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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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I have been doing this whole "teaching with comics" thing for nearly 15 years and I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with teachers all over the country. During panels and workshops, I find that I often hear (or overhear) a specific remark: "I love these books. They're great for my reluctant readers."

When I hear teachers say things like this, or that comics are only for the "kids who don't like to read," I feel they're buying into a common myth: that reluctant readers are the only ones who can benefit from comics. While it's true that comics and graphic novels do work well with reluctant readers, that's precisely because they work well with nearly all readers. Rather than relegated to only the most struggling students, comics can be useful - even invaluable - for elementary all the way up to College Preparatory or even Advanced Placement classes, offering up countless opportunities for teachers and administrators to better engage their students.

For my part, I use comics with all my students who vary in gender, age, and academic performance - from reluctant to engaged and everything in between. Of course, curation is key here. Should you decided to take on the challenge and joy of teaching with comics in your classroom, it is important to understand what titles you have to choose from and the complexity level of these texts - particularly if you are not familiar with them - as some of them are every bit as complex as their chapter-based counterparts. For example, while I'd avoid handing a difficult book like Maus or Persepolis to a student who struggles with reading, I would also be hesitant to hand an elementary-level Smile to an 11th or 12th grade honors or college prep group.

See, that's the rub! With the diverse range of comics available today, it's hard to know exactly what works best for your students - especially if you're new to comics. To help, I have taken the liberty of listing some great examples below, along with a few of the themes that the texts take on to help you decide how to work them into your curriculum:

Elementary/Middle School Level:

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel

The Eternal Smile or American Born Chinese by Gene Yang

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis

Astronaut Academy (Series) by Dave Roman

The Human Body Theatre by Maris Wicks

by Svetlana Chmakova

by Noelle Stevenson

High School Level:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Superman: American Alien by Max Landis

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

The texts above are just a start. If you decide to start with your struggling readers by passing some comics into their hands, just keep in mind that this is where you should be beginning, not ending, your intervention. When you are comfortable with their effectiveness and your ability to implement them successfully, you can take the next step and bring these texts to your other, higher achieving students!

It may take some time but, in my experience, it usually does not take long to discover those books that will make your reading-loving students eager to explore and be challenged by new types of texts, topics, and content.

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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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I have been doing this whole "teaching with comics" thing for nearly 15 years and I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with teachers all over the country. During panels and workshops, I find that I often hear (or overhear) a specific remark: "I love these books.

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The work of 213,284 kids was analyzed. These are the writing and critical-thinking skills that stumped students. - The Washington Post

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The work of 213,284 kids was analyzed. These are the writing and critical-thinking skills that stumped students. - The Washington Post

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It's often said that young people today don't know how to write, or, at least cannot write as well as their parents' generation did. (Not that their parents were great writers, either). So how bad is the problem?

Pretty darn bad, and in specific ways that have now been evaluated by the people behind NoRedInk, a Web-based platform that attempts to help students in sixth through 12th grade improve their writing and critical-thinking skills through an adaptive, Internet-based curriculum. The material, including an evidence-based argument program, challenges students on a number of different skills, such as making logical deductions from a set of facts and recognizing vague language.

NoRedInk was started about five years ago by Jeff Scheur, a National Board Certified Teacher who taught - and graded high school English papers - for eight years, then decided to find a way to help students beyond his own classroom. There are both free and paid versions of the platform, which he said is used in about half of the school districts in the country.

Scheur said in an interview that the company decided recently to try to drill down on seven proficiency areas in which students get in trouble when it comes to writing and thinking critically about written material. From the more than 3 billion questions that students have so far answered on NoRedInk, the company analyzed questions answered by 213,284 students (see the demographic breakdown below) in sixth through 12th grade across all 50 states. The proficiency areas were:

* Evaluating Undeveloped and Undefendable Claims - Can students evaluate when claims are undefendable or too obvious to be debated?
* Identifying Arguments That Don't Progress - Can students identify when arguments fail to advance?
* Making Logical Deductions - Can students make logical deductions based on evidence?
* Distinguishing Between Claims, Evidence, & Reasoning - Can students distinguish between claims, evidence, and reasoning?
* Analyzing Evidence - Can students tell when evidence is irrelevant, not credible, or not factual?
* Recognizing Vague Language - Can students detect and strip away vague or ambiguous language in arguments?
* Revising Wordiness - Can students detect and eliminate wordy, redundant, or unnecessary language from arguments?

