Sternberg &
Wagner, 1982). When teachers ask, "How did you solve that problem? What strategies did you
have in mind?" or "Tell us what went on in your head to come up with that conclusion," students
often respond, "I don't know. I just did it."
We want students to perform well on complex cognitive tasks. A simple example might
be drawn from a reading task. While reading a passage, we sometimes find that our minds
wander from the pages. We see the words, but no meaning is being produced. Suddenly, we
realize that we are not concentrating and that we've lost contact with the meaning of the text. We
recover by returning to the passage to find our place, matching it with the last thought we can
remember, and once having found it, reading on with connectedness. This inner awareness and
the strategy of recovery are components of metacognition.
Striving for Accuracy
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A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.
—Confucius
Whether we are looking at the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a carpenter,
we see a desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce
exceptional results. People who value truthfulness, accuracy, precision, and craftsmanship take
time to check over their products. They review the rules by which they are to abide, they review
the models and visions they are to follow, and they review the criteria they are to use to confirm
that their finished product matches the criteria exactly. To be craftsmanlike means knowing that
one can continually perfect one's craft by working to attain the highest possible standards and by
pursuing ongoing learning to bring a laserlike focus of energies to accomplishing a task.
These people take pride in their work, and they desire accuracy as they take time to check
over their work. Craftsmanship includes exactness, precision, accuracy, correctness, faithfulness,
and fidelity. For some people, craftsmanship requires continuous reworking. Mario Cuomo, a
great speechwriter and politician, once said that his speeches were never done; it was only a
deadline that made him stop working on them.
Some students may turn in sloppy, incomplete, or uncorrected work. They are more eager
to get rid of the assignment than to check it over for accuracy and precision. They are willing to
settle for minimum effort rather than invest their maximum. They may be more interested in
expedience rather than excellence.
Questioning and Posing Problems
The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. … To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances.
—Albert Einstein
One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans is our inclination and ability
to find problems to solve. Effective problem solvers know how to ask questions to fill in the gaps
between what they know and what they don't know.
Effective questioners are inclined to ask a range of questions:
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What evidence do you have?
How do you know that's true?
How reliable is this data source?
They also pose questions about alternative points of view:
From whose viewpoint are we seeing, reading, or hearing?
From what angle, what perspective, are we viewing this situation?
Effective questioners pose questions that make causal connections and relationships:
How are these (people, events, or situations) related to each other?
What produced this connection?
Sometimes they pose hypothetical problems characterized by "if" questions:
What do you think would happen if … ?
If that is true, then what might happen if … ?
Inquirers recognize discrepancies and phenomena in their environment, and they probe
into their causes:
Why do cats purr?
How high can birds fly?
Why does the hair on my head grow so fast, while the hair on my arms and legs grows so
slowly?
What would happen if we put the saltwater fish in a freshwater aquarium?
What are some alternative solutions to international conflicts, other than wars?
Some students may be unaware of the functions, classes, syntax, or intentions in questions.
They may not realize that questions vary in complexity, structure, and purpose. They may pose
simple questions intending to derive maximal results. When confronted with a discrepancy, they
may lack an overall strategy to search for and find a solution.
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Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations
I've never made a mistake. I've only learned from experience.
—Thomas A. Edison
Intelligent humans learn from experience. When confronted with a new and perplexing
problem, they will draw forth experiences from their past. They often can be heard to say, "This
reminds me of …" or "This is just like the time when I …" They explain what they are doing
now with analogies about or references to their experiences. They call upon their store of
knowledge and experience as sources of data to support, theories to explain, or processes to solve
each new challenge. They are able to abstract meaning from one experience, carry it forth, and
apply it in a novel situation.
Too often, students begin each new task as if it were being approached for the first time.
Teachers are dismayed when they invite students to recall how they solved a similar problem
previously—and students don't remember. It's as if they had never heard of it before, even
though they recently worked with the same type of problem! It seems each experience is
encapsulated and has no relationship to what has come before or what comes after. Their
thinking is what psychologists refer to as an "episodic grasp of reality" (Feuerstein et al., 1980);
that is, each event in life is separate and discrete, with no connections to what may have come
before or no relation to what follows. Their learning is so encapsulated that they seem unable to
draw it forth from one event and apply it in another context.
Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision
I do not so easily think in words. … After being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear … I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them. —Francis Galton, geneticist
Language refinement plays a critical role in enhancing a person's cognitive maps and
ability to think critically, which is the knowledge base for efficacious action. Enriching the
complexity and specificity of language simultaneously produces effective thinking.
Language and thinking are closely entwined; like either side of a coin, they are
inseparable. Fuzzy, vague language is a reflection of fuzzy, vague thinking. Intelligent people
~ 108 ~
strive to communicate accurately in both written and oral form, taking care to use precise
language; defining terms; and using correct names, labels, and analogies. They strive to avoid
overgeneralizations, deletions, and distortions. Instead, they support their statements with
explanations, comparisons, quantification, and evidence.
We sometimes hear students and adults using vague and imprecise language. They
describe objects or events with words like weird, nice, or OK. They name specific objects using
such nondescriptive words asstuff, junk, things, and whatever. They punctuate sentences with
meaningless interjections like ya know, er, and uh. They use vague or general nouns and
pronouns: "They told me to do it," "Everybody has one," or "Teachers don't understand me."
They use nonspecific verbs: "Let's do it." At other times, they use unqualified comparatives:
"This soda is better; I like it more" (Shachtman, 1995).
Gathering Data Through All Senses
Observe perpetually.
—Henry James
The brain is the ultimate reductionist. It reduces the world to its elementary parts:
photons of light, molecules of fragrance, sound waves, vibrations of touch—all of which send
electrochemical signals to individual brain cells that store information about lines, movements,
colors, smells, and other sensory inputs.
Intelligent people know that all information gets into the brain through sensory pathways:
gustatory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, and visual. Most linguistic, cultural, and
physical learning is derived from the environment by observing or taking it in through the senses.
To know a wine it must be drunk; to know a role it must be acted; to know a game it must be
played; to know a dance it must be performed; to know a goal it must be envisioned. Those
whose sensory pathways are open, alert, and acute absorb more information from the
environment than those whose pathways are withered, immune, and oblivious to sensory stimuli.
The more regions of the brain that store data about a subject, the more interconnection
there is. This redundancy means students will have more opportunities to pull up all those related
bits of data from their multiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross-referencing
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of data strengthens the data into something that's learned rather than just memorized (Willis,
2007).
