Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Engaging Students with Academic Texts through Flipped Learning

Introduction: The following resources were created to complement a professional development talk given as part of the Jornada de Capacitación Docente IIC 2022 at Universidad Latinoamericana de Ciencia y Tecnología. The title of this talk alludes to the English idiom used to describe a situation when a person is unable to distinguish individual instances from the overall system to which they belong. Failure to see the forest for the trees occurs in our classes when students do not understand how the texts they are required to read fit within the overall design of the course and they are therefore less likely to successfully achieve the intended learning outcomes. The talk and this accompanying blog post outline the challenges faced by teachers and students and offer several practical strategies to ehance student engagement with academic readings at different stages of the flipped learning cycle.   

Goals: 

• Explore the role of academic reading in a university context, barriers to success, and teacher responsabilities.
• Propose a series of practical activities to promote reading engagement among students before, during, and after classes sessions.

Guiding Questions: 

• What are the barriers to university student reading success and how can I address them in my courses?
• What pedagogical strategies lead to greater levels of student engagement with academic readings?

Session Recording

Topic 1: The Role of Academic Texts in University Courses

For most people, college life is synonymous with reading, but why do we expect our students to read? What is the purpose of academic reading within the educational experience? 

• Exposure to Content: Reading the academic texts assigned by the professor provides students with access to key content to be covered in the course. Taking time to read the assigned texts carefully will prepare students to explore and clarify those concepts more deeply with their teacher and classmates in the following class. 

• Sensemaking Tools: Information from the assigned texts contributes to students' ability to make sense of the big issues and open questions in their professional field. Theories, models, case studies, and the results of research can be used by students to describe and explain phenomena they encounter in the real world. 

• Shared Body of Knowledge: University students need to survey a vast amount of collective knowledge that is specific to their particular domain or field of study. Becoming a professional involves gaining familiarity with the major issues in the field, the contributions of leading scholars, dominant theories and domain specific terminology.  

• Challenge and Test Ideas: Students must also learn to push back on certain ideas they encounter in academic texts and recognize that many issues are still unsolved, are heavily context dependant, or have a multitude of interpretations. They must learn to recognize and navigate the gray areas where multiple, possibly contradictory theories exist.

• Develop Information Literacy: Academic reading in college also helps students learn to recognize the characteristics of trustworthy sources of information identify sound reasonsin which will contribute to their ability to interpret the media they consume outside of the classroom.

• Develop Professional Identity: Engagement with the academic literature of their field combined with their own practical experiences will contribute to the formation of the students' professional identity as they begin to form their own working theories that guide their thinking and descision making in their professional lives. 

Topic 2: False Assumptions about University Students and Reading

At the beginning of my university teaching career I made a number of assumptions about students and reading that I later reconsidered in light of my classroom experiences. 

• Willingness: Students will read the assigned text.

• Comprehension: Students will understand the text. 

• Selective Attention: Students will focus on the important ideas. 

• Retention: Students will remember what they read when they come to class.

• Purpose: Students will see connections between the content of the reading and major themes and goals of the course.

• Evaluation: Students will think critically about the ideas presented in the text and not accept them on blind faith. 

• Application: Students will notice how the ideas from the text can be used in the construction of major course assignments.

• Transfer: Students will understand how the ideas of the text can be applied in their personal and professional contexts outside of the classroom.

Needless to say, it did not take long for me to realize that the behavior of the average student does not conform to these assumptions. That is not a bad thing, however. These false assumptions provide a clear indication of the factors that university teachers must consider when designing pedagogical strategies to help students engage with academic texts. This is the challenge we must accept!

Topic 3: Reading Challenges and Teacher Responsibilities

Why is university level reading a challenge for students? First we should consider the nature of reading itself. Reading is not a passive process. It is an active one, or rather, an interactive one. 

• "Reading is what happens when people look at a text and assign meaning to the written symbols in that text. The text and the reader are the two physical entities necessary for the reading process to begin. It is, however, the interaction between the text and the reader that constitutes actual reading (Aebersold & Field, 1997, p. 15)."

Reading as Interaction

What is the nature of this interaction between reader and text? Schema theory tells us that individuals use mental models, or schema, from previous experiences to make sense of new experiences by placing them within previously established mental categories and relationships. Aebersold and Field (1997) outline three categories of schemata that readers use to make sense of a text:

• Content Schema: Familiarity with the subject matter of the text they are reading. 

• Formal Schema: Familiarity with the organizational structures, genre convensions, and discourse patterns of the type of text they are reading.

