Literacy Annotations from Dr. Lofflin: journal_of_adolescent_and_adult

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A cautionary tale about using the word shy: An action research study of how three quiet learners demonstrated participation beyond speech

Rosheim, K.C. (2018). A cautionary tale about using the word shy: An action research study of how three quiet learners demonstrated participation beyond speech. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 61(6), 663-670.

Getting all students to participate in class has continued to be a challenge for me in all my years of teaching. I feel like a failure as a teacher if some voices go unheard in class discussions and group activities. When peer observations have been done of my teaching even now at the college level, I have worried if all students did not talk in class, and in fact, that is one thing that is evaluated negatively at my university. When I have observed faculty peers and student teachers, I’ve often looked specifically at who talked in class and how much.

Like the well-intentioned teachers Rosheim describes in this article, my peers and I have often discussed who are the “shy” or “quiet” students in our classes and what we can do to make them participate more. I have used every kind of strategy and activity I could think of to make that happen.

After reading this article, I realize that while my students often seem to respond well to my efforts, there has been a time or two when I crossed over the line, and despite my good intentions, I have unintentionally been guilty of “forcing extroverted behavior” from students, occasionally with negative results. I’ve thought I had to do that because I’ve believed that my students will need to acquire oral communication skills to succeed in the workplace and in life. The state and national standards that drive instruction and teacher education in my state demand that we help students gain those skills. And of course, there are always those negative peer and student evaluations that I think will come if I do not push the unwilling to speak in class.

The irony of all this, is that like Rosheim, I was, and still am, a “quiet learner.” I have been described as “shy” by my current faculty peers and by administrators. When I walk into the classroom to teach, or go to a meeting, I often feel that I will have to force myself to speak. I’ve even shared this with my teacher candidates. What I’ve described is a process almost like “method acting” where I get myself “in character” as a teacher or a committee chair or a conference presenter or some other kind of participant. Eventually I find that I usually become the role I am playing, but the process is stressful for me, and when any element of uncertainty is involved, I must become the character all over again.

I think about my own preferences for learning and participating with others, and I realize they are the same as the three introverted sixth grade learners Rosheim worked with in her action research study. Rosheim gathered extensive data from these students. She began with a 10-question survey that places students on a “continuum for introversion-extroversion” taken from the writings of Susan Cain, whose 2012 book, Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking was heavily referred to by Rosheim. I easily found this survey online, though I am required to register if I want to see my own results. This was interesting because as a “shy person”, my own shyness extends to online situations, and I usually prefer to “lurk” rather than register!

I did order Susan Cain’s book and plan to dig into it when it arrives. The book was a best-seller when it came out in 2012, but I have heard it referred to as “pop psychology”. I also easily found and viewed the TED talk that Rosheim showed the students. She asked them to write reflectively on what they thought about the TED talk. Like Rosheim and like me, Cain identifies herself as a “quiet learner.”

Because this article resonated with me emotionally, I am trying to view this article with a particularly critical eye. It would be all too easy to embrace everything in this article, but when something resonates so strongly as this did for me, caution is necessary. With Rosheim’s study drawing so heavily on Cain’s work, we must ask who Cain is and what her research has been, and I intend to do that.
We need to keep in mind that Cain is not an educator; she is an attorney. She does appear to be making an income presenting and writing on this topic. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but as I tell my own students, we always have to be looking at the goals and intentions of researchers, writers, and presenters. We need to see evidence, and critically evaluate what we hear and read, even if it comes from a source that sounds trustworthy to us.

We also need to look critically at Rosheim’s findings and the data upon which she based her conclusions. The data Rosheim gathered came from interviews, video observations in the classroom, students’ reflective writing, and Rosheim’s field notes. She discovered that each of her three focal students (who all had scored as introverted on the survey), had different reasons for not speaking in class, and they each reported different ways of learning. All showed evidence that the assumption teachers often make that “the absence of talk” equals “the absence of learning” (p. 664) was not the case for these students. One student said that she preferred to “think and listen to others” in class (p. 666). One of the students took copious notes in class, showing engagement and mental processing, though he rarely spoke in class. A third student discussed how he often needed a break from interacting socially, and when he did not get a break, he became physically ill.

