How to Activate Your Reading
How to Activate Your Reading
Transcript
I want you to think about the last thing you were assigned to read. How did you start? Did you start with the first word and then the second and the third, etc, etc until you finished the piece? Did you do any research before you started reading? Did you even take a moment to think about what you were reading and why?
Chances are you were engaged in something called passive reading, which is the way that most of us have read for most of our lives. But in college the academic demands are going to force you to activate your reading. And that's what we want to help you with today. Give you some strategies to help you active your reading to make it more effective and more efficient. I want to talk about active reading in the context of active learning. What is active learning and aren't we always active when we learn?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. A lot of learning is passive, but active learning is different because it means that while you're learning something about a topic you're also spending time and energy thinking about your learning as a process. It means you're thinking about not only what you learn, but also how you learn. You're identifying potential weaknesses in your learning process and you're really leaning on your learning strengths. It also means that you're seeking constant feedback about your own process and you're always searching for ways to become a better, more active, more engaged learner.
That's essentially what active learning is. It's learning with a mind always toward becoming an even better learner than you already are. So if that's active learning then what is active reading? It's essentially the same idea. While you read you're thinking about how to become a more efficient, more effective reader. You're not just reading the thing in front of you, you're also reading your own understanding of how you read, where your strengths and weaknesses are, and where you can get better.
And we're going to give you some strategies today to help you further activate your reading, even if you've already put a bit of time and energy into thinking about what kind of a reader you are. Let's talk a little bit about what passive reading looks like. It sounds like what I just talked about when I first started. It means that you're given something to read, you start with the first word and move onto the second and third, you move from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph until you finish the text. It basically means that you approach something cold with very little information and you proceed in well-mannered chronological order until you get to the end. The best example of passive reading is the kind of reading you did as a child where you started with once upon a time and you ended with the end. That's not how we want to read in college. Instead, we want to activate our reading. And here are six easy things to do to help activate your reading, to help make you a more engaged reader, and critically, to make your reading more efficient.
The first thing you should do is you should distinguish what kind of reading you're doing. Different types of reading can be read and should be read in different ways. Consider, for example, you're taking two classes. One British novel class and one biology class. In the novel class you're going to be assigned large books of fiction. In the biology class you have a textbook. Obviously you don't want to read those things in the same way. The novel you may want to read by looking first at the introduction to get a basic idea of what the novel's about. The textbook you may actually want to start with the problem sets in the back of the book before you actually read the material.
Or you may want to start by skimming the material and looking at the bold headlines first. Again, different types of reading are read in different ways and it's important to realize that if you're an active reader you're going to consider the kind of reading you're doing before you start.
Second, you want to ask yourself why you're doing the reading you're doing. What is the purpose of the reading? Are you preparing for an exam? Are you reading something so that you can write a paper for it? Are you reading it because it's an optional article? Or are you reading it out of interest? Knowing the purpose of your reading helps you direct the kind of reading you do and it's an important question to ask at the beginning of any reading engagement.
Three, and it may sound simple, you want to think about where and when you're reading. It's especially important to self-assess how productive your reading sessions are. If you're spending an hour reading and you're not getting an hour's worth of reading done, you want to ask why. Does it have to do with where? Does it have to do with the time of day? Does it have to do with your energy level? These things that seem somehow outside of reading can really affect how productive we are when we read.
And so we want to think about them always as we read for our classes. Next we want to prime our reading. And as far as I'm concerned this is one of the most powerful strategies for reading actively, especially when the material is complicated. If someone were to assign you Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” you would find yourself in the presence of a very difficult text. And trying to read that text by starting at the beginning and ending at the end would leave most of us completely bewildered.
But if you did just a little bit of internet research on the piece or if you spoke to your professor about how best to engage the material, or if you spoke to a friend who studied that piece the semester before you would find that by priming your reading in that way your reading engagement would go quicker and would be more productive. Whenever we prime ourself to read something, especially when it's difficult, we increase our comprehension and retention. And here's the good news; it doesn't have to take a lot of time. Next, once you've read something you want to take a moment to articulate the big idea. What's the most important theme? What's the central concept? Why was this reading assigned in the first place? Essentially what you're doing is you're taking a moment to identify the significance of the reading in the context of the larger study of the material.
