Website building and reading comprehension

This is the fourth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3). This reflection is on “planning purposefully.”

Have I ever planned at the level of detail outlined in the TFA training materials? No. In fact, I’ve worked on projects far more complicated, expensive, and involving more people than a semester of classroom instruction that have been executed without as much planning as the Teaching as Leadership rubric describes. That said, there are some connections to effective (and ineffective) methods for designing, building, and producing web publications, a process I am familiar with. Moreover, some of the explicit decisions necessary for effectively editing and organizing articles on a web magazine resonate with the necessity for planning explicit demonstrations of reading comprehension skills.

The crucial point of focus in purposeful class planning is of course the “big goal” for student achievement. Hitting a certain level of performance on a standardized test, advancing a certain number of grade levels towards mastery of a subject, etc. Subsequent decisions and resource allocations can be judged based on whether or not they contribute to meeting the goal. In publishing websites or magazines, a clear goal is likewise necessary in order to measure success, make clear decisions about the allocation of time, money and talent, and to design a way to present information to your audience.

In setting out to design the current magazine I work for, Science Progress, the original goal was to fill a gap in the science policy sphere, where there was no publication addressing science from a progressive perspective. That goal presumed a certain audience that included policymakers, academics, journalists, and professionals in the industry and lobbying world. Success shaping the opinions of these audience members is somewhat difficult to measure, but there are useful proxies: web traffic, mentions and references, and policy ideas we publish that are taken up by Congress or the administration.

These questions were crucial because without a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to measure, we might have built an accompanying website that didn’t present content in an accessible manner or move ideas where we could measure their influence. (Indeed, some of these factors changed over time and those problems arose; many we addressed by changing the site.) In fact, many web publications make the mistake of designing a site without starting from the content it will contain—in essence building a house frame without thinking about the interior floor plan. This is just like instructional razzle-dazzle that ignores learning goals.

For instance, a common design planning approach to mocking up a website is to create a page layout and fill areas where text will go with blocks of placeholder “dummy” text—often Latin from a Cicero speech that begins “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” The problem with this is that while it creates a nice page to look at, working with dummy text ignores the primary function of the page: to provide content to your readers. Without real text and images, you can’t know if you have made your columns too wide, left too little space for photos, or if you’ve foregrounded the key ideas presented in your features.

Doing this well does involve a considerable level of detail work that spans editorial and development. Websites (like this blog) run on top of “content management system” software that groups posts or stories into “content objects.” A content object in most instances is an abstract grouping of all the components that make up an article: the headlines, body text, associated images, as well as the little blurbs used to promote the articles around the site and the tags or categories that group it with similar articles in an archive. Working out the appropriate model for these objects seems akin to translating curricular standards into learning objectives: it’s a process that has to happen early in the planning process that patterns a great deal of subsequent work. Hence getting it right is important.

Part of what interests me about the abstract process of planning patterns for website content is that it exposes some of the individuals steps to creating effective content itself. If you can’t write a set of pithy headlines and blurbs that draw readers in or pick a provocative image that evokes the main idea of an article, then it’s likely that the main idea of the piece isn’t clear. When I edit articles, I make explicit decisions about how to present main ideas in the opening paragraphs and then translate that same language into the headlines and summaries of the article that will appear around the site. This is itself a reading comprehension strategy: I am deliberately engineering context clues for readers, labeling and marking keywords and ideas.

Even as I was reading about reading comprehension in the literacy materials included in this exercise, and the potential for demonstrating to students the processes and habits of effective readers, I realized I was underlining these suggestions in the text. This was one of many strategies I could model. But more importantly, the recognition of my own habits is a foundation upon which to plan strategies that develop the student habits I want to see. That is, observing myself will be a way to visualize and map the strategies students should learn and demonstrate when it comes to reading comprehension.

That said, I’m intimidated by the open-ended question of how to choose among instructional strategies. How am I to know that presenting one concept will be more effective as a lecture instead of through a more complicated cooperative learning activity? I suspect experimentation will be necessary, and that means designing lessons in such a way that I can document the effectiveness of one approach, try another, and compare the results. When you’re building a website or sending an email, a lot of this information gathering can be automated, tallying site visitors or click-throughs. But perhaps effective grading and traffic strategies can come close.