Though I found these observations interesting, I want to know more. What other ways of engaging in class are there, besides listening and writing? Could there be a middle ground, where certain kinds of social interactions might be easier for introverts than others? In my own case, discussing with a small group of people that I know well works better than discussing in large group settings or with people I do not know well. I do well in situations where I can get away and work alone, then return to a small group setting to bounce ideas off people, and then maybe work alone some more.

What other alternatives could be tried that would meet students’ needs while still providing a context for engaged learning? Listening and writing might be good alternatives, but are there ways that go beyond verbal skills that might meet even more students’ needs? How can I make such alternatives work in my own classroom, and model them for future teachers, in a world where verbal (especially spoken) responses are valued over other types of responses?

One big take-away I had here was that “taking time to think” before responding to prompts is not a negative thing! Teachers often find even a few seconds of wait time almost unbearable, but should we be building in more opportunities for reflection? I have felt my own frustrations when peers, supervisors, and students expected instantaneous responses to electronic communications. Nowadays, with text messaging, Twitter, and other rapid ways of communicating, it sometimes feels like taking time to think before responding is discouraged. If I take a day to respond thoughtfully to a message, I receive emails asking whether I received the message or not!

Judging from much of what I see of responses that are almost instantaneous (and which may often have character limits!), I am beginning to think that we sometimes need to slow things down a bit before responding. In the long run, that may save time. Sometimes it may be better to provide a response that is less instantaneous but more thoughtful, and that shows some engagement and care.

Clearly, there is a place for all kinds of learners and responders and what they bring to our schools, our workplaces, and our society. As Susan Cain says in her TED talk, we need all kinds of learners and all kind of communicators to cope with the complex problems we are facing, now and in the future.

Understanding and evaluating English Learners’ oral reading with miscue analysis

Keh, M.L. (2017). Understanding and evaluating English Learners’ oral reading with miscue analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(6), 643-653.

Reading fluency and college readiness

Rasinski, T.V., Chang, S., Edmondson, E., Nageldinger, J., Nigh, J., Remark, L., Kenney, K.S., Walsh-Moorman, E., Yildirim, K., Nichols, W.D., Paige, D.D., & Rupley, W.H. (2017). Reading fluency and college readiness. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 60(4), 453-460.

Literacy Annotations from Dr. Lofflin

Pages

A cautionary tale about using the word shy: An action research study of how three quiet learners demonstrated participation beyond speech

Understanding and evaluating English Learners’ oral reading with miscue analysis

Reading fluency and college readiness

Flipped professional development: An innovation in response to teacher insights

Inverting instruction in literacy methods courses: Making learning more active and personalized

Drawing on what we do as readers: Discovering and embedding strategies across the disciplines

Beyond the rubric: Think-alouds as a diagnostic assessment tool for high school writing teachers

Uncovering substance: Teaching revision in high school classrooms

Teaching adolescent ELs to write academic-style persuasive essays

Scaffolding high school students’ reading of complex texts using linked text sets

Close reading as an intervention for struggling middle school readers

Learning to talk like the test: Guiding speakers of African American Vernacular English

Open up the ceiling on the Common Core State Standards: Preparing students for 21st-century literacy—now

Bidialectal African American adolescents’ beliefs about spoken language expectations in English classrooms

From resistance to advocacy for math literacy: One teacher’s literacy identity transformation.

Microblogging as a literacy practice for educational communities

Understanding resistance: Preservice teachers’ discourse models of struggling readers and school literacy tasks

Adolescents and “autographics”: Reading and writing coming-of-age graphic novels

“Rap universal”: Using multimodal media production to develop ICT literacies

Take it out of class: Exploring virtual literature circles

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