The percentages of students who can do these specific things are low, as you can see below from the analysis.

"The reason why it is happening is prima facie," Scheur said. "Kids don't get strong modeling and they don't get sufficient practice. They need strong modeling. They need practice."

Large class sizes can make it difficult for teachers to assign a lot of long writing projects.

"I have a teacher in Michigan [who uses NoRedInk] with 38 students," he said. "Imagine having five classes of 38. What approach do you take to grading those papers and giving feedback, and then asking for revisions and then evaluating those revisions? Teachers rush through and give cursory feedback, or they take their time to give real feedback, but that naturally limits the number of such assignments they can give over the year."

And, of course a lot of writing instruction in recent years has been geared toward getting students to perform well on standardized tests that either don't require real writing or call for essays of several paragraphs.

Another issue, Scheur said, is where students get their information. Many get it from the Internet, without evaluating for accuracy.

"Democracy depends on an informed citizenry and the mutual commitment to reasoned rational argument," he said. "Those are the underpinnings of a system where we make decisions together. So the fact that students are having trouble with this is concerning."

Here's the breakdown of the students and results in the NoRedInk analysis:

This comes from NoRedInk's analysis:

* EVALUATING UNDEVELOPED AND UNDEFENDABLE CLAIMS
Modern political discourse has veered away from substantive discussion. Some claims are either entirely self-evident or are patently untrue and have no viable evidence to support them, making them inappropriate for substantive debate. Our curriculum presents students with claims that are worthy of debate, completely undefendable, and entirely self-evident to assess if they can differentiate between them.

Even when students have a 33% chance of guessing correctly, about half of them (47%) can't identify when claims "aren't defendable" enough for substantive debate.
-0-0- *IDENTIFYING ARGUMENTS THAT DON'T PROGRESS
Another challenge in modern political discourse is the Twitterization of our culture: making clickbait or 140-character arguments and failing to advance them.

Candidates frequently repeat themselves to drive home a point, rather than digging into the actual subject matter.

NoRedInk tests this skill by giving students claims that are followed by mere restatements and seeing whether they can identify the problem.

We also give students a series of statements to see if they can drag in the ones that actually advance the argument.

Fewer than half of students (47%) can identify when the follow-on statement is a mere repackaging of the original claim, even in a multiple-choice format.

*MAKING LOGICAL DEDUCTIONS
We also assess whether students can tell when arguments leap to unjustified conclusions based on the evidence.

Students do only 2% better than a coin flip (52%) when asked whether a piece of reasoning logically connects claims and evidence.
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*DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN CLAIMS, EVIDENCE AND REASONING
To construct logical, persuasive arguments, students need to be able to understand the separate roles of claims, evidence, and reasoning. NoRedInk creates persuasive arguments on interesting topics and measures whether students can identify the different parts of the argument.

Again, less than half of students (49%) were able to complete the task successfully.
-0-0- *ANALYZING EVIDENCE
Among the biggest challenges of modern political discourse is the lack of evidence to defend one's claims. Often, the "evidence" provided is not credible, not factual, or not relevant. NoRedInk's curriculum assesses students on each of these dimensions.

Only about half of students (54%) can tell that these arguments are weak.
NOT CREDIBLE

Only 42% of students can tell that these arguments are weak.

Only about half (54%) of students can tell that these arguments are weak.

-0-0- *RECOGNIZING VAGUE LANGUAGE
When individuals hide behind vague language, they can obscure the truth or present misleading information.

And here is an example of how our curriculum trains students to flag ambiguity:

Unfortunately, only 35% of students are able to detect vague or ambiguous language that's used in arguments like this.
-0-0- REVISING WORDINESS
In order for students to advocate for themselves, it's important that they be able to articulate their ideas clearly and crispy, shedding
words that distract and detract from their arguments.