We are learning more and more about the impact of the arts and music on improved
mental functioning. Forming mental images is important in mathematics and engineering;
listening to classical music seems to improve spatial reasoning. Social scientists use scenarios
and role playing; scientists build models; engineers use CAD-CAM; mechanics learn through
hands-on experimentation; artists explore colors and textures; and musicians combine
instrumental and vocal music.
Some students, however, go through school and life oblivious to the textures, rhythms,
patterns, sounds, and colors around them. Sometimes children are afraid to touch things or get
their hands dirty. Some don't want to feel an object that might be slimy or icky. They operate
within a narrow range of sensory problem-solving strategies, wanting only to describe it but not
illustrate or act it, or to listen but not participate.
Creating, Imagining, Innovating
The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.
—John Schaar, political scientist
All human beings have the capacity to generate novel, clever, or ingenious products,
solutions, and techniques—if that capacity is developed (Sternberg, 2006). Creative human
beings try to conceive solutions to problems differently, examining alternative possibilities from
many angles. They tend to project themselves into different roles using analogies, starting with a
vision and working backward, and imagining they are the object being considered. Creative
people take risks and frequently push the boundaries of their perceived limits (Perkins, 1991).
They are intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated, working on the task because of the
aesthetic challenge rather than the material rewards.
Creative people are open to criticism. They hold up their products for others to judge, and
they seek feedback in an ever-increasing effort to refine their technique. They are uneasy with
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the status quo. They constantly strive for greater fluency, elaboration, novelty, parsimony,
simplicity, craftsmanship, perfection, beauty, harmony, and balance.
Students, however, often are heard saying "I can't draw," "I was never very good at art,"
"I can't sing a note," or "I'm not creative." Some people believe creative humans are just born
that way and that genes and chromosomes are the determinants of creativity.
Responding with Wonderment and Awe
The most beautiful experience in the world is the experience of the mysterious.
—Albert Einstein
Describing the 200 best and brightest of USA Today's All USA College Academic Team,
Tracey Wong Briggs (1999) states, "They are creative thinkers who have a passion for what they
do." Efficacious people have not only an "I can" attitude but also an "I enjoy" feeling. They seek
intriguing phenomena. They search for problems to solve for themselves and to submit to others.
They delight in making up problems to solve on their own, and they so enjoy the challenge of
problem solving that they seek perplexities and puzzles from others. They enjoy figuring things
out by themselves, and they continue to learn throughout their lifetimes. One efficacious person
is chemist Ahmed H. Zewail, a Nobel Prize winner, who said that he had a passion to understand
fundamental processes: "I love molecules. I want to understand why do they do what they do"
(Cole, 1999).
Some children and adults avoid problems and are turned off to learning. They make such
comments as "I was never good at these brain teasers," "Go ask your father; he's the brain in this
family," "It's boring," "When am I ever going to use this stuff," "Who cares," "Lighten up,
teacher; thinking is hard work," or "I don't do thinking!" Many people never enrolled in another
math class or other "hard" academic subject after they weren't required to in high school or
college. Many people perceive thinking as hard work, and they recoil from situations that
demand too much of it.
We want students to be curious, to commune with the world around them, to reflect on
the changing formations of a cloud, to feel charmed by the opening of a bud, to sense the logical
simplicity of mathematical order. Intelligent people find beauty in a sunset, intrigue in the
geometric shapes of a spider web, and exhilaration in the iridescence of a hummingbird's wings.
~ 111 ~
They marvel at the congruity and intricacies in the derivation of a mathematical formula,
recognize the orderliness and adroitness of a chemical change, and commune with the serenity of
a distant constellation. We want students to feel compelled, enthusiastic, and passionate about
learning, inquiring, and mastering (Costa, 2007).
Taking Responsible Risks
There has been a calculated risk in every stage of American development—the pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
—Brooks Atkinson
Risk takers seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to go beyond established limits.
They are uneasy about comfort; they live on the edge of their competence. They seem compelled
to place themselves in situations in which they do not know what the outcome will be. They
accept confusion, uncertainty, and the higher risks of failure as part of the normal process, and
they learn to view setbacks as interesting, challenging, and growth producing. However,
responsible risk takers do not behave impulsively. Their risks are educated. They draw on past
knowledge, are thoughtful about consequences, and have a well-trained sense of what is
appropriate. They know that all risks are not worth taking.
Risk takers can be considered in two categories: those who see the risk as a venture and
those who see it as adventure. The venture part of risk taking might be described in terms of
what a venture capitalist does. When a person is approached to take the risk of investing in a new
business, she will look at the markets, see how well organized the ideas are, and study the
economic projections. If she finally decides to take the risk, it is a well-considered one.
The adventure part of risk taking might be described by the experiences from Project
Adventure. In this situation, there is a spontaneity, a willingness to take a chance in the moment.
Once again, a person will take the chance only if experiences suggest that the action will not be
life threatening or if he believes that group support will protect him from harm (e.g., checking
out the dimensions of weight, distance, and strength of a bungee cord before agreeing to the
exhilaration of a drop). Ultimately, people learn from such high-risk experiences that they are far
more able to take actions than they previously believed. Risk taking becomes educated only
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through repeated experiences. It often is a cross between intuition, drawing on past knowledge,
striving for precision and accuracy, and a sense of meeting new challenges.
Bobby Jindal, then executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the
Future of Medicare, stated, "The only way to succeed is to be brave enough to risk failure"
(Briggs, 1999, p. 2A). When people hold back from taking risks, they miss opportunities. Some
students seem reluctant to take risks. They hold back from games, new learning, and new
friendships because their fear of failure is far greater than their desire for venture or adventure.
They are reinforced by the mental voice that says, "If you don't try it, you won't be wrong," or "If
you try it and you are wrong, you will look stupid." The other voice that might say, "If you don't
try it, you will never know," is trapped by fear and mistrust. These students are more interested
in knowing whether their answer is correct or not than in being challenged by the process of
finding the answer. They are unable to sustain a process of problem solving and finding the
answer over time, and therefore they avoid ambiguous situations. They have a need for certainty
rather than an inclination for doubt.
We hope that students will learn how to take intellectual as well as physical risks.
Students who are capable of being different, going against the grain of common thinking, and
thinking of new ideas (testing them with peers and teachers) are more likely to be successful in
an age of innovation and uncertainty.
Finding Humor
You can increase your brain power three to fivefold simply by laughing and having fun before working on a problem.
—Doug Hall
Why we laugh, no one really knows. Laughing is an instinct that can be traced to chimps,
and it may reinforce our social status (Hubert, 2007). Humor is a human form of mutual
playfulness. Beyond the fact that laughing is enjoyable, it may have medicinal value as well.
