Here are two simple examples of modeling reading from a history course:
Example 1: Reading Selectively
Bottleneck: Students in history courses often have the misconception that they are supposed to remember everything that they read. This is not only impossible, but, even it were doable, it would be of little help, when students were asked to perform complex tasks.
Mental operations: Students need to read selectively, deciding which parts of the text are worth remembering, and which can be used to get a general idea about the period and then forgotten
Modeling Process:
Students were presented with a paragraph from their readings and then ask to work in groups to decide what they could remember. (This served to them involved in the decision making process at the same time that it emphasized the importance of making decisions about what to remember.)
As Christianity triumphed, its millennialist strand faded. Once an embattled faith sustained by apocalyptic hope, Christianity by the third century enjoyed an increasingly secure position in the Roman world, a shift formalized by Constantine, who after coming to power in 312 not only tolerated but favored the new faith. He made Sunday a public holiday; granted privileges to the Christian clergy; and endowed various church institutions, including the Jerusalem holy places. He also arbitrated theological disputes and in 325 presided at the Council of Nicaea that codified the Church’s fundamental creed.”
After they had worked on deciding what was important, I represented a PowerPoint with the same passage with the importance of each section indicated by its relative size.[The graphics on the passage below are not yet accurate.[
As Christianity triumphed, its millennialist strand faded. Once an embattled faith sustained by apocalyptic hope, Christianity by the third century enjoyed an increasingly secure position in the Roman world, a shift formalized by Constantine, who after coming to power in 312 not only tolerated but favored the new faith. He made Sunday a public holiday; granted privileges to the Christian clergy; and endowed various church institutions, including the Jerusalem holy places. He also arbitrated theological disputes and in 325 presided at the Council of Nicaea that codified the Church’s fundamental creed.”
There was then a general discussion of the criteria upon which I, as a professional historian, made choices about what was worth reading and what was not.
Example 2: Recognizing an Author’s Interpretation of a Phenomena
Bottleneck: Students often do not stop to identify the position that an author is taking on a subject and to recognize what evidence he or she is providing to support that interpretation.
Mental operations: Students need to recognize that the essential operation within the discipline of history is the creation of interpretations and the development of well supported arguments to support them. They need to look for rhetorical which indicate when an author is presenting an interpretation and to distinguish between interpretations and evidence that was used to support them.
Modeling:
Before the formal modeling occurred students were asked on an on-line exercise to consider the two paragraphs below from the course readings and to answer the four questions the follow. This step was taken to involve students in the process and to make clear the differences between the process of reading that many of them brought to the course and the ways of reading that would be successful in it. The part of the exercise also gave me some valuable information about the reading strategies that students had at the beginning of the course.
While Catholic doctrine increasingly moved away from end-time speculation, apocalyptic thinking survived. In his 1970 work. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn focused on the proliferation of millenialism in “the obscure underworld of popular religion” among “the underprivileged, the oppressed, the disoriented, and the unbalanced.” Cohn’s medieval Europe, far removed from the society Henry Adams imagined as united in veneration of the Virgin in vast cathedrals such as Chartres, is a veritable cauldron of hermit messiahs, wandering visionaries, self-taught prophecy interpreters, and doomed social revolutionaries inflamed by apocalyptic expectations. For Cohn, the fearful speculation aroused by the approach of the year 1000 was only one incident in a succession of turbulent mass movements that germinated in a rich loam of popular millennialism.
In reality, as Bernard McGinn and other scholars have made clear in recent years, apocalyptic speculation flourished at all levels of medieval society. Eschatological hope formed part of the ground of Christian belief, and thus of the medieval mentality. Monastic scholars and the most erudite theologians contributed to, and often cited, the vast body of verse prophecies known collectively as the Sibylline oracles, Modeled on Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic Jewish writings, these literary works wove images from Daniel and Revelation into imaginative narratives that were revised periodically as historical circumstances changed. In the later Middle Ages, guilds supported by the urban elites produced open-air dramas or miracle plays (the Oberammergau Passion Play is a surviving example) in which the Last Judgment and other end-time events figured prominently.
Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More, pp.49-50
Questions to answer:
A. Summarize the basic ideas in this passage in one clearly written sentence.
B. In one sentence describe the basic issue that Boyer is dealing with in these paragraphs.
C. In one sentence describe the position Boyer takes on this issue.
D. Give three examples of bits of evidence that Boyer uses to convince his readers that his position is more apt to be true than opposing positions.
Student Efforts:
As expected, many of the students failed to recognize that the author was rejecting the interpretation of Norman Cohn, described in the first paragraph, and supporting that of Bernard McGinn. Misunderstanding the task required of them, they simply treated all of the information presented in both paragraphs as facts to be memorized and often evidence some of the evidence associated with Cohn’s argument as supporting Boyer’s argument.
Modeling how to read this passage:
Having focused the students’ attention on the issue of sorting out evidence and interpretations and having obtained examples that I could share in class of effective and ineffective ways to read the passage, I could in class go through the process that I myself used in reading passages like this. I showed them that the interpretations in the two paragraphs were diametrically opposed to one another (the first seeing apocalyptic movements as being entirely a phenomena of the lower classes and the second arguing that such eschatological concerns were present at all levels of society). I then asked what words in the text suggested which interpretation Boyer supported, there was always at least one student who would point to the words “In reality” that began the second paragraph. I would then show another slide of that paragraph with these words larger than the rest.
In reality, as Bernard McGinn and other scholars have made clear in recent years, apocalyptic speculation flourished at all levels of medieval society. Eschatological hope formed part of the ground of Christian belief, and thus of the medieval mentality. Monastic scholars and the most erudite theologians contributed to, and often cited, the vast body of verse prophecies known collectively as the Sibylline oracles, Modeled on Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic Jewish writings, these literary works wove images from Daniel and Revelation into imaginative narratives that were revised periodically as historical circumstances changed. In the later Middle Ages, guilds supported by the urban elites produced open-air dramas or miracle plays (the Oberammergau Passion Play is a surviving example) in which the Last Judgment and other end-time events figured prominently.
With the groundwork thus prepared, I could then discuss the way that certain words or phrases tell us how to read the rest of the passage and let us know how the author is treating various positions.