The last skill area that NoRedInk assessed is students' ability to eliminate wordy, redundant, or irrelevant language that has the potential to weaken their arguments.

We found that only 33% of students are able to detect and remove language that qualifies as "wordy," "redundant," or "irrelevant."
(Update: removing extraneous words that were not part of the slide presentation)

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Analysis | The work of 213,284 kids was analyzed. These are the writing and critical-thinking skills that stumped students.

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It's often said that young people today don't know how to write, or, at least cannot write as well as their parents' generation did. (Not that their parents were great writers, either). So how bad is the problem?

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

1. Students are more motivated academically when they have a positive relationship with their teacher.

2. Choice is a powerful motivator in most educational contexts.

3. For complex tasks that require creativity and persistence, extrinsic rewards and consequences actually hamper motivation.

4. To stay motivated to persist at any task, students must believe they can improve in that task.

5. Students are motivated to learn things that have relevance to their lives.

To dig deeper into this research, you'll find a link at the end of this post to a collection of resources that explore current studies on each of the above findings.

Stopping the Buck: The Teacher's Role in Student Motivation

The research on motivation wasn't hard to find; it seems as if any teacher with an Internet connection and an hour or two should be able to learn everything they need to know about the topic.

So where's the disconnect? If we as a collective group of educators already know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? When I talk with teachers about the problem, I don't hear much about the research.

Instead, we blame technology: "Students are so distracted by their phones."

Or we blame the parents: "Parents just don't want to be bothered" or "They don't want their kids to fail/experience setbacks/take responsibility."

Or we make sweeping generalizations: "Kids today just aren't like they used to be. They act so entitled."

Are we passing the buck? Maybe. It's certainly easier to blame outside forces than it is to make big changes in the way we teach. Unfortunately, even if ALL of the above statements are true, we can't do anything about those things. The only piece we really have control over is what goes on in our own classrooms.

So let's look at our own practice. When we set aside all the outside factors and just focus in on our time with students, how are we doing? How much alignment is there between our own instructional moves and the research on student motivation?

I have put together a list of five questions we can ask ourselves to see if we really are doing everything we could to boost student motivation. To keep me from getting too preachy, I'll do the exercise with you, reflecting on the years when I was a classroom teacher with middle school students.

Okay, let's go.

The Questions

1. How is your relationship with your students, really?

Multiple studies have shown a significant connection between student motivation and the quality of the teacher-student relationship. A good teacher-student relationship provides students with a sense of stability and safety, which sets the stage for more academic risk-taking. So what kind of relationship do you have with your least motivated students? How well do you really know them? Do you have conversations with them about the things they care about? Or have you more or less given up on them?

My response:
At first, I'm thinking I did pretty well in this area. I taught English language arts and my students kept journals, so I got to know them well. But when I think about my less-motivated kids, I'm not so sure I can say the same. The connection I had to Andre, one of my seventh-graders, consisted entirely of me getting him to make up missed work. It was all we talked about: the missing work, why he wasn't turning it in, how important this stuff was for his future. When Andre saw me coming, he probably just saw a looming cloud of nag. We never really talked about the stuff that mattered to him.

How we can do better:
Just becoming more aware of the value of relationships is the most important step. From there, consider one of these resources:

Jim Sturtevant's book, You've Gotta Connect, is full of specific strategies for building stronger bonds with your students. (Episode 9)

Smokey and Elaine Daniels' The Best-Kept Teaching Secret describes how dialogue journals can help us get to know our students better personally and academically.

If you want something faster, take a look at the 2 x 10 strategy, shared by Angela Watson, which has teachers spend two minutes a day for ten days casually chatting with underperforming students.

Remember that relationships between students matter, too. A well-chosen classroom icebreaker can begin building a sense of community in your room.

2. How much choice do your students actually have?

Study after study points to choice as a major factor in motivation. Most of us have probably heard this, but we may not have fully embraced it. After all, providing choice can be messy, with students completing different tasks at different rates, making it hard to be consistent with grading. It can also mean a lot more prep work: If you're going to give students three different options for an assignment, that means you have to prepare all three options ahead of time. Or do you? Isn't that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it's much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren't constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.

