A Case Study at Chinese Christian Schools

Mosaic of Thought Implementation

By Robin Hom and Jenny Lee

What Problem Are We Trying to Address?

Twenty years ago, our students at Chinese Christian Schools were scoring below the 50th percentile on average in both reading and language. Through a series of curriculum changes, consistent teacher training, and special emphasis in our academic program, our students now score in the 82nd percentile in reading and 85th percentile in language.

While we are pleased with this rise in test scores, we have also made some disturbing observations as well. As any educator will tell you, test scores tell only part of the story of what is going on in the life of students. Other forms of assessment determined the following:

• The writing of our students generally lacked analytical depth. They could not write a strong persuasive paper or support a thesis in an expository essay with textual or logical references.
• Our senior high teachers, especially in AP and honors-level classes, were saying that even our best students lacked critical-thinking skills. The students could not derive conclusions or corollaries using inductive or deductive reasoning.
• Reading comprehension consistently showed up as the lowest of our test scores. Although our students tested well, showing that they had intelligence, they never scored as high on reading as their abilities indicated they could.
• Our alumni returned from college saying they were not fully prepared for collegiate-level writing. They were well prepared in other classes, but they said they needed a better foundation in literary analysis and expository writing for English classes.

We took these signs very seriously because they also indicated we were not preparing our students spiritually for college. Students who cannot reason well or formulate arguments cannot truly defend the faith when they are on their own. We want to produce Christian scholars who know more than trite sayings and pat answers; we want to produce young men and women who can truly give “a reason for the hope that is in [them]” (1 Peter 3:15, NKJV).

What Was Our Initial Approach?

In our initial analysis, we reasoned that the problem must be our students’ inability to write and express their thoughts, especially since they were “smart” and doing well in other academic areas. So our first steps involved the following:

• We sent all our teachers to participate in the Bay Area Writing Project for training on how to teach the writing process, and we continue to send them for training. The Bay Area Writing Project, sponsored by the University of California and conducted throughout the country, trains teachers in how to teach writing.
• We have adopted a standard writing process that teachers use across the curriculum. Now every student learns the same process for writing regardless of grade level or subject area. The students thus learn, practice, and reinforce the basic process and skills of writing throughout their academic career.
• We have included an Advanced Literature and Composition class. Every graduating senior who is not taking AP English must take this semester class, which focuses heavily on critical reading skills and expository writing.

What Was the Real Problem?

Our initial steps brought some results but not nearly what we expected or desired. Further investigation led us to believe we had misdiagnosed what was happening:

• The problem was “fake reading”—the process of decoding and reading fluently but not understanding the content. Our students could spell, follow grammar rules, read aloud, and answer basic descriptive and comprehension questions, and thus they could score well on standardized tests. However, they could not read analytically or think critically about what they read.
• Our problem wasn’t that students couldn’t write but that they didn’t have anything to say. As hard as it may be to comprehend, our students could not form a defensible opinion or make value judgments regarding what they were reading.

We recognized that part of this problem was a weakness stemming from our heavily Asian student and teacher population. The Asian culture assigns value to obedience (especially in children), harmonious relationships, and personal long-suffering. It does not encourage arguing, thinking as an individual, or questioning authority. Yet again, we knew the importance of addressing this area if we were going to prepare our students to stand for the faith on some of our nation’s most hostile college campuses.

What Were Our Next Steps?

We implemented several new programs to address reading comprehension and critical thinking, again with limited success:

• We found that the Accelerated Reader program was effective in developing a love for reading and the habit of reading, but the program’s comprehension tests were very basic. The program got students to read, but it did not make them proficient readers.
• The Great Books program gave good principles about thinking critically, but there was very little teacher support on how to develop “big  questions. Our teachers needed more guidance themselves on how to use Socratic questioning, and the number of training materials to support teachers was sparse.
• Using the Open Court basal readers with prescriptive lessons for teachers did a good job in helping teachers know what and how to teach, but the readers and lessons did not teach critical-thinking skills. Students learned lowerlevel comprehension, but there was not enough emphasis on higher-order thinking skills.

What Are Our Current Efforts?

The programs mentioned above are effective in their specific areas, and we still use them in our school. But they did not specifically address the problem we were seeing. Additional research brought us to research-based practices taught at Columbia Teacher’s College, located in New York, and at the Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), located in Denver, Colorado. These two similar instructional practices attracted our attention for the following reasons:

• They have been tried and tested in hundreds of schools with thousands of students including students in an urban setting.
• They have worked in the same context as that of our school population: one consisting of large numbers of ESL students who have parents who cannot assist them at home.
• They provide sufficient resources and support to help teachers implement the programs.

After visiting and studying the instructional practices taught at both locations, we realized they were similar but decided to go with the PEBC program. This was more a pragmatic decision than a philosophical one. First, PEBC is in Denver and thus closer to the West Coast, so PEBC was more accessible from a cost and geographical standpoint. Moreover, PEBC was a little more open to implementing strategies to whatever curriculum we had already been using, whereas Columbia Teacher’s College was more prescriptive and uncomfortable with schools wishing to retain a basal reader as their primary reading text.

