Entry #4: Abnormal Psychology...an abnormal reading experience!

Three years ago, before I enrolled in the Regis University Master's of Education program, I was briefly enamored with the idea of obtaining a Master's in Counseling and becoming a licensed therapist.  I thought it would be fascinating, and as my minor in my undergraduate coursework is in Psychology, I thought I had all the background information I would ever need to be successful in this field.  I eagerly began my coursework, ready to turn my passion for psychology into a lucrative career as a counselor. 

I soon found I was not cut out to be a counselor.  Not at all.  For many reasons.  One of which was the completely different register of the language in the textbooks.  I am a teacher, familiar with all the pedagogical buzzwords common to my field.  I am not a science-minded kind of gal, and am widely unfamiliar with the scientific language of psychology textbooks.  So I quit.  I decided to obtain my higher education credential through a language I could understand fully.  I thought I would never have to attempt to navigate those overworded, cumbersome science books again.  I was wrong.

Here I sit, in my new degree coursework, being instructed to read and find meaning from a text that is somewhat out of my reach; a text, to quote the syllabus, "at a level at which I should be proficient."  Should be proficient.  Yet not proficient.  This was a no-brainer.  I grabbed my Abnormal Psychology textbook from my previous foray into graduate school and hunkered down with it.  If it was anything like I remembered, I would certainly have to employ some metacognitive strategies and some deep comprehension skills in order to gain meaning from those dauntingly scientific words. 

I was right...it was just as challenging as I remembered.  Maybe even more so, since I had spent so much time away from the field and my schema was shrinking.  As I turned to the chapter entitled "Neurological Dispositions Indicating Abnormal Tendencies", I realized I needed to call for linguistic back-up (my electronic dictionary and thesaurus) just to decipher the meaning of the title!  If the title eluded me, what hope did I have for the rest of the text??

As I sat, reading, with my iPhone dictionary in full use, I soon found that vocabulary was not my only issue with this unfamiliar text.  I also needed to create  non-linguistic representations to understand some of the brain-based terms.  I teach the basic 4 lobes of the human brain to my fifth graders at the beginning of the year as a way to engage them in using their whole mind to assist them in learning new material.  As I read the textbook, I drew a picture of the brain, color-coded the lobes as I had taught my students to do, then used the color associated with each different lobe to highlight the information that referenced the lobe in the text.  This helped me immensely, as I was able to easily navigate the text after color-coding it in a familiar fashion. 

This brings me to another strategy I used:  activating my schema.  I constantly had to draw upon my prior experiences as a science teacher to help me understand the text.  As I mentioned, I have a small background in neurology (fifth grade level neurology, that is!) and it is that upon that information I anchored my new, much more advanced findings.  I might not have had even the faintest hope of comprehending had I not had a wee bit of experience with neurology.

The strategy of note-taking (Marzano, 2004) was another I utilized intensely during my reading experience.  I sticky-noted the heck out of each page, turning the technical scientific terminology into much smaller, more understandable phrases.  I took copious notes, and it was those notes that I referred back to when encountering new information that alluded to previously read information.  This was another way of providing myself with schema.

I had to chuckle when I realized that, in order to muddle my way through this challenging text, I had to rely on comprehension strategies I expect my students to use every day.  Of course I knew, as best practice, these strategies were common to both child and adult readers; that is why I taught them...so my students could also use them when reading as an adult.  However, it always seems so easy to me when I am teaching.  When I ask children to use sticky notes to write down important information, I always think what a simple task it is and wonder why more of them aren't adept.  This is because the text I am asking them to navigate is easy--for ME.  Not necessarily for them.  In fact, this "easy" text might feel, to some, like I felt when reading the abnormal psychology book. 

When I have students reference glossaries and dictionaries to clarify unfamiliar words, it always seems like it should be a walk in the park.  Again, this is because the reading is so simple for me, the new words are easy to decipher.  When I found myself looking up strange scientific words from the psychology book, sometimes I needed to use the dictionary again to look up the words in the definition!!  I'm sure some of my students feel this way also.

This experience was valuable for me as a way to put myself in the shoes of my students.  I found the process of navigating difficult text strenuous; at times I wanted to throw in the towel and stop reading.  It was also a bit humbling to see that I might not be as good a reader as I originally thought.  I started to get a bit down on myself.  It was then that I realized how hard my students work every day...especially my ELLs.  Most passages, to them, feel like an abnormal psychology text.  It will be as strenuous and discouraging to them to read a challenging book as it was for me; I need to truly remember how down on myself I got when realizing how little I understood and be sure to prevent my students from letting their frustration take a toll on their reading attitude.  I can do this by providing even more scaffolding and by using non-linguistic representations as much as possible.  The drawing and color-coding I did during my experience was actually the one that provided me with the most understanding; therefore, I should be careful to provide such experiences for my students.