Again, this doesn't have to take a lot of time, but spending as few as two or three minutes identifying the importance of the reading you just did can help concretize that significance in your mind and can aid in your comprehension and retention of the material. Basically what we're describing here is a three part process to reading. Previewing the reading, that is doing a little bit of pre-research before you read something, especially if it's complex. Reading the thing itself, and then reviewing, that is identifying the main significance of what you've read. And finally there's no substitute for talking to somebody about something that you've read.
Either you can talk to someone who's read the same thing and share your thoughts or even have an argument about the reading, or you can try to teach someone who doesn't know anything about the topic a little bit about what you've just read. And a favorite strategy of mine is to develop exam questions. Think about what kinds of questions might appear on an exam about this reading.
And if you have a friend who's in the same class reading the same thing, have them develop questions too, switch those questions, do them and then grade each other's work. This is a really great way to test each other's comprehension of the reading before the test tests you. I want to quickly talk about a graphic that you'll see a lot with regard to active reading that gives you six verbs that are meant to help you think about active reading in six different ways.
Visualizing, clarifying, questioning, predicting, connecting, and evaluating. I want to take those and just move them into the context of a college classroom to help you get a slightly better sense of what this can look like. For visualize I want you to think about the moment when the idea that came up in your reading came up in lecture. Or visualize the moment when a student asked a really smart question about it. Making that cognitive connection can really help with your comprehension of the material.
For clarification, think about annotating your text. Remember, you should never read for college without a pen or a pencil in your hand. Question why the reading was assigned to you. When you're done with a reading think about why it appeared on the syllabus and by trying to justify it's existence on the syllabus, often it'll be easier to identify the significance of the particular reading. For predict you might try predicting exam questions. If you were the professor what kinds of questions would you ask someone to evaluate their familiarity with the reading? Connect the reading that you just did with other material on the syllabus and think about how those connections could, for example, be rendered into a paper or an essay.
And finally evaluate how you might use the reading as a piece of evidence in a larger argument for a paper. Now remember, this is not an exhaustive look at how to activate your reading, but hopefully some of these strategies will be helpful to you. And remember, if you had a strategy that helps you activate your reading and it's working for you and you're getting the results that you want, keep doing it.
Chances are you were engaged in something called passive reading, which is the way that most of us have read for most of our lives. But in college the academic demands are going to force you to activate your reading. And that's what we want to help you with today. Give you some strategies to help you active your reading to make it more effective and more efficient. I want to talk about active reading in the context of active learning. What is active learning and aren't we always active when we learn?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. A lot of learning is passive, but active learning is different because it means that while you're learning something about a topic you're also spending time and energy thinking about your learning as a process. It means you're thinking about not only what you learn, but also how you learn. You're identifying potential weaknesses in your learning process and you're really leaning on your learning strengths. It also means that you're seeking constant feedback about your own process and you're always searching for ways to become a better, more active, more engaged learner.
That's essentially what active learning is. It's learning with a mind always toward becoming an even better learner than you already are. So if that's active learning then what is active reading? It's essentially the same idea. While you read you're thinking about how to become a more efficient, more effective reader. You're not just reading the thing in front of you, you're also reading your own understanding of how you read, where your strengths and weaknesses are, and where you can get better.
And we're going to give you some strategies today to help you further activate your reading, even if you've already put a bit of time and energy into thinking about what kind of a reader you are. Let's talk a little bit about what passive reading looks like. It sounds like what I just talked about when I first started. It means that you're given something to read, you start with the first word and move onto the second and third, you move from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph until you finish the text. It basically means that you approach something cold with very little information and you proceed in well-mannered chronological order until you get to the end. The best example of passive reading is the kind of reading you did as a child where you started with once upon a time and you ended with the end. That's not how we want to read in college. Instead, we want to activate our reading. And here are six easy things to do to help activate your reading, to help make you a more engaged reader, and critically, to make your reading more efficient.
The first thing you should do is you should distinguish what kind of reading you're doing. Different types of reading can be read and should be read in different ways. Consider, for example, you're taking two classes. One British novel class and one biology class. In the novel class you're going to be assigned large books of fiction. In the biology class you have a textbook. Obviously you don't want to read those things in the same way. The novel you may want to read by looking first at the introduction to get a basic idea of what the novel's about. The textbook you may actually want to start with the problem sets in the back of the book before you actually read the material.
