The Chain Test: A Lesson in Teaching for Success

by Gabriel Ortiz

It is our responsibility as educators to prepare our students to be independent learners. This means that we need to explicitly teach skills such as how to take notes from reading and listening, how to study effectively, and how to stay engaged and avoid procrastination.  Thinking they should be able to do these things is an assumption that is easy to make and hard to catch.

I learned this lesson many years ago as a young teacher at the end of a long school day. I call it the “chain test.”

THE CHAIN TEST

It was a simple request: I asked one of my 8th grade students to lock the gate. The task required him to secure the gate to the fence using a chain, and then fasten the padlock. I assumed that just telling him to do it would be enough; however, ten minutes later he was still hard at work. Confused, I sent another child to assist him. Another ten minutes passed, yet the task remained incomplete. I walked down to assess the situation. Together, they had managed to snake the chain through the individual links of the fence but failed to secure the fence to the gate. They bickered back and forth another few minutes as I watched in befuddled irritation. Embarrassed, they both turned to me and gave up, “We don’t know how to do it!”  I demonstrated, step by step. Then I let them try it. Finally, the gate was locked.

FROM ASSUMPTION TO INSTRUCTION

Based on my conversations with many teachers over the years, I know that I’m not alone in making erroneous assumptions about student skills. I have heard from college professors who wonder what those high school teachers are teaching. High school teachers can’t figure out what in the world is going on in middle school classrooms. Middle school teachers are amazed by what those elementary school students come to them still not knowing. Many point fingers at the generation, or at their parents, or at poverty or at the lack of resources. The reality is, regardless of the reason, students often don’t know because they haven’t been taught.

According to Dan Willingham in episode 3 of Jennifer Serravallo's podcast "To the Classroom," we teachers need to look for opportunities to explicitly teach strategies for any skill or task that is required for our subject matter. But not just our subject area: we also must teach skills foundational to learning in all subject areas, such as how to engage or re-engage in a lecture, how to block out distractions, how to take notes, how to study, how to manage our time, or how to ask for help. The list goes on.

NOTETAKING

Let’s focus on just one of these skills, helpful in all areas from the ELA to Science to History to Math classroom: Taking notes.

We must start by evaluating note taking skills. Begin by looking at a student’s short jots, post-its, annotations, or their longer, informal responses to reading/lectures in their notebooks. As you look, ask yourself these questions:

·       Does the student seem to be capturing the most important information?

·       Does the student seem to be jotting/annotating aligned to their purpose for reading?

·       Does the student have ways to organize their notes?

·       Does the student use their notes as a springboard to expand or deepen understanding?

As you review a student’s notes, you may place their work along the Writing About Reading Progression of Skills (Serravallo 2023) to help you decide what strategies to teach:

Category 1: Students who need help recording important information or capturing ideas about the text.

Numerous studies have shown that actively engaging with text is crucial for students to improve their comprehension. Presley and Afflerbach (1995) found that students who took notes while reading had better comprehension and recalled the material. Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) also discovered that students who used active reading strategies such as notetaking and summarizing performed better than those who did not. While these are wonderful findings, many students require help figuring out what is important to write down, or how to even have an idea about what to write.

To get started, Jennifer Serravallo offers one possible beginning strategy for annotation: Teach students how to simply Hold Onto a Thought with a Symbol. This technique teaches readers how to mark a passage with a symbol during times when they find themselves reacting to something in a text, or for those who don’t want to take the time to stop, and write an elaborated jot. Then, they can be taught to revisit these symbols and recall their thinking.  (Serravallo 2023).

Category 2: Students to organize notes, and deepen or expand their thinking.

Students who are already proficient at capturing important information in their writing can benefit greatly from using writing as a tool for further exploration. Graham and Hebert (2010) found that students who wrote deeply about their texts showed higher levels of comprehension than those who did not engage in these type of writing activities. Therefore, helping students develop effective strategies for writing about reading can be an important step toward supporting their continued growth and success.

One such strategy suggested by Dan Willingham is similar to one in The Reading Strategies Book 2.0: teach children how to organize their notes by going back and synthesizing information and finding connections between ideas. Strategy 13.6 – Organize Your Jots - involves teaching readers how to reread their sticky notes, consider which ones are worth keeping, organize or categorize them, and then using them for further thinking (Serravallo 2023).

It’s great to have high expectations—and we should—but it’s important to also keep our eyes open, assess readers’ needs and be ready to teach strategies to support them with skills you had hoped they had, but it turns out they don’t! Don’t assume they know how to lock the gate; give them the tools they need to secure it.  

References:

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading.

Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading.

Serravallo, Jennifer (2023). The Reading Strategies Book 2.0.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking Content area literacy.

Willingham, D.T. (2018). Building Blocks for Demanding Tasks [Audio podcast episode]. In To the Classroom. Jennifer Serravallo.