• Linguistic Schema: Familiarity with the language, grammatical structures, vocabulary and phrases in the text they ar reading.  

Barriers to Reading Success

Readers with high language proficiency, extensive experience with the genre type, and sufficient background knowledge regarding the topic of a text will be far more successful at accurately interpreting its intended meaning than a reader lacking in any or all of the schema domains. This certainly represents a barrier to reading success but there are other potential barriers.

• Language Proficiency: It is far harder to read in your non-dominant language than in your first language. However, academic language and organizational patterns are not native to anyone's first language. They must be learned.

• Culture of Reading: Reading is not valued the same by all cultures or even among members of the same culture. If students are not in the habit of reading in their personal time, they will have a harder time accomplishing academic reading tasks. 

• Content Knowledge: Students are in the process of learning about their professional field. There is a lot to know and academic texts often make reference to other related concepts that students will need to have some knowledge of to make sense of the arguements of the reading. Academic readings are also full of domain specific terminology and jargon that can make comprehension challenging. 

• Academic Discourse: Academic texts follow strict conventions in the ways that they express information, justify their points, provide context, and make conclusions. Students who are unfamiliar with the discourse patterns of academic texts can often struggle to see the points the author is making.

• Direction and Purpose: Students also find it challenging to read a text when they are not sure what it is they need to do with it. If their teacher does not provide sufficient instruction, they may spend their time focused on irrelevant portions of the text.  

What do Students Say?

In preparation for this talk I asked former students to tell me the challenges they have faced when attempting to complete the reading assignments for their classes at ULACIT. 

• Terminology (Content Schema): "The book had really difficult terms and honestly I wasn’t prepared for it."
  

• Academic Style (Formal Schema): "It takes so long [for the author] to explain the idea of the chapter. It has so many examples and at the end of the day I don’t get the real meaning of the topic that the chapter has."

• Selective Attention (Purpose): "The most challenging thing about academic reading is focusing on what’s important. You have to read so many pages at once and you don’t know how to dismiss some information."

• Comprehension and Affective Factors: “When I'm reading the book and I don’t understand it, but the teacher already assigned a homework based on that reading and I’m like ‘Whoa, wait a second.' I didn’t understand the reading and I have to do this homework and it’s just crazy. I feel stuck."

• Perceived Lack of Relevance: "Some things are difficult to apply. What you read sometimes is difficult for you to see it being helpful in reality."

• Incorrect Application of Flipped Learning: "Sometimes, in some courses, the book is THE course. Why did I come to the synchronous session if they are just mentioning what I just read?"

Teacher Responsibilities

It is clear from the students' comments as well as the previous exploration of barriers that students need support from their teachers if they are to be successful readers, but what is the nature of this support? It is common to hear teachers refer to their role as facilitators of the learning process. How does the facilitation of learning actually work? A model from Freeman (1989) may provide a useful way of thinking about this. 

Freeman proposes a model for language teacher education and the ways that teacher educators can support the learning of pre-service and in-service language teachers. For those of us who teach current and future English teachers, this model was designed for us. I would argue, however, that the categories outlined by Freeman can equally apply to pre-service and in-service learning in other professional fields.

Freeman outlines four constituents that make up the content of professional learning with the acronym KASA which stands for:

• Knowledge: Facts, theories, names, terminology, and other concepts related to our professional field.

• Attitudes: What we value, view as important or unimportant, and how we feel about different factors in our professional experiences.

• Skills: Specific behaviors that we are able to carry out as part of our professional duties.

• Awareness: The degree to which we are conscious of the knowledge we have (or lack), the attitudes we hold (or don't), and the skills we are able to perform (or not). 

It is the combination of these four constituents that influences the decisions made by the pre-service or in-service professional. With Freeman's KASA framework in mind, we can say that our role as university professors is to help students make better decisions within their professional contexts by enhancing their knowledge and skills while simultaneously encouraging them to reflect on their attitudes and growing levels of awareness. Freeman says that knowledge and skills are the only components  that can be addressed through formal education and training. In other words, only knowledge and skills can be taught. Attitudes and awareness can only be addressed indirectly by providing learners with opportunties to reflect on their attitudes and awareness. As teachers, the KASA framework can help us design in-class and out of class activities related to the assigned reading to address the four constituents.