Laughing, scientists have discovered, has positive effects on physiological functions: blood
vessels relax, stress hormones disperse, and the immune system gets a boost, including a drop in
the pulse rate. Laughter produces secretion of endorphins and increased oxygen in the blood.
Humor has been found to have psychological benefits as well. It liberates creativity and provokes
~ 113 ~
such higher-level thinking skills as anticipating, finding novel relationships, visual imaging, and
making analogies. People who engage in the mystery of humor have the ability to perceive
situations from an original and often interesting vantage point. They tend to initiate humor more
often, to place greater value on having a sense of humor, to appreciate and understand others'
humor, and to be verbally playful when interacting with others. Having a whimsical frame of
mind, they thrive on finding incongruity; perceiving absurdities, ironies, and satire; finding
discontinuities; and being able to laugh at situations and themselves.
Some students find humor in all the wrong places—human differences, ineptitude,
injurious behavior, vulgarity, violence, and profanity. They employ laughter to humiliate others.
They laugh at others yet are unable to laugh at themselves. We want students to acquire the habit
of finding humor in a positive sense so they can distinguish between those situations of human
frailty and fallibility that require compassion and those that truly are funny (Dyer, 1997).
Thinking Interdependently
Take care of each other. Share your energies with the group. No one must feel alone, cut off, for that is when you do not make it.
—Willie Unsoeld, mountain climber
Humans are social beings. We congregate in groups, find it therapeutic to be listened to,
draw energy from one another, and seek reciprocity. In groups we contribute our time and energy
to tasks that we would quickly tire of when working alone. In fact, solitary confinement is one of
the cruelest forms of punishment that can be inflicted on an individual.
Collaborative humans realize that all of us together are more powerful, intellectually or
physically, than any one individual. Probably the foremost disposition in our global society is the
heightened ability to think in concert with others, to find ourselves increasingly more
interdependent and sensitive to the needs of others. Problem solving has become so complex that
no one person can go it alone. No one has access to all the data needed to make critical decisions;
no one person can consider as many alternatives as several people.
Some students may not have learned to work in groups; they have underdeveloped social
skills. They feel isolated, and they prefer solitude. They say things like "Leave me alone—I'll do
it by myself," "They just don't like me," or "I want to be alone." Some students seem unable to
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contribute to group work and are job hogs; conversely, other students let all the others in a group
do all the work.
Working in groups requires the ability to justify ideas and to test the feasibility of
solution strategies on others. It also requires developing a willingness and an openness to accept
feedback from a critical friend. Through this interaction, the group and the individual continue to
grow. Listening, consensus seeking, giving up an idea to work with someone else's, empathy,
compassion, group leadership, knowing how to support group efforts, altruism—all are behaviors
indicative of cooperative human beings.
Remaining Open to Continuous Learning
The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.
—John F. Kennedy
In a world that moves at warp speed, there is more to know today than ever before, and
the challenge of knowing more and more in every succeeding day, week, month, and year ahead
will only continue to expand exponentially. The quest for meaningful knowledge is critical and
never ending.
Intelligent people are in a continuous learning mode. They are invigorated by the quest of
lifelong learning. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to
constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for
improvement, growing, learning, and modifying and improving themselves. They seize
problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn
(Bateson, 2004).
A great mystery about humans is that many times we confront learning opportunities with
fear rather than mystery and wonder. We seem to feel better when we know rather than when we
learn. We defend our biases, beliefs, and storehouses of knowledge rather than invite the
unknown, the creative, and the inspirational. Being certain and closed gives us comfort, whereas
being doubtful and open gives us fear. As G. K. Chesterton so aptly expressed, "There is no such
thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; there are only uninterested people."
Because of a curriculum employing fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness,
students from an early age are trained to believe that deep learning means figuring out the truth
~ 115 ~
rather than developing capabilities for effective and thoughtful action. They have been taught to
value certainty rather than doubt, to give answers rather than to inquire, to know which choice is
correct rather than to explore alternatives. Unfortunately, some adults are content with what they
already believe and know. Their childlike curiosity has died. They exhibit little humility because
they believe they are all knowing. They do not seek out or discover the wisdom of others. They
do not know how or when to leverage a love of and lust for learning. As a result, they follow a
path of little value and minimal opportunity.
Our wish is for creative students and people who are eager to learn. This Habit of Mind
includes the humility of knowing that we don't know, which is the highest form of thinking we
will ever learn. Paradoxically, unless we start off with humility, we will never get anywhere. As
the first step, we must already have what eventually will be the crowning glory of all learning: to
know—and to admit—that we don't know and to not be afraid to find out.
The Right Stuff
The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.
—B. B. King
The 16 Habits of Mind just described were drawn from research on human effectiveness,
descriptions of remarkable performers, and analyses of the characteristics of efficacious people.
These Habits of Mind can serve as mental disciplines. Students, parents, and teachers, when
confronted with problematic situations, might habitually use one or more of these Habits of Mind
by asking themselves, "What is the most intelligent thing I can do right now?" They also might
consider these questions:
How can I learn from this? What are my resources? How can I draw on my past successes with
problems like this? What do I already know about the problem? What resources do I have
available or need to generate?
How can I approach this problem flexibly? How might I look at the situation in another way?
How can I draw upon my repertoire of problem-solving strategies? How can I look at this
problem from a fresh perspective (lateral thinking)?
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How can I illuminate this problem to make it clearer, more precise? Do I need to check out my
data sources? How might I break this problem down into its component parts and develop a
strategy for understanding and accomplishing each step?
What do I know or not know? What questions do I need to ask? What strategies are in my mind
now? What am I aware of in terms of my own beliefs, values, and goals with this problem?
What feelings or emotions am I aware of that might be blocking or enhancing my progress?
How does this problem affect others? How can we solve it together? What can I learn from
others that would help me become a better problem solver?
Community organizer Saul Alinsky coined a very useful slogan: "Don't just do something
… stand there!" Taking a reflective stance in the midst of active problem solving is often
difficult. For that reason, each of these Habits of Mind is situational and transitory. There is no
such thing as perfect realization of any of them. They are utopian states toward which we
constantly aspire. Csikszentmihalyi (1993) states, "Although every human brain is able to
generate self-reflective consciousness, not everyone seems to use it equally" (p. 23). Few people,
notes Kegan (1994), ever fully reach the stage of cognitive complexity, and rarely before middle
age.