Mosaic of Thought in Brief

What Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann (1997) propose in the book Mosaic of Thought is simply a distillation of educational research that identifies what proficient readers do when they try to comprehend text. The authors assert that there are eight key cognitive reading strategies:

1. Monitoring for meaning. Proficient readers select appropriate fix-up strategies to best solve given problems in a reading situation.
2. Determining importance. Proficient readers use their conclusions about important ideas to focus their reading and to exclude peripheral or unimportant details from memory.
3. Creating mental images. Proficient readers use mental images to deepen their understanding of the text.
4. Synthesizing. Proficient readers monitor their overall reading and understanding as they read and take in new textual clues.
5. Relating new to known (schema). Proficient readers use prior knowledge to evaluate the adequacy of the model of meaning they have developed.
6. Questioning. Proficient readers use their questions to clarify and focus their reading.
7. Inferring. Proficient readers use their prior knowledge and textual information to draw conclusions, make critical judgments, and form unique interpretations.
8. Problem solving. Proficient readers have strategies to repair understanding when meaning has broken down.

Knowing these strategies is important, but the authors also suggest that certain instructional methods help students get to high-level comprehension:

• Think aloud to show what the readers who comprehend think about and how they create a literate life.
• Model what it is to live a literate life, and share insights from those literary experiences.
• Confer with individual students to assess their application of strategies, skills, and writing tools, and to push students to the next level.
• Demonstrate classroom rituals and routines so that students can interact effectively with one another.
• Manage sharing opportunities so that students teach their peers what they have learned rather than merely share. This activity of learning is also known as reflection.

What Is Our Implementation Plan?

After sending an initial team of 10 for training and further study, and after much reflection and prayer, we committed this past summer to having our entire staff adopt PEBC’s methodology across the curriculum. During this 2005–2006 planning year, our immediate goal is that teachers institute two structural changes and implement two instructional methods:

• Structurally, we want to schedule 75 minutes a day of uninterrupted literacy time because solid blocks of time for reading and writing instruction are essential. Second, we want to evaluate whether our classroom culture is warm, inviting, and risk free so that it encourages students to select texts and let their voices be heard.
• Instructionally, we first want our teachers to incorporate mini-lessons during literacy time. Mini-lessons help ensure that teachers have clear objectives and that new or reviewed material is taught regularly in 15-to-20-minute timeframes. We also want teachers to think aloud while they model a strategy, allowing students to “see” what a person is thinking while that person is trying to make meaning of text.

Starting in 2006–2007, we will begin to build the foundation for understanding the cognitive strategies for reading comprehension. Teachers will explicitly teach each of the eight strategies, spending at least six to eight weeks on each one. Our ultimate goal is that students will independently use the eight cognitive strategies to think more deeply about their reading, make connections, and develop and defend opinions.

Overall, we estimate that it will take three to five years to master and apply these strategies as a school. However, as students learn to be proficient  readers at younger ages, high school teachers can begin to focus more on teaching content than on developing these skills.

We believe there are four keys to successful implementation:

1. The school needs to purchase books and resources that give teachers an understanding of the research and methodology. All teachers must possess this core knowledge about reading pedagogy.
2. Teachers can use videos and DVDs to see the teaching strategies in action. As people say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
3. In-service training provides a personalized learning environment that answers questions specific to a teacher’s circumstances. This setting often bridges the gap from learning theory to practical application and brings theories down to where the teachers live in their classrooms with their students.
4. Teachers need coaches to provide personal mentoring for putting the strategies to use. The coaches can make sure the teachers are implementing the strategies and can assess the teachers’ performance in a supportive setting that allows for immediate and specific feedback.

What Discoveries Have We Made During Implementation?

Now that we have been using this program for over half a year, we have learned several things. If you plan to implement this approach or any program for school change, we hope you can benefit from the lessons we have learned:

• It is helpful to have a core group of teachers who have bought into the program and are committed to seeing it through. These teachers will provide momentum to keep the initiative moving forward, and they are an invaluable peer support group.
• This program, like most reading comprehension programs, works best in kindergarten through grade 8. High school teachers find it hard to take time out of their content instruction to teach a mini-lesson using an instructional strategy.
• A strength of the program is that it is flexible. You can bring it into your existing program no matter what curriculum you are using or what  particular challenges your students are facing.
• Since the program is not prescriptive, it is much more difficult to teach the concepts consistently to the teachers, let alone the students. You have to realize that all groups of people, including teachers, have segments that learn more quickly and readily than other segments. You will find that you need to teach and reteach it to some of your teachers as well as to some of your students.
• This approach, which calls for conferencing, discussions, and open-ended questions, leaves the teachers more vulnerable in that they must think on their feet. When teachers use principles, approaches, and strategies versus prescribed, cookbook steps for which one approach fits all situations, there is room for interpretation and discretion. Teachers need to be OK with the varied possibilities because that is the nature of critical thinking: not everyone is going to agree with everything.

We share this case study of Chinese Christian Schools not to hold ourselves forth as an example of how things are to be done. As you can see from our story, we have made plenty of mistakes, and we are learning as we go along. We hope that you can learn from our experiences and mistakes and that our story will help you in your efforts to raise a generation of students who can read, think, and write proficiently in a way that honors God.

Reference

Keene, Ellin Oliver, and Susan Zimmermann 1997. Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader’s workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

The Meantime Volume 5 Number 3