Topic 4: Flipped Learning and Course Design

In this section we will briefly look at the Flipped Learning Cycle for planning your day to day lessons as well as consider some important points about the design of your course as a whole in order to promote maximum understanding. The Flipped Learning Cycle is a teaching methodology that intends to promote active student participation in their learning process. It does this by "flipping" or inverting the traditional model of education in which students come to class to get input from the teacher (usually in the form of a lecture) and then they do homework assignments based on that input. In the flipped model, students are exposed to the input before class so that they come to the lesson ready to participate actively and explore the topic in more detail. It consists of the following stages:

• Asynchronous: (Individual Preparation) Students read a text or watch a video and complete tasks to help them process the input and prepare for in-class activities.

• Synchronous: (Group Exploration) Students process the ideas from the input in group discussion and application tasks. Misunderstandings can also be clarified by the teacher and the teacher can give additional input at this time building on what students have already learned.

• Asynchronous: (Individual Consolidation / Preparation) The teacher can assign additional tasks based on the topic that require students to reflect on the topic or apply it in some way. They will also need to access and process the new input in preparation for the next class. 

The Importance of Seeing the Big Picture in Course Design

The Flipped Cycle is important for your day to day lesson planning but it is also critical that this cycle fits within the overall design scheme of your course in order for all the pieces to fit together. I recommend considering the following stages when preparing your course program:

• Review: Survey the content and stated goals of the course in the syllabus.

• Identify: Determine what the key themes, open questions, and general aims of the course are.

• Create: Create evaluation activities and major course assignments that will become the course landmarks or waypoints. 

• Sequence: Now, determine how to order the texts you will have students read during the term in the best way possible to help students build the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve the course goals that will be observable through their performance in the evaluation activities and major course assignements.

Having great activities in your Flipped Learning Cycle will do very little for student learning if these activities do not fit within a well planned course design. You need to think big!

• If you do not understand the reading...
• If you have not read the text carefully before assigning it to students...
• If you do not see how the reading fits into the overall course design...
• If you only have your students read the text because it was in the syllabus...

• YOU ARE IN A BAD SPOT AND SO ARE YOUR STUDENTS!

The Role of Guiding Questions

Even when you do have a well planned design for your course and you have squenced your readings to provide the scaffolding students need to be successful, sometimes they still fail to make the seemingly obvious connections between the content of the readings and the aims, themes, and major questions that the course was designed to explore. A useful strategy is to create guiding questions for each lesson and unit of work. These are open ended questions that encourage students to refect and articulate their current understanding regarding the topic of study. These questions can be introduced to students at the beginning of a lesson and they should also be reinforced during and after the lesson or unit in order to promote metacognition, retention of ideas, and awareness of changes in their Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills.

Topic 5: Practical Ideas for the Stages in the Flipped Learning Cycle

Before presenting some practical ideas that work for integrating reading in the different stages of the Flipped Learning Cyle, I would like to share some strategies I have tried in the asynchronous preparation stage that have not worked to my satisfaction.

• Read the text and come to class ready to discuss.
• There is no direction here. No purpose. Most importantly, there is no accountability. Why read the text if the teacher isn't going to check?

• Read the text and make a summary.
• While some students are skilled at writing summaries, others are not. A surprising number of summaries consist of a rather generic statements related to the topic of the text or a near direct quotation of the concluding paragraph of the text. Why read the whole text if the conclusion will summarize it for me?

• Read and make a mindmap or infographic.
• Again, students who are already skilled at summarizing and who are motivated enough to read the text carefully are capable to creating graphic representation of the main points of a text. More often than not, however, the documents are a mess of ideas and terms that do not accurately reflect the key concepts of the text. 

• Read and make an outline.
• I often received a list of content headings taken directly from the chapter. This does not indicate that the student has actually read and comprehended the ideas in each of the sections of the text. 

• Read, find three important quotes from the text, copy the quotes and say what they mean to you and why you chose them. 
• I often received quotes that were completely irrelevant to the main ideas of the text. There were also a surprising number of quotes from the first and last pages and a serious lack of quotes from all the pages in between. The reactions to many quotes also displayed an inaccurate interpretation and a superficial analysis which indicated that the student either did not read or did not understand the text leading up to the quote.

• Read but don't worry if it's difficult. Just try to understand it and I'll explain it to you next class.
• At my lowest point I have resorted to this and the results were predictable. This approach reinforces the idea that students are not capable of making sense of the text, that academic reading is just too hard for them, and, more importantly, why study when the teacher is joing to explain it to me in class?