Or you may want to start by skimming the material and looking at the bold headlines first. Again, different types of reading are read in different ways and it's important to realize that if you're an active reader you're going to consider the kind of reading you're doing before you start.
Second, you want to ask yourself why you're doing the reading you're doing. What is the purpose of the reading? Are you preparing for an exam? Are you reading something so that you can write a paper for it? Are you reading it because it's an optional article? Or are you reading it out of interest? Knowing the purpose of your reading helps you direct the kind of reading you do and it's an important question to ask at the beginning of any reading engagement.
Three, and it may sound simple, you want to think about where and when you're reading. It's especially important to self-assess how productive your reading sessions are. If you're spending an hour reading and you're not getting an hour's worth of reading done, you want to ask why. Does it have to do with where? Does it have to do with the time of day? Does it have to do with your energy level? These things that seem somehow outside of reading can really affect how productive we are when we read.
And so we want to think about them always as we read for our classes. Next we want to prime our reading. And as far as I'm concerned this is one of the most powerful strategies for reading actively, especially when the material is complicated. If someone were to assign you Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” you would find yourself in the presence of a very difficult text. And trying to read that text by starting at the beginning and ending at the end would leave most of us completely bewildered.
But if you did just a little bit of internet research on the piece or if you spoke to your professor about how best to engage the material, or if you spoke to a friend who studied that piece the semester before you would find that by priming your reading in that way your reading engagement would go quicker and would be more productive. Whenever we prime ourself to read something, especially when it's difficult, we increase our comprehension and retention. And here's the good news; it doesn't have to take a lot of time. Next, once you've read something you want to take a moment to articulate the big idea. What's the most important theme? What's the central concept? Why was this reading assigned in the first place? Essentially what you're doing is you're taking a moment to identify the significance of the reading in the context of the larger study of the material.
Again, this doesn't have to take a lot of time, but spending as few as two or three minutes identifying the importance of the reading you just did can help concretize that significance in your mind and can aid in your comprehension and retention of the material. Basically what we're describing here is a three part process to reading. Previewing the reading, that is doing a little bit of pre-research before you read something, especially if it's complex. Reading the thing itself, and then reviewing, that is identifying the main significance of what you've read. And finally there's no substitute for talking to somebody about something that you've read.
Either you can talk to someone who's read the same thing and share your thoughts or even have an argument about the reading, or you can try to teach someone who doesn't know anything about the topic a little bit about what you've just read. And a favorite strategy of mine is to develop exam questions. Think about what kinds of questions might appear on an exam about this reading.
And if you have a friend who's in the same class reading the same thing, have them develop questions too, switch those questions, do them and then grade each other's work. This is a really great way to test each other's comprehension of the reading before the test tests you. I want to quickly talk about a graphic that you'll see a lot with regard to active reading that gives you six verbs that are meant to help you think about active reading in six different ways.
Visualizing, clarifying, questioning, predicting, connecting, and evaluating. I want to take those and just move them into the context of a college classroom to help you get a slightly better sense of what this can look like. For visualize I want you to think about the moment when the idea that came up in your reading came up in lecture. Or visualize the moment when a student asked a really smart question about it. Making that cognitive connection can really help with your comprehension of the material.
For clarification, think about annotating your text. Remember, you should never read for college without a pen or a pencil in your hand. Question why the reading was assigned to you. When you're done with a reading think about why it appeared on the syllabus and by trying to justify it's existence on the syllabus, often it'll be easier to identify the significance of the particular reading. For predict you might try predicting exam questions. If you were the professor what kinds of questions would you ask someone to evaluate their familiarity with the reading? Connect the reading that you just did with other material on the syllabus and think about how those connections could, for example, be rendered into a paper or an essay.
And finally evaluate how you might use the reading as a piece of evidence in a larger argument for a paper. Now remember, this is not an exhaustive look at how to activate your reading, but hopefully some of these strategies will be helpful to you. And remember, if you had a strategy that helps you activate your reading and it's working for you and you're getting the results that you want, keep doing it.