My response:
I was pretty good about letting students choose topics for writing assignments, but I also required a lot of seat work as well. I wanted students to do their work at about the same pace, and I knew next to nothing about differentiation. Now I'm thinking about Matt, another one of my unmotivated seventh graders, who was incredibly smart. He sat way low in his chair in the back of the Gifted & Talented language arts class he'd been assigned to, way cooler than all the others, and he gave minimal effort. I used the same nagging approach I'd used with Andre, with minimal success. Now that I know more about differentiation and choice, I realize I could have had a conversation with Matt about letting him work ahead on some things. I could have allowed him, and his classmates, more input on the larger assignments I gave them. If I had given Matt a more active role in his own learning, he might have been more engaged.

How we can do better:
There are lots of ways you can allow more choice in your classroom without having to completely overhaul your way of doing things. Even adding a small amount of choice to what students already have is an improvement. Consider letting them choose:

seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats?

work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own.

intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option.

output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing.

timing: If students don't absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?

3. Are you relying heavily on carrots and sticks...or Jolly Ranchers?

Many, many teachers count on rewards ("carrots") and punishments ("sticks") to motivate students. And those who study motivation tell us that extrinsic reinforcement can be motivating if the task is something easy: If you're trying to get students to clean up the classroom quickly, for example, offering class points toward a party can get them to speed up. But for tasks that require creativity and complex thought, extrinsic rewards actually reduce motivation. In your class, how much of your motivational approach is extrinsic? How often do you use grades, treats, privileges or punishments to prod students into doing something they don't really want to do, something they have no real interest in? If extrinsic reinforcement is your primary approach, you may actually be killing off any natural motivation students might have otherwise had.

My response:
I score myself pretty low here. As a teacher, my classroom management was a mess until I learned how to control students with names on the board, extra credit, whole-class rewards for good behavior, and the ever-reliable bag of Jolly Ranchers. I did those things because they worked. But there's a difference between getting kids to do what you want and truly, deeply motivating them.

How we can do better:
Try to catch yourself the next time you're about to tie a challenging activity to a reward or consequence. When introducing a task, try focusing on its inherent interest or value, or how much students are going to learn, rather than on a separate reward or grade. Consider the difference in these two statements:

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit.

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two-those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.

If you have a tendency to go for the first option, you are going for the easy win, the extrinsic reinforcement. If you find that this doesn't do much to motivate your underperforming students, try moving more toward the second option and see if anything changes.

4. Do your words contribute to a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?

What could be wrong with saying "You're so smart"? It's nice, right? It boosts their confidence, no? Well, it's more complicated than that. Students are motivated to persist at a challenging task when they believe they can get better at it. That requires them to have a growth mindset, a belief that their intelligence and abilities can be developed with effort. Teachers can have an impact on this mindset with the things we say to students. So when we say "You're so smart," "You have natural math ability," or "You're a great writer," we are telling the student it's their natural ability that got them where they are. We're contributing to a fixed mindset. And that's not motivating.

My response:
When I was in the classroom, I knew nothing about growth mindset. I thought kids would feel great if I told them they were smart or talented. I can remember a conversation with Janae, a student who commanded the attention of her peers with ease but got into trouble a lot and did poorly in school. I remember pulling her aside and telling her that I thought she had strong leadership qualities, and that if she could just get her grades up, she had a bright future ahead of her. Yeah, that didn't work. If I wanted her to "get her grades up," I would have been better off noticing a well-constructed sentence or complimenting the way she got her group back on track during a cooperative learning activity, showing her exactly what kind of choices she should keep making to be successful.
How we can do better:

Instead of praising something innate and fixed about a student, focus on specific things students can actually control. So instead of telling a student she's a great student, notice the level of detail in her lab report. Marvel at the level of difficulty she was able to handle on that challenging math problem. Point out how much preparation she must have done for the presentation she gave. It's faster and easier to just tell them they're awesome, but taking the time to be specific and focus on effort will pay much larger dividends.