Topic 6: Study Guides as a Multipurpose Tool to Enghance Reading Engagement

The strategy I have found works best for me to engage students with academic readings within a Flipped methodology is to use study guides. My study guides are worksheets I design to help students focus on important parts of the text, process the ideas, and react to them. The idea is for students to read the assigned text and fill out the study guide as they go along. The study guides follow a predictable but flexible format. They always begin with a section containing instructions and an introduction:

• Instructions/Introduction: I remind students of the instructions to complete the different sections of the worksheet. I also introduce the text they are about to read by stating the topic and why it is important. 

The rest of the study guide consists of a combination of different item types that fall into three categories:

• Fill-in-the-Blank Quotations: I include a number of important, thought provoking direct quotations from the text. To add a gamelike element to the task, I delete several keywords and phrases from the quotations which students are required to type in themselves. 

• Personal Response Prompts: I also include prompts that require students to fill in their own answers. The prompts take a variety of forms and serve different purposes some of which include:

• Schema Activation: Before reading the text or before starting a new section, I often ask students some questions to articulate what they already know about the topic to activate their relevant content schema.

• Summarize in Your Own Words: In some sections I ask students to briefly summarize the author's ideas in their own words.

• Define Key Terms: When the author introduces important concepts or terms, I often ask students to write the definition the author provides or to say it in their own way.

• Charts, Tables, and Outlines: When the author provides lots of information about a specific topic, I will often create a chart, table, or outline that students will complete based on what they read. This helps them make sense of the ideas and organize the information in a systematic way that they can easily reference later. 

• Reflection and Personal Reaction: It's also important to encourage students to react to the ideas they are reading. I often ask them to think of examples from their own lives, to contextualize a concept within their work context or the cultural realities of Costa Rica. I may even ask students whether or not they agree with the author. Having students develop a personalized response to texts ensures that they are engaging with the ideas. 

• Connection to Course Assignments: When appropriate, I also have students articulate how certain ideas can help them complete different course assignements they are working on such as a research paper, project, or other creation. 

• Summary/Support: I also include my own brief commentaries in the study guide to summarize and explain extremely difficult sections that students are unlikely to understand on their own or to summarize extended sections of the text that are irrelevant for our purposes. I use the Summary/Support comentaries sparingly.

Sample Study Guides

Here are some sample study guides I have designed for different courses I taught last term. Each contains a commentary as well as a link to view the study guides.

• Materials Evaluation: This study guide requires students to use the information they learned to create their own materials evaluation criteria, something that was needed for one of their major course assignments. 
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Teaching Grammar: This study guide requires students to organize information into tables to make it easier for them to understand and reference later. 
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Teaching Grammar: This study guide requires students to respond to a number of summary prompts and personal opinion prompts.
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Designing Training Courses: This study guide makes use of a schema activation prompt at the beginning and many summarize in your own words prompts throughout.
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Designing Training Courses: At the end of this study guide students had to use ideas from the chapter to begin brainstorming content for one of their upcoming projects. 
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Designing Training Courses: This study guide was created to help students process ideas from a Linkedin Learning Course rather than a reading. 
• CLICK HERE to see a sample student response. 
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

• Culture and SLA: This study guide makes extensive use of the Summary/Support comments. This article was extremely technical and challenging for my master's students to understand so more direct teacher support was needed to aid comprehension.
• CLICK HERE to see the original worksheet. 

What do Students Say?

In preparation for this talk I also asked my most recent students their opinions about the study guides. 

• Purpose/Comprehension: "It helped me to focus on what was most important in each chapter and it helped me to grasp the basic and important ideas of the reading."

• Selective Attention: “I love the way the teacher summarizes some of the pages for me so I don’t have to stay that long on those sections.”

• Reaction/Application: “With these study guides I can concentrate on the most specific aspects of the reading. I can find my reactions towards what the author is saying and reflect on my learning and how it can be applied in my teaching [professional] experience.”

• Purpose: “I don’t have to wonder what the instructor wants me to learn about the chapter and rather focus on the most important aspects he is trying to get me to apply.”

• Retension/Reference: “...these main ideas, you have them in one place so later if you have to go back, you can find them in the study guide instead of searching through the whole reading…”

• Flipped Learning: “It actually helps me finish the task, understand what’s going on, and be prepared for class.”

Practical Reasons to Use Study Guides

Study guides have been an incredible tool to enhance student engagement with readings in my courses. Here are a few practical reasons to use them yourself.

• You'll Know Who Read and Who Didn't: Before class begins, you can check who has submitted their study guides. In class activities, you'll know ahead of time who has not done their reading.

• You Can Grade Them: In my courses, completion of the study guides forms a significant portion of the students' grade. This provides an extra incentive to do the readings. 

