Thoughts on reading chapter one of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. 

This chapter is titled “Show Me, Help Me, Let Me” and it is focused on allowing the reader to become a learner who is responsible in their own learning process. Wilhelm starts off with a list of steps that he directly connects (this is so exciting) to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, he says “the following steps illustrate the process of giving over expertise to students through the learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), that cognitive area where students can do something with the appropriate assistance that they cannot do on their own” (p.21). 

The reading process becomes something that the whole learner can interact with – these strategies transform the reader from a silent, passive, vessel into an active participant in a community of readers. 

I am a firm believer and doer of a classroom that is student centered and not teacher front. I think students can do what we ask so long as we teach them, show them, model for them, interact with them, collaborate with them, and do everything else besides traditionally quiz and test them.  

Here is the list (p.21), in short form, it can be utilized with any (ANY) content area: 

1. Goal Setting: Teacher Identifies a Strategy to Teach 

2. Modeling: Teacher Uses the Strategy; Student Observes 

3. Teacher-Led Collaboration: Teacher Uses the Strategy, Cues Students; Students Help 

4. Student-Led Collaboration: Students Use Strategy Together; Teacher Helps as Needed 

5. Student Independence: Each Student Uses the Strategy on His Own: Teacher Observes and Assesses 

Now, remember how Gee in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” talked about the apprentice in the learning process? Here’s a Gee influenced moment in Wilhelm’s text “Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that good teaching is the inducting and apprenticing of learners into a community of expert practice…. [we need to apprentice] students to use the strategies of expert readers and the strategies of the field reflected in the text’s content” (p.22). 

I feel that utilizing the list above (Vygotsky style) with the apprentice model, students can and do learn much more than the “sage on a stage” lecturing them. Additionally, if those teachers around you look at you with sideways eyes when you say that you want to “empower” students and have them “create” handouts and “make” their own quizzes and writing workshops, here is some more Vygotsky followed by Halliday to show how your practices are founded on theory and well researched models of teaching, “the Vygotskian orientation to teaching and learning posits that teaching and learning consist of the ‘transformation of student participation’ from that of a novice to that of an expert” (p. 23), therefore, there should be no challenge of mindset in the idea and practice of sharing your authority with students.  And Wilhelm also has a great quote from Halliday offset on this page, “we do not experience language in isolation … but always in relation to a scenario, some background or persons and actions and events from which the things that are said derive their meaning” (p. 23).  

Wilhelm includes a great story from his own life about wanting to do some repairs on his house and asking one of his friends to help him and to teach him how to do the repairs by himself in the future. This example is used to demonstrate that the idea of being a lifelong learner and gaining knowledge from others who are experts in their area.  

There is a list that is specific to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development derived from the story of fixing his house on pages 25 to 27, and then a list of the arguments (excuses) you will hear teachers counter these great ideas with on pages 27 through 29.  

This is followed by an excerpt from a letter of a teachers experience at utilizing these strategies to engage her students – and, obviously, her success at doing so. 

So not only does Wilhelm bring theory and research to the text as he shows us how to apply his strategies, he also brings lived experience of teachers and vignettes from students (i.e. qualitative research in the form of case study).  

For more on Vygotsky, here is a link to one of Holbrook Mahn's articles "Vygotsky's Analysis of Children's Meaning Making Process."