These Habits of Mind transcend all subject matters commonly taught in school. They are
characteristic of peak performers in all places: homes, schools, athletic fields, organizations, the
military, governments, churches, or corporations. They are what make marriages successful,
learning continual, workplaces productive, and democracies enduring. The goal of education,
therefore, should be to support others and ourselves in liberating, developing, and habituating
these Habits of Mind more fully. Taken together, they are a force directing us toward
increasingly authentic, congruent, and ethical behavior. They are the touchstones of integrity and
the tools of disciplined choice making. They are the primary vehicles in the lifelong journey
toward integration. They are the "right stuff" that make human beings efficacious.
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Bateson, M. (2004). Willing to learn: Passages of personal discovery. Hanover, NH:
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Briggs, T. W. (1999, February 25). Passion for what they do keeps alumni on first
team. USA Today, pp. 1A–2A.
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A resource book for teaching thinking (Rev. ed., Vol. 1, pp. 63–67). Alexandria, VA:
ASCD.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York:
Bantam Books.
Hubert, C. (2007, August 12). Why we laugh. Sacramento Bee, p. L3.
Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental complexity of modern life. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Perkins, D. (1991). What creative thinking is. In A. Costa (Ed.), Developing minds: A
resource book for teaching thinking (Rev. ed., Vol. 1, pp. 85–88). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Senge, P. M., Roberts, C., Ross, R. B., Smith, B. J., & Kleiner, A. (1994). The fifth
discipline fieldbook: Strategies and tools for building a learning organization. New York:
Doubleday/Currency.
Shachtman, T. (1995). The inarticulate society: Eloquence and culture in America. New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Sternberg, R. J. (1984). Beyond I.Q.: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (2006, February 22). Creativity is a habit. Education Week, pp. 47, 64.
Sternberg, R., & Wagner, R. (1982). "Understanding intelligence: What's in it for
education?" Paper submitted to the National Commission on Excellence in Education.
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Strugatch, W. (2004, December 5). Entrepreneurs tell their success stories. New York
Times.
Waugh, S. (2005). Chase your dreams. An interactive DVD/video program. Canberra:
Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, and Team Duet.
Whimbey, A. (1980, April). Students can learn to be better problem solvers. Educational
Leadership, 37(7).
Whimbey, A., Whimbey, L. S., & Shaw, L. (1975). Intelligence can be taught. New York:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Willis, J. (2007). Research-based strategies to ignite student learning: Insights from a
neurologist and classroom teacher. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Copyright © 2008 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Post Reading Quick Write:
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Unit 2: Motivation and Perseverance
Reading List
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink “True Grit” Duckworth “Alphabet Soup: My Life as a Reader” by John Almy “The Matthew Effect” from Outliers by Malcom Gladwell “The 10,000-Hour Rule” by Malcom Gladwell The Power of Habit, Ch 4: Keystone Habits
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Academic Speed Dating
Academic Speed Dating Questions for Teachers (Sample student questions on the next page)
Answer the questions by carefully following the directions below. Partners are encouraged to collaborate.
Odd # questions: A’s verbally answer the question using evidence in the text, and B’s
write down the answer following the specifics of the instructions.
Academic Speed Dating Questions—Drive introduction
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BB
A
B
A
B
B
B
B
B
A
A
B
AA
A
AA
B
A
B
B
A
A
Students face each other in pairs to answer reading comprehension questions while
practicing summary, paraphrase, quotation, attribution (signal) phrases and in-text citation.
The entire class works on one question at the same time.
Students switch partners after each question.
When the instructor determines that most students are finished, he/she says “switch.”
All students move to the right which causes the concentric circles to move in opposite
directions.
For odd # questions, A’s verbally answer using evidence in the text, and B’s write down the
answer following the specifics of the instructions.
For even # questions, B’s verbally answer using evidence from the text, and A’s write down
the answer following the specifics of the instructions.
Even # questions: B’s verbally answer the question using evidence from the text, and A’s write
down the answer following the specifics of the instructions.
Academic Speed Dating Questions—Drive introductionBe sure to use in-text citation!
For odd # questions, A’s verbally answer using evidence in the text, and B’s write down the answer following the specifics of the instructions.
For even # questions, B’s verbally answer using evidence from the text, and A’s write down the answer following the specifics of the instructions.
________________________________________________________________________1 Explain the “two main drives” that scientist in Harlow’s time thought
“powered behavior” (2-3).
2 In your own words, summarize “the third drive” that Harlow discusses (3).
3 In your own words, summarize the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation. Give specific examples of each.
4 Use your own words to explain the meaning of the first full paragraph on page
4.
5 Why do you think Harlow “dropped the whole idea”?
6 In your own words summarize and explain the outcome of Deci’s experiment
with the soma puzzles (6-8).
7 Explain what Deci found out about human motivation and money.
8 Thinking about the They Say, I Say introduction, what academic
“conversation” is Pink engaging with in his book? Explain in your own words.
9 Use your own words and a template (you may need to change the template a
bit) on page 9 in They Say, I Say to summarize the “conversation” Pink is
engaging with. Pink sums it up on pages 8&9 of Drive.
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Alphabet Soup: My Life as a Reader
by John Almy
One of the first things I learned in school was that I
was stupid. Really stupid. Talk about lifelong learning! That’s
one lesson that has stayed with me my entire life. Today, from
where I sit in my office writing this paper, I can’t help but
ponder over a school system that is capable of doing so much
good, or so much harm. I felt humiliated in classrooms for ten
years. I was consistently moved from one level to the next,
and in the end I was blamed for not learning how to read. I’m
old now (and when I say old I mean gasoline-was-35 cents-a-
gallon old), but I don’t care how old you are: When you first
go to school, and you can’t learn to read and write like all the other kids do, it has a way of
taking some of the shine off.
When I first started going to school it was fun. Really fun. We crawled around, pushing
toys like those big yellow plastic bulldozers, climbed all over the jungle gyms, “parachuted” out
of swings, rolled in the dirt and wrestled over stray marbles, and (at least if you were a guy)
chased girls around and pulled their hair (which really meant that we liked them but we hadn’t
figured out how to kiss yet). Anyway, school was great, until we got to the alphabet, and that’s
when everything went south for me.
In our third or maybe fourth week of class, the teacher wrote a lower case b on the
chalkboard and then asked us what letter that was. And we were all wiggling and waggling and
waving our arms and finally she said, “Yes, John, what letter is that? And I ever-so-
enthusiastically yelled out, “BEEEEE!” And oh my God, when she flashed those pearly whites at
me and said, “Yes, that is absolutely correct!” I thought I would pee my pants.
I made it all the way through the letters a, b, and c, and then my days of glory as a reader
came to a screeching halt with the letter d. (That must be some kind of a world record, don’tcha
think?) I was on such a hot streak with that b, and loving every second of it, that when the
teacher wrote a neat little d on the board, I didn’t even wait for her question; I just screamed out
“BEEEEE!”
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Think about this: certain letters, b, d, p, and q for instance, are the very same symbol, but
in our alphabet we turn them in different directions to stand for different letters, like a b turned
around is a d, right? I’d never seen anything like that before; I mean turn a dog around and what
have you got? A cat? No way. So from my point of view, when I was five years old, a b was a b
was a b. I didn’t care what direction you turned it in or how many times you flipped it around,
the damn thing was still a b. In the time it takes to say “a, b, c, d” the alphabet turned into an
indecipherable bowl of alphabet soup, a magical illusion. The magician—our teacher—would
write a letter on the board and all the kids (except me, of course) would yell out “QUUUUU!” or
“PEEEEE!” How in the hell did they all know that this time the b was called a q or a p? I was
flabbergasted. It was pure magic! They might as well have pulled rabbits out of their butts.
From then on, I just started guessing what the next answer might be, but instead of
yelling out “BEEEEE!” I’d whisper, “b?” And most of the time my classmates were yelling out
something else. When teachers say things like, “Now students, I want all of you to take turns
naming the letters of the alphabet as I write them on the board,” and you’re the only one who
can’t do it, weird things begin to happen. In no time at all the words “Public School” turn into
“Public Humiliation.” See how magic works? And that was it. No more pretty smiles. No more
days of educational glory.
I’m not saying that in the ten years I spent in school no one tried to help me read. That
would be pure poppycock. Several teachers gave it a good shot. But they also had twenty-nine
other students to think about, and when I just couldn’t keep up, they had to cut the loser and help
the winners. And make no mistake, I was counted among the losers because of my struggles with
reading. According to the tests I took, I didn’t learn to read past a fourth grade level the whole
time I was in school, including high school, and that was a great source of shame and
unhappiness for me, but I did learn, over time, to love reading.
When I was in the fifth grade, we all had to go to the school library once a week (or more
if we were in trouble). The librarian, Mrs. Wilson, floated around the library in an invisible
bubble like the good witch Glenda in the Wizard of Oz, and, in my case, hit me in the head with
her magic book-reading wand. When she saw that I couldn’t read (and that is a mortal sin to
most librarians), she made me come to the library five days a week to sit down at a table with her
and read aloud.
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Before we got started on a book, Mrs. Wilson talked to me for awhile and asked me about
the things I liked. Once we got past pizza and cheeseburgers and chocolate malts and movies, we
came up with dogs. I would have done anything to have a dog. I used to chase down all the strays
in the neighborhood and drag ‘em home with me, but my mom, who was a waitress, said because
my dad was an “illusionist” (he disappeared and never came back) that we couldn’t afford to
feed a dog. And that was that. So when Mrs. Wilson heard how I felt about dogs, she glided over
to one of the shelves and brought back a book titled The Wolf King by a man named Joseph
Lippincott.
At first, reading out loud was embarrassing. At least we sat in an area where no one else
could hear me. After the false starts, and the blushing and stumbling and stuttering over letters
and words I didn’t recognize, I was lost in the world of a fearless black wolf, who from the time
he was a pup was the target of men and other animals who wanted to kill him. Through courage
and cunning and a fierce will to live he overcame all obstacles, even my inability to read.
While my friends were out shooting marbles and pulling girls’ hair, I was in the library
(they thought I was in detention) which had, in ways I never could have imagined, magically
transformed into rugged snow-covered forests, alive with danger, and all the while I was running
wild with my beautiful black wolf, praying that nothing bad would happen to him. In other
words, I was hooked.
The Wolf King ended in knuckle-chewing suspense. My beloved wolf had narrowly
escaped what seemed like certain death at the hands of a man I had come to hate, a tracker who
hunted my comrade relentlessly. By then, I would have beaten that man to death with a baseball
bat if I had had the power to do so.
The sequel to The Wolf King was a book titled Wilderness Champion. Mrs. Wilson
ordered the book especially for me. She no longer had to force me to come to the library. The
library was pretty much all I could think about (except chasing girls, which was getting better all
the time). I still hated school and all of my classes, and I rarely read anything in class, nor did I
seem to read much better than before I started going to the library. But, as they say, the seed had
been planted. It would just take another ten years or so to take hold.
The following spring, Mrs. Wilson left the school to become a mother. When we came
back to school after summer break, and I found out that she had gone and wasn’t coming back, I
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went to the library and stole both The Wolf King and Wilderness Champion. I kept both books
for more than thirty years.
I didn’t read anymore books after Mrs. Wilson left. I went to the library with the rest of
the kids, but there were so many books that I felt overwhelmed, so I quit trying to find something
to read. What I did start to read was comic books: Superman, Batman, Aquaman, and even
Archie. Comic books were cheap, or better yet easy to steal. And once again, reading was fun. I
couldn’t wait to get my hands on the newest edition so I could sit down somewhere--anywhere--
and read for the pure pleasure of it.
I owed Mrs. Wilson big time for teaching me to love to read, but it took me a long time to
read anything boring, like so many school books I had encountered. I tried as hard as I could to
read those books. I would start at the top of the page and the next thing I knew my eyes were at
the bottom, but I had no idea of what I had just “read.”
I was finally put out of school when I turned sixteen. The principal sat behind his big fat
polished desk and smugly told my mom that I was reading and writing at less than a fourth grade
level. She sat there in her waitress uniform, the only clothes she ever wore, even on her one day
off; then she got up, walked over to me, and started slapping me in the face and head (nothing
new for me, but an obvious eye-popper for the principal). As she flailed away she kept
screaming, “I told you you were stupid! I told you you were stupid!” And I couldn’t help but
think she was right. Really right.
I went to work as a busboy, then in a factory, where every hour seemed more like two or
three. Over time I began to read more and more to escape the drudgery. I would find an
adventure book that I liked, and then read everything that that author had written. But when it
came to reading anything like school books, I still couldn’t do it.
In time, a couple of my friends decided to join the Navy, so I volunteered too. But
because I wasn’t a high school graduate, they didn’t want me. I still managed to get into the
Army. I thought the experience might improve my life. It didn’t.
When I got out of the Army, I got a job on the loading docks, a good-paying job. But
several months later, when I got a promotion, the boss did a background check on me and found
out that I had lied on my application. I had put down that I was a high school graduate. I always
lied about that, to everyone. Instead of getting the promotion, I got fired for lying. That was the
most embarrassing moment I had ever known as an adult. Because I couldn’t read well enough, I
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had no high school diploma. I lied about that because I was ashamed, and that shame had just
cost me my job and my self-respect. That’s when I knew it was time to do something about my
lack of education.