• You Can Preview Possible Misunderstandings: I skim some of the students' responses before class to see if there are points that students did not understand. In class I'll be sure to clarify this.

• Reference for Studying and Creation of Assignments: Students can use the study guides to prepare their essays, presentations, and other course assignments. I encourage students in cite quotations from the study guides to support their claims and justify their decisions.

• Reduce Reliance on Memory: I have students use their study guides to complete in class discussion and exploration activities so that they can use the terminology and ideas to express their points.

• Teaching for Understanding: I design my study guides carefully in order to enhance comprehension of the texts. In the end, we want students to learn! 

Arguments Against Study Guides

I have found study guides to be the most flexible and effective tool for enhancing reading engagement, but what are some possible counter arguments against this pedagogical strategy?

• You're making it too easy for them.
• A good study guide should not be easy. It guides the students but requires them to think and process the reading deeply.

• Telling them what to focus on does not help them develop the skill of reading selectively.
• I want to channel their limited time and energy into engagement with the ideas of the text and how they relate to the big questions of the course.

• You're telling them what to think.
• Nope. I'm trying to help them accurately understand what the author thinks. They can make up their own opinion about that. 

• You know they can just copy it from a classmate, right?
• Lazy students will be lazy students. However, several of your prompts should require personalized responses that can't be simply copied verbatim from the text or from a classmate.

In-Class Processing Tasks

Here are a few tasks that you can have students do in the synchronous session to process the ideas from the reading in more depth. 

• Recall and Clarification: Put students in groups and have them do tasks like these:

• Reconstruct an Outline: For readings with lots of complex ideas, I sometimes create an outline of the major points and then remove some of the pieces. Students need to work together to reconstruct the outline. They can use their study guides to help them if they need to. The important thing to remember is to design the outline using different words than the ones students have in their study guide so they need to show they actually comprehend what they are doing. CLICK HERE to see a sample. CLICK HERE to see the answer key.
• Group Discussion: Reformulate some of the questions from the study guide prompts for students to discuss with their peers. This helps increase their recall of the key ideas and process the concepts as a group.
• Generate Questions: Have students create a list of questions or specific aspects that they would like more examples or clarification on. Then as a whole group discuss those questions together.

• Personal Response Tasks: Have students share and compare personal examples they wrote in the prompts.

• Experiential Tasks: Give students tasks that allow them to experience the concepts from the readings themselves. Here are some examples from my courses.

• Materials Evaluation: Student read about the design characteristics of effecive checklists to evaluate materials. In class I had students use several sample checklists to evaluate materials and say what they liked and didn't like about the checklist designs. 

• Grammar Teaching: Students read some theoretical ideas about language processing. In class they partipated in several sample grammar activities based on the language processing theory and they discussed their impressions. 

• Additional Input: You may decide to give some additional input to students in the form of a presentation or lecture. However, be sure you are showing a new side to the issue or that you are expanding on what students already learned rather than simply regurgitating the reading or reciting word for word from the study guide. 

Post-Class Ideas

Here are a few ideas for activities that you have students do after class based on the reading and activities they did in the synchronous session. 

• Design: Have students design their own samples.
• Example: Students read about evaluation checklists before class. In class they practice using some different checklists. After class they create their own checklists.

• Apply: Have students apply the concepts from the reading to their ongoing projects.
• Example: Students read about how to carry out a needs analysis before class. In class they write some sample needs analysis survey questions. After class they create a complete draft of their needs analysis survey.

• Reflect: Have students reflect on the experiences they have had and articulate what they have learned. I suggest that you turn the guiding questions of the lesson into a writing prompt. If you want, you could even turn this into a graded assignment such as an ongoing "learning journal" or writing porfolio. 

Topic 7: Questions for Reflection and Group Exploration

The following list of questions are meant to help you reflect on and explore ideas related to the seven topic sections of this presentation and blog post.

• What role do academic texts serve in your courses?

• What assumptions have you made about university students and reading?

• What are the reading challenges your students face and what should you do about them?

• How can the design of your courses support students' engagement with academic texts?

• What task types can help your students get the most out of academic texts before, during, and after your synchronous class time?

• How might the use of study guides enhance reading engagement?

• What thoughts or questions about the topic of academic reading were raised in you during this session?

• What are you interested in exploring when it comes to the way you address academic reading in your courses?

References: 

Aebersold, J. & Field, M. (1997). From Reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge University Press

Freeman, D. (1989). Teacher Training, Development, and Decision Making: A Model of Teaching and Related Strategies for Language Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly, 23(1) 27-45.