When you have constructive feedback to give, follow the same principle and make it specific. Rather than telling a student she "needs to work harder" on her assignments, tell her what to work on. Is neatness an issue? Does she need to read the questions more slowly? Is she doing the advanced math right, but messing up with the basic addition and subtraction? If a student knows what to work on, she will be far more motivated to do that work.

5. What are you doing to make your content relevant to students' lives?

I think this is another one of those principles that's been around for so long, we assume we're doing it more than we actually are. But showing students how the content relates to their lives really does make a difference. When students believe they are doing something authentic, something that will improve their lives or have some kind of impact, they are naturally motivated. So how are you doing in this area? Do you regularly provide opportunities for students to connect what they're learning to the world they currently live in?

My response:
I got pretty lazy about this. Just like crafting a good opening and closing for each day's learning, I often cut corners on making my material relevant. I was often much more focused on getting through content and tasks than I was on making it meaningful. I was pretty good about giving writing assignments on topics that mattered to them, but I don't know how clearly I connected what they were doing to how it could help them. For example, with something like argumentative writing-I was probably more focused on "this is how you get a good grade on this" rather than on "this is how you change someone's mind."
How we can do better:

Plan it, then say it: Making material more relevant can be as simple as occasionally stopping an activity to explain its relevance. When students are studying the Lincoln-Douglas debates, show parallels with the current presidential election. When you're studying bacteria, talk about all the places bacteria hang out in students' daily lives. Making these kinds of connections is a natural practice for many teachers, but if you're like me, you might forget to add these connections into a lesson. So just add them into your lesson plan; literally write down a few connections you plan to make some time during a class period, then check your plans before class is over to make sure you did it.

More reflection: Even asking students to think about how course material connects to their lives can make a difference. One study (see the Motivation Matters document in the collection) had teachers ask students to write weekly reflections on how the material they were learning related to their lives; lower-performing students in these classes did better compared to those where teachers didn't use this intervention. Researchers referred to these as "value interventions."

Design tasks that end with a public product: In one of the videos in the collection below, educator Kathleen Cushman describes the highly engaging work students do at High Tech High, a school whose curriculum focuses on project-based learning. Student projects have an authentic, public end product-a video, a live presentation, a community service project, a website-something that will ultimately be consumed by people outside of their own classroom. This naturally motivates students to work harder on a task. So look at your curriculum and see if you can find more ways to build assignments around real, public products.

Where to Go from Here

The purpose of this exercise is not to beat ourselves up. It's just a way of deeply diagnosing a problem most teachers struggle with. There's a very good chance that the technology, the parents, or the entitlement are playing a role in what we perceive to be reduced student motivation. But there's a very good chance that our instructional decisions play a role as well.

So pick one area and start there. Make a small adjustment this week and see what happens. Share in the comments where you think you could improve, then come back and tell us what changes made a difference. To solve a problem as complicated as student motivation, there is no magic bullet; instead we'll need a set of tools that we blend and refine over time. This is a process that will definitely be slower and more frustrating than a single, easy solution, but we're professionals. This is our craft. We can do this. ♦

Read the Research on BloomBoard

I have collected seven excellent resources relating to the topic of student motivation. Instead of housing them here, I have been invited to gather them into a collection on BloomBoard, a new site where educators curate collections of resources then have them reviewed by the BloomBoard team before they are made available to the public. To view them, you'll need to open a free account, which takes about ten seconds. Then you'll have access to BloomBoard's growing collection of free, high-quality resources.

Throughout the month of February, over 20 education bloggers will be sharing Collections of learning resources on their blogs. Readers can check back into the BloomBoard Blog every Monday in February for the week's schedule of bloggers and follow along daily on BloomBoard's Facebook and Twitter.

Go check out my collection called Beyond Carrots and Sticks: How Teachers Can Really Motivate Students.

The next blogger in the series is Gabrielle from Teaching Special Thinkers. Gabrielle is a K-2 teacher who serves students with autism and wants to empower others who do the same. On her site, she creates engaging resources that can meet the needs of different learning styles and ability levels and save teachers time.

Keep in touch.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students

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Listen to this post as a podcast: When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable.