What Do You Know "How To" Do? (Professional Piece, Final Draft)

Natalia Simmons
What do you know “How To” do?
Using “How To” articles to explore reading and writing in the secondary classroom

Introduction
Do you want to know “How To” do something new? Where do you go to find out? From growing broccoli to whitewater kayaking, most people love to learn new things, and adults use many resources to find answers to the questions we have. By using the format of a “How To” article, students can take essential elements of lessons from all content areas and incorporate informational writing to create a unique and powerful learning tool. Haven’t you ever wondered “How To…” Bowl with a Lilliputian? Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? Using the process outlined here, students will be able to deconstruct the finer details of lessons to better understand the essential message. The lesson featured in this explanation is based in an English Two honors class with Gulliver’s Travels, where the class collaboratively analyzed the “How To” genre through various samples. The basis of their “How To” creations is a reader generated question from the first book of the novel. This article explains the lesson process and provides the research basis for both the reading and writing aspects of the strategy.

Instructional Problem
In my English Two honors class, I found that students read and question what they have read, but they do not explore the answers on a deeper level on their own, relying on our class discussions and lectures to satisfy that need. They also have a hard time extending the themes and ideas of what they read in fiction to nonfiction texts. Missing this connection makes it hard for them to make connections between writing nonfiction for academic purposes and fiction reading for the class. I wanted them to make inferences from their reading to create a real world response.

Hypothesis
Upon starting a unit on Gulliver’s Travels, I wanted to see how we could use nonfiction models to make inferences from what we’ve read in the novel. On top of this, I wanted to give them ownership of the novel by having them write their own questions as they read rather than answering teacher-generated questions. It is important to stress to students that the questions they write should be genuine; some questions may be answered later in the text, but generally the questions will require the help of other people or sources. I decided that they would be more engaged in finding an answer to a question they had created themselves. This also supports real world literacy because students are able to identify what they know and do not know, then evaluate that question to determine the best way to find an answer. They are then able to apply this process to what they question in everyday life.

Research Findings and Connections

Chris Tovani, I Read it but I Don’t Get It
“Readers who are taught to question the text can infer and clear up confusion better than those who simply decode the words and accept ideas unchallenged.”

“In the real world, the learner, the one wanting information, initiates the questions…When one question is answered, usually another one arises. The more I learn, the more sophisticated my questions become. Through questioning, I gain new information and I am better able to apply what I have learned.”

To facilitate this portion, I walked students through an active reading strategy in questioning their reading materials. As they read in class and for homework, they wrote the questions that came to them on Post-It notes and placed them in the book where the question was posed. In class, we created a chart with four boxes labeled From the Text, Requires an Outside Source, Ponderable, and Open Category. Each box represented where the student thought he or she should go for the answer to the question they needed addressed the most. Students posted their questions on the chart accordingly as they entered class throughout the unit.

At this point, questions were addressed in a variety of ways. Initially, we looked at the questions and answered them as a group just to get us started in the book. I’ve explained this step because it is important to the main point, creating the “How To” article; however, we addressed the questions in several ways: class discussion, text hunting, jigsaw researching, peer sharing, etc. Creating the “How To” article is just one example of how we addressed the questions.

Step One
On the “How To” day, students posted their questions as they had been. Then I grouped the class into pairs, and each pair chose one classmate’s question from the chart. Together, the pair discussed the question they chose and recorded a response to that question. They were able to use their text, the internet, nonfiction books, and one another to answer these questions. Then we set the question and answer pair aside momentarily.

Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
“I use the terms student writers and experienced writers because the principal difference between these two groups is the amount of experience they have had in writing.”

When it came to using the questions to bridge to nonfiction texts, this piece of research became the basis of my idea. Students have little experience with writing and the literature they are writing about, so making it relevant to their lives is an important aspect of the secondary class. In addition to this, contemporary society is highly visual and reactionary, and I knew I needed to use it to my advantage. I could use several texts by “experienced writers” for students to work from, but I wanted something highly engaging, simply constructed, and familiar. As I looked for short genres to satisfy these needs, I found the “How To” article format to be the most intriguing. My students are at an age where they look for solutions to their problems and they want to know how to do new things, and the format was familiar because they see these types of articles in different kinds of magazines and on the internet. I knew I would be able to find a variety of examples that would relate to their interests to use for classroom models.

Step Two, Part One
Each pair of students received an example of a “How To” article pulled from various magazines I had available. After reading the article together, the pair completed several analysis tasks. They identified the audience of the article and determined the final product that should result from the article. They then made a list of characteristics of their particular article, as well as listed information the article left out that they felt was necessary for successful completion. We went around the room and discussed these characteristics and compared and contrasted the format and effectiveness of the different articles. We made a list of these on the board for all the class to have available.

Rebecca Bowers Sipe, Tracy Rosewarne, Purposeful Writing
“Investigation into the conventions of a genre also provides the opportunity for students to contextualize their understanding of the various skills and craft lessons…each represents an area of identified need and each will be immediately reinforced in their writing.”

This piece of research guided me in connecting the fiction reading (Gulliver’s Travels) to the nonfiction article. They were familiar at this point with the tone, purpose, and audience of the “How To” genre. It was time for them to create their own version based on the reading and questioning they had done. I considered giving the students a rubric of what needed to be in the “How To” they would create, but after looking at the models we would use, I realized these were all different. Students needed the opportunity to address the question they had chosen in a format that was appropriate for their answer, and these too would all be different.

Step Two, Part Two
Students were asked to revise the answers they recorded to the Gulliver’s Travels question they chose. Once they were satisfied with their answers, they brainstormed ways to create a “How To” article from the question and answer they received. This required them to make inferences about what they read and pose it in an answer that fit the “How To” models they analyzed. After they brainstormed their ideas, I gave each pair a large piece of white paper (11.5x17) on which to draw out their “How To” article. The only guidelines they had in the creation was to use the characteristics they identified from the models and that their “How To” had to provide an answer to the question they chose.

Conclusion
Using this method, students were able to extend their real world experiences into their academic study through writing. They were able to analyze a familiar subgenre of nonfiction, and they were able to use that model to write their own examples, which was an unfamiliar task. Most groups answered the question directly in articles such as, “How to Negotiate with Hostile Little People.” Some groups were more creative in their answers and products. For example, in response to the question, “If Gulliver is so much larger than the Lilliputians, why doesn’t he just do what he wants?” a group created a “How to Bowl with Lilliputians” article. It guides its reader through a process that uses Lilliputians as bowling balls and bowling pins to Gulliver’s game. Student products also included a mixture of texts and pictures to support the text. Using this mixture gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding in two ways.

Extensions
After using this process for a reading based activity, I determined it would also be useful to use in analyzing students’ own writing. They could identify flaws and weaknesses in their writing, research solutions, and create a self-help “How To” to use as a guide for writing and revising. In other content areas, a similar principle applies. Students could create a variety of articles for different subjects, such as “How To…” Earn the Right to Vote? Deliver a Powerful Speech? Multiply Fractions? In addition to these ideas, I also have considered extending the product into something more professional by completing a final draft on a publishing program with photographs and text. With more time, students can complete a variety of nonfiction modeled products and compile them into a magazine, with the “How To” article as one piece of the whole.

Research
Sipe, Rebecca Bowers and Tracy Rosewarne. Purposeful Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
2006

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanova, Jr. Urbana, Il: NCTE, 1997. 43-54.

Tovani, Chris. I Read It, But I Don’t Get It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2000.