I called the local adult-education program. They held classes at a nearby community
college (which seemed roughly the size of a small city). The following day, I went there to sign
up, but for me school and public humiliation were still branches on the same tree, so I was
scared. Really scared.
After I tested into the lowest classes the college offered, I started attending remedial
English five days a week. My math wasn’t any better than my English, so I started taking basic
math as well. In time, I learned that school wasn’t all about brains. In fact, school had a lot more
to do with self-discipline and perseverance than it did with brain power.
When I had to read something I thought was too difficult, I stopped giving up. I read
small portions at a time and made notes about each one. I got a dictionary and started looking up
words, sometimes the same word over and over again (something I still do until this day).
In the next three years or so, I got my high school diploma. I was twenty-five years old. I
also got an AA degree. I was proud of that. Really proud.
I tried to go to a university, one that made the community college look like a small
village. And even though I was doing well in all of my classes, I soon convinced myself that I
had no business going to a university, that I was too stupid (remember what I said about life-long
learning?). The truth was that I was too much of a coward to stick it out and do the work. I left
college and went back to the kind of jobs that made one hour seem like two: moving man,
asphalt worker, stevedore, and the list goes on.
So what good did learning how to read do me? Plenty! For one thing, I started reading to
my daughter from the day she came home from the hospital. And I taught her to read long before
she ever set foot in a public school. No one was going to mess with her the way they did with
me. In fact, when she was old enough, I unpacked The Wolf King and Wilderness Champion and
night after night, when the dishes and homework were done, out came our books and we would
take turns reading aloud to each other. Those stories meant just as much to me then as they did
when I was a kid because this time my daughter and I made that incredible journey together.
You want to teach your kids to love reading? Read with them.
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Another way that being able to read helped me was a complete surprise: When I was
thirty-seven years old I lost my job. When the lay offs started, I was working in the mountains as
a line cutter for a survey crew. The entire area fell apart (sort of like the whole country is today).
I had a wife, a newborn daughter, three dogs, and two cats (in case we needed something to
barbeque—I’m kidding!). Most of the guys I worked with could barely read, but I could. So as
soon as I quit freaking out and feeling sorry for myself, I picked my butt up and--determined to
set a good example for my little girl and to change our lives forever--I returned to college.
Don’t just tell your kids education is important, show them. Right?
As a teacher, I do my level best to help others learn to read and write (and that is an
honor, indeed). I still have problems with English, both reading and writing, and I’m a lousy
speller, but I do ok. Nowadays, on my way to work, I often give thanks for being where I am in
life. I am here because of the California community college system. I am here because I can read
well. I am here because of a wonderful, caring librarian by the name of Mrs. Wilson, who took
time out of her busy day to teach an illiterate ragamuffin what it meant to run wild through the
forest with a beautiful black wolf by his side. See how magic works?
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Unit 3: Planning a Path to SuccessReading List:
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Writing Resources
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Outline Template: I. Introduction: _________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
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II. First Main Point: _____________________________________________
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III. Second Main Point: ___________________________________________
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IV. Third Main Point: _____________________________________________
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V. Conclusion __________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
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of the Interview
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C o o r d i n a t i o n & S u b o r d i n a t i o n O p t i o n s
Option 1, coordination [Independent clause]
, for
, and
, nor
, but
, or
, yet
, so
[independent clause].
Option 2, coordination [Independent clause] ; [independent clause].
Option 3, coordination [Independent clause]
;consequently,
;furthermore,
;however,
;indeed,
;in fact,
;moreover,
;nevertheless,
;then,
;therefore,
[independent clause].
Option 4, subordination [Independent clause]
afteralthoughas (as if)becauseifsinceunlessuntilwhen (whenever)while
[dependent clause].
Option 5, subordination
AfterAlthoughAs (As if)BecauseIfSinceUnlessUntilWhen (whenever)While
[dependent clause, independent clause].
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C l a u s e s : I n d e p e n d e n t & D e p e n d e n t clause is a word group containing a subject and verb pair. If a clause can stand alone, it is independent. If a clause cannot stand alone, it is dependent.A
Independent clauses are strongA single independent clause is the same as a simple sentence. An independent clause contains at least one subject + verb pair, expresses a complete thought, and can be ended with a period:
Bob and Marcie love Thai food.They eat there often and bring all their friends.Bowling is fun.Bowling shoes are stinky and sweaty.
A single independent clause may have compound subjects (Bob and Marcie), compound verbs (eat and bring), compound adjectives (stinky and sweaty) or other compound elements. However, when you combine two independent clauses, you create a compound sentence. You may combine independent clauses with a semicolon or with a comma + coordinating conjunction:
Bob and Marcie love Thai food; they eat there often and bring all their friends.Bowling is fun, but bowling shoes are stinky and sweaty.
Coordinating conjunctionsfor and nor butor yet so
You may join more than two independent clauses using one of the two above methods of coordination:
Bowling is fun, but bowling shoes are stinky and sweaty, so we always bring thick socks.
You may NOT try to join independent clauses with a comma. This is an error called a comma splice.
Dependent clauses are weakA dependent clause standing alone is the same as a sentence fragment. A dependent clause does contain at least one subject + verb pair, but it does not complete the thought it has begun. It cannot be ended with a period without creating a fragment.
since we eat Thai food oftenafter we go bowlingbecause she wants organic produce
The words that make the above clauses incomplete are since, after, and because. Without these words, the above examples would be independent clauses—We love Thai food. We go bowling.
~ 140 ~
She wants organic produce. The words that make these clauses dependent are called dependent-making words. They are also called subordinating conjunctions, and the clauses they create subordinate clauses. A few common subordinating conjunctions are listed below:Common subordinating conjunctions after before so that whenalthough even though though wheneveras if if unless whetherbecause since until while
Dependent clauses must be joined to independent clauses that complete the thought. When you join at least one independent and one dependent clause, you create a complex sentence.
Since we eat Thai food often, we would like to try Mexican food tonight.We’ll take you home after we go bowling.Because she wants organic produce, Melissa is growing tomatoes and peppers.
If the dependent clause comes first, treat it like an introductory word group, following it with a comma.
Relative clauses are another type of dependent clause. They function as adjectives, describing a noun or pronoun in the independent clause.
