Chapter 4: Conversations with Cantos: Tracking Confusion to Its Source
This chapter specifically deals with helping students recognize their confusion and where the confusion oriented from or became noticeable. For many it has been suggested that teachers are responsible for what a student does or does not know, however we can only witness what they show us, and as Chris already pointed out, many students have become adaptable in producing performance tasks; thus it becomes an ability to mind read in order to gage the level of understanding in a student. This is highly unlikely, so we need to train students to recognise their own level of understanding and take proper measures.
Chris mentions 6 ways to be able to better understand our confusion while reading;
- The voice inside the reader’s head isn’t interacting with the text.
- The camera inside the reader’s head shuts off.
- The reader’s mind begins to wander.
- The reader can’t remember what has been read.
- Clarifying questions asked by the reader are not answered.
- The reader re-encounters a character and has no recollection when that character was introduced.
The strategy:
Give the student a photocopied version of the assigned reading and instruct them to take two highlighters (pink and yellow) to mark the part they are reading. Pink is for understood section where they would feel comfortable explaining it to someone who did not understand it and yellow is for parts that leave the reader confused.
After doing this activity her students reflected that the responsibility made them read more carefully, the highlighter in hand helped concentration and some really wanted to fill the page with pink so they read over parts again.
They began to understand that they only way they would fail, is not highlight anything at all. They became more aware of their consciousness while reading and their ability to spot confusion and address it then instead of leaving it for the perhaps chance that some teacher may explain it.