The tomatoes that she grew from seed are old, heirloom varieties.The peppers, which she purchased as small plants, are jalapeños.Mai, who grows strawberries every year, loaned Jas her rototiller.People who love vegetables often grow their own.You need to have a spot where the plants get several hours of sun each day.
One independent clause can support more than one dependent clause:
The tomatoes that she grew from seed are old, heirloom varieties while the cucumbers are modern hybrids.
Compound sentences can be joined with complex sentences to form compound-complex sentences. In this case, all the same punctuation rules apply: the independent clauses are joined with a comma + coordinating conjunction, the introductory/dependent clause is followed by a comma, and the second dependent clause follows the independent clause without a comma. The dependent clauses are underlined:
After we cleared the weeds, Jas tilled the ground, and Pindy marked off the rows so that we could plant on Saturday.
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W r i t i n g & L a n g u a g e D e v e l o p m e n t C e n t e r
S e n t e n c e - l e v e l T r a n s i t i o n sertain words and phrases signal connections between or within sentences. They make it easier for readers to follow your thought by leading them smoothly from one idea to
another. Some frequently used transitions are included in the following list.CThese words… …show this. For example…andalsobesidesfurther/furthermorein additionmoreovertoofirstnextlast
Adding one idea to another
She likes both sushi and tacos.She also likes Pepsi.She cooks well besides.Further, she draws and paints.In addition, she is a dancer.Moreover, she loves to travel.Traveling is fun but tiring, too.First, you have all the packing.Next, you don’t get much rest.Last, you have all the unpacking.
for examplefor instanceto illustratein factspecifically
Giving examples For example, they like to blog.They like to blog, for instance.To illustrate, all of them blog.They blog every day, in fact.Specifically, they blog late at night.
alsoin the same waysimilarlylikewise
Comparing similar things
Soccer also draws large crowds.In the same way, soccer draws large crowds.Similarly, soccer is very popular.Likewise, soccer is very popular.
butyethoweveron the other handin contrastneverthelessstillunfortunately although
Contrasting unlike things
They love country life, but there are few job there.They love country life, yet there are few jobs there.However, there are few jobs in the country.On the other hand, there are few jobs.In contrast, city jobs are plentiful and higher-paid.Nevertheless, they prefer living in the county.They still prefer living in the country.Unfortunately, there are few jobs.Although jobs are scarce, we still prefer living in the country.
in other words Summarizing or In other words, state drinking laws are
~ 142 ~
in shortin summaryin conclusionto sum upthereforeindeedthat is
concluding unfair.In short, California alcohol laws are unfair.In summary, state alcohol laws should be changed.In conclusion, the state laws should be changed.To sum up, the alcohol laws should be changed.Therefore, the laws must be changed.Indeed, the laws must be changed.The laws must be changed; that is, drinking age should be lowered.
afterbeforenextduringlaterfinallymeanwhilewhenwhileimmediatelythen
Showing time After the game, let’s go to Moxie’s.I turned off the lights before I left.Next time, we should eat Chinese food.He got a new car during the summer.Later in August he quit his job.He finally decided to go back to school.Meanwhile, his wife is working two jobs.She plans to quit one job when he finishes school.He will do an internship while he is still in school.Success won’t come immediately.First you work hard, and then you succeed.
abovebelowcloseto the leftnearbybeyondfarther onopposite
Showing place or direction
Above our heads towered tall pine trees.We pitched our tent below the bluffs.Close to the tent was a faint animal trail.To the left of the tent was a big pile of rocks.We could hear a small steam murmuring nearby.Beyond the stream was a small grassy meadow.Farther on we could see the far range of mountains.Opposite the mountains was a wide, sunny valley.
ifsincebecausesothereforeconsequently
Showing logical connections/cause and effect
If you read the news, you will be better informed.Since you read the news, you understand more.You understand more because of reading the news.
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thusas a resultfor this reason
You read the news, so you are better informed.Therefore, you will develop better judgment.Consequently, you understand events better.Thus, you understand events better.You understand events better as a result.For this reason, people who vote should read news.
significantlyeven moremore importantmost importantworseworst of all
Showing relative importance
Significantly, adult stem cells show new promise.Even more, they inspire far less controversy.More important, they inspire far less controversy.Most important, they have produced many useful therapies.Worse, the research is not well funded.Worst of all, the research is not well funded.
Transitions act like bridges between one idea and another. The ideas that connect should be right next to each other, so usually we place transition signals at the beginning of the second idea:
First idea Transition/bridge Next ideaHis students are very computer-literate. For example, they blog everyday.The laws are clearly unfair. Therefore, the laws should be changed.Embryonic stem cell research is controversial.
Significantly, adult stem cells show new promise.
Jobs are scarce in the country. Nevertheless, they prefer to live there.
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C i t i n g S o u r c e s w i t h S i g n a l P h r a s e shen you use somebody else’s ideas in your essay or research paper, you need to give that person credit. You must name, or cite, your source whether you borrow the exact words (enclosing them in quotation marks), or
paraphrase (put the ideas into your own words). You must cite any time you use any fact, assertion, or detail that is not common knowledge. This borrowed information is often introduced with a signal phrase or sentence. This lets your reader know that what follows will be someone else’s idea.
W
A signal phrase introduces a direct quote:
In the words of Alan Brooks, “Iran’s refusal to grant access to the international community will only lead to economic sanctions and further skepticism on the part of the West.”
“We don’t have enough evidence yet,” writes researcher David Evans in a New York Times editorial. “Until we get the results of the studies being conducted by the Department of Health, there’s no telling what the long-term side-effects of Substance D might be” (“The New Pollution”).
It is a good idea to establish the credentials or qualifications of your sources when you first cite them (researcher David Evans, activist Jessica Cantrell, psychologist David Jones). Pointing out that the person you’re quoting has expertise or personal experience makes them believable.
A signal phrase may also introduce a paraphrase:
Despite evidence to the contrary, activist Jessica Cantrell (1993) has suggested that the monthly cost of the Iraq War exceeds what the state of Washington spends annually on education.
As Petra Johansson has noted, sharks are less likely to attack when water temperatures reach 70 degrees (“Danger Zone” 172).
You can also combine a partial direct quote with a paraphrase using a signal phrase:
According to psychologist David Jones, children with mild cases of ADD are “more commonly over-diagnosed than under-diagnosed” if there is a history of the condition in the family (45).
In “A Manifesto for the Comedown” (1969), Bales indicates that “the radicalism of the youth culture” has run its course and can only be reinvigorated through a new set of “clearly defined” principles (12).
How you give credit to your sources depends on the citation guidelines (for example, MLA or APA) your teacher wants you to follow.
The following verbs indicate authorship and signal a direct quote or paraphrase:
Admits Claims Declares Notes Refutes ThinksAgrees Compares Denies Observes Rejects WritesArgues Confirms Emphasizes Points out RespondsBelieves Contends Insists Reasons Suggests
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W r i t i n g & L a n g u a g e D e v e l o p m e n t C e n t e r
A p o s t r o p h e spostrophes are a stumbling block for many people. Even in professional signs and ads, apostrophes are frequently misused. There are three correct uses for the apostrophe and a
few incorrect ones you must avoid.A1. Do use an apostrophe to indicate contractions (omitted letters):
we’ve (for we have) can’t (for cannot) won’t (for will not)they’re (for they are) you’re (for you are) it’s (for it is)
Don’t confuse the contractions they’re, you’re, and it’s with the possessives their, your, and its.
2. Do use an apostrophe to indicate possessives (ownership):
▪ Singular or plural nouns not ending in –s take an apostrophe and –s.
a child’s drawingthe children’s booksthe women’s luncheon
▪ Singular nouns ending in the sounds (s) or (z) or (sh) take an apostrophe and –s.
Alice’s restaurant Marx’s writingsMr. Davis’s house the fish’s habitat
▪ However, the following exceptions to the above rule prevent awkward pronunciation:
Jesus’ teachings Socrates’ wisdomOdysseus’ wanderings Moses’ laws
▪ Plural nouns ending in the sounds (s) or (z) take only an apostrophe.
four years’ delayladies’ shoesmy parents’ anniversary
▪ For joint ownership of one item, only the last noun takes the possessive form.
Joe, Tom, and Liz’s computer
▪ For multiple separate ownership, each noun takes the possessive form.
the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms
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3. Do use an apostrophe to make plurals of single letters (to prevent confusion):
▪ Last semester he earned all A’s, and she earned C’s and D’s (not As, Cs, and Ds).▪ Dot your i’s and cross your t’s (not is and ts).
Avoid the following common apostrophe errors:
1. Do not use an apostrophe with possessive personal pronouns ending in –s:
hers his ourstheirs yours its
Don’t confuse the possessives their, your, and its with the contractions they’re, you’re, and it’s.
2. Do not use an apostrophe with singular nouns which are not possessive and end in the sound (s):
▪ The Bates family lives on Oasis Lane.▪ The house paint is sold on aisle ten.
3. Do not use an apostrophe to form plurals:
▪ one shoe, two shoes▪ one puppy, two puppies▪ one leaf, two leaves
4. Do not use an apostrophe in plural numbers and abbreviations:
▪ She was dealt a king, two 8s, and two 3s.▪ My grandfather was born in the 1800s.▪ The Nobel laureate held two PhDs.
Once you’ve learned these simple rules for forming contractions, possessives, and plurals, you’ll be able to use apostrophes correctly. Remember that the spell-check feature on your computer will not always catch and correct an apostrophe error, so pay particular attention to them when you’re proofreading your papers. Avoid the embarrassment of referring to all the toy’s on sale or the dog chased it’s ball. Correct apostrophe use will help indicate your excellent command of English writing skills.
Contributed by Karen Trefzger ▪ 3/18/2009
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W r i t i n g & L a n g u a g e D e v e l o p m e n t C e n t e r
R u n O n S e n t e n c e sRun on sentences are independent clauses that have not been either separated or joined using correct punctuation. You may always use periods to separate independent clauses. You may use a semicolon or a comma with a coordinating conjunction to join independent clauses. However, you may not use a comma alone to join independent clauses. Joining independent clauses is called coordination. Coordination creates compound sentences where the clauses are considered of equal importance. Another way to correct a run on is called subordination. Subordination creates complex sentences with an independent clause that is considered more important than the subordinate (also called dependent) clause.
This is a run on… …because…. This is correctly joined with coordination.
This is correctly joined with subordination.
This is correctly separated.
Vang was tired he decided to stay home.
It joins two independent clauses without any punctuation.
Vang was tired, so he decided to stay home.
orVang was tired; he decided to stay home.
Because Vang was tired, he decided to stay home.
orVang decided to stay home because he was tired.
Vang was tired. He decided to stay home.
Nuclear waste is hazardous, this is indisputable.
It joins two independent clauses with the wrong punctuation.
Nuclear waste is hazardous; this is indisputable.
orNuclear waste is hazardous, and this is indisputable.
(These clauses are intended to have equal importance, so subordination would not make sense.)
Nuclear waste is hazardous. Indeed, this is indisputable.
John added biology to his schedule, he was worried about the homework.
It joins two independent clauses with the wrong punctuation
John added biology to his schedule, but he was worried about the homework.
orJohn added biology to his schedule; he was worried about the homework.
John added biology to his schedule although he was worried about the homework.
orAlthough John was worried about the homework, he added biology to his schedule.
John added biology to his schedule. However, he was worried about the homework.
Shoua hopes to move to Napa, her family lives there.
It joins two independent clauses with the wrong punctuation.
Shoua hopes to move to Napa, for her family lives there.
orShoua hopes to move to Napa; her family lives there.
Shoua hopes to move to Napa, where her family lives.
orShoua hopes to move to Napa since her family lives there.
Shoua hopes to move to Napa. Her family lives there.
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Appendix
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Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
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Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 152 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 153 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 154 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 155 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 156 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 157 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 158 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 159 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 160 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 161 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 162 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 163 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 164 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 165 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 166 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 167 ~
Metacognitive Reading Log
Name___________________________________Chapter :Key ideas and information--include page # in
parentheses (#)My thoughts, feelings and questions:
(see metacognative reading strategies list for further information)
~ 168 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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~ 170 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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~ 172 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 173 ~
~ 174 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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~ 178 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
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~ 180 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 181 ~
~ 182 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 183 ~
~ 184 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 185 ~
~ 186 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 187 ~
~ 188 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 189 ~
~ 190 ~
Reading Analysis Chart3. Summary sentence that includes: author’s full name, title of chapter (in quotation marks), title of book (in italics), and the author’s over-arching thesis (hint—do this after completing 1 and 2 below):
1. What are the author’s main ideas? Break the text into sections according to main ideas/claims. Use your own words to write his/her big ideas here. Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
2. How does the author support her /his main ideas/claims? What evidence (quotes, specific examples, reasoning, statistics etc.) does the author give to back up claims? Be sure to give page #’s—abbreviations are OK
4. What I think about the author’s ideas: connections, reflections, questions, difficulties with the reading, and opinions about the reading.
~ 191 ~
~ 192 ~