Make students college-ready in high school

To increase college persistence and graduation, we must get better at teaching high school students the on-the-ground skills they will need to be successful in college.

It’s a crisp December afternoon, and Zenobia is inhaling her professor’s lecture on Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” She has spent 30 minutes meticulously taking notes, annotating key points, and preparing her questions. She has strategized what she’ll say when she is called on.

“That’s a compelling argument,” she says, when the floor finally opens to questions. “But can’t we argue that Biff is actually a passive character?”

Right now, Zenobia is in her 12th-grade English class where she and her peers are trying to build a deeper understanding of a novel from a teacher’s presentation. In the bigger picture, however, Zenobia and her classmates are part of an intentional teaching protocol designed to help prepare them for the college lecture hall.

If we’re going to prepare Zenobia and her peers for college lectures, what sort of high school experience does she need?

Swimming lessons

College lectures remain the staple of most universities. Built on the premise of sharing the expertise and scholarship of the professor, lectures often present themselves as sink-or-swim moments: Students must be able to master large chunks of information regardless of the quality of delivery — or fail. This is a far cry from much of the instruction in high school, where we put a premium on encouraging pedagogy, class participation, and engagement to increase student learning.

The result is a sizable gap between what we ask students to do in high school and in college, and it means we’re left with a choice. We can accept that some students will drown in a college lecture, or we can find a way to ensure that everyone stays afloat.

High school should be a time to teach students how to be successful in college.

Approaches to this dilemma have been varied. In the past, many of us hoped high school could instill a love of learning strong enough to buoy students during the toughest coursework. A quick glance at our national college graduation rate — only about one-third of 25- to 29-year-olds earn a bachelor’s degree or higher — reveals the inadequacy of that approach.

Another tack could be to make our high school classes more boring, as Emory professor Mark Bauerlein suggested this past summer. But that move just pushes down to high school the premise that learning is solely for those who already know how to engage when the going gets tough. It ensures that many students will sink even sooner.

Instead, what we need is to give students swimming lessons. The reality is that college success depends on having skills that lead to success. And these skills, like everything else, can be taught.

Core idea: If we can’t assume all students will automatically thrive in college, it’s our job to teach them how to thrive.

Not so long ago, Steve Chiger and his colleagues were confronted with this exact problem. When the team at North Star Academy’s high school interviewed their own alumni, what began as a compliment turned into a troubling refrain: “These teachers don’t teach like you,” students reported. “We don’t do activities. We have lectures.”

In response, Chiger and his colleagues designed a “college lecture” lesson, meant to bridge high school to the rigor and structure of what students would encounter in college. How did they do it? By thinking about the non-negotiable skills students needed by the time they set foot in their first lecture hall.

Learn to take notes

If we think back to Zenobia’s experience in class, we can see that one skill she had to learn was how to take fast, comprehensive notes. This happened in three ways.

First, Zenobia had to become comfortable paraphrasing ideas. Class conversations offered plenty of opportunities for practice: “Zenobia, can you paraphrase what Charles just said?” became a common prompt.

To capture even more complex ideas, the teacher asked Zenobia to paraphrase throughout her annotation process. After every few paragraphs of text, the teacher asked Zenobia and her classmates to jot a fast summary of what they were reading. Since simulated lectures always included difficult prereading, some of the most challenging annotations occurred just before lecture day.

Finally, Zenobia needed a system for recording notes quickly. Her teachers taught mini-lessons on using Notehand, then started asking all students to use a template — the Cornell Notes system — to capture class notes in a consistent and accessible way. Chiger and his team like the Cornell Notes structure because it allows students to skim their notes for key ideas.

During lecture simulations, the teacher asks Zenobia and her classmates to share their notes or to critique the work of a peer. After class, their lecture notes are graded both for accuracy and clarity.

While some people have a mental system that allows them to get away without taking effective notes — excellent long-term memory, pre-existing content expertise, the ability to cram from a textbook — this won’t work for every student. Teaching a framework for note taking ensures that all students, once they’re in the lecture hall, will be prepared to capture a professor’s key points.

Learn to engage professors

Zenobia didn’t just take great notes — she also knew what to do with them. If we know that lectures can often be a one-sided conversation, we need to teach students how to advocate for their own learning when they get the chance.

In the lesson format that Chiger and his peers developed, the “professor” won’t take questions until the end of the talk. In the meantime, students must add questions into their notes so they can refer to them after the lecture.

Students also learn that not all questions are equal. They spend time before and during the lecture developing questions that extend or even challenge a professor’s argument. These questions must be rooted in evidence from either the lecture itself or the texts it is based on.

To help students develop a radar for which questions are most productive, the “professor” will politely dismiss the student’s question if it’s off-topic or demonstrates that they didn’t pay attention. “I believe I covered that in today’s lecture,” the instructor might say. “You’ll be able to find my slides online.”  Conversely, the professor will become energized by a cogent or well-crafted query:  “Now that’s a great question. Well said.”

Students know that they may only have one shot to get called on in a lecture so they have to make it count.

Learn to engage with peers

Ultimately, Zenobia’s success hinged on her ability to synthesize and use the notes she took in class — well beyond any questions she was able to ask in the moment. For students to be truly successful during a lecture, they must learn to be successful after it. They must be able to assemble study groups where they can clarify and review the most difficult content they encounter.

During each lecture simulation, Zenobia and her classmates had time to gather in small groups. In these moments, students do exactly what they might do as undergraduates: They compare notes, clarify misunderstandings, develop questions for the professor, or complete a related problem set.

Rather than intervening on confusion, the teacher’s role is to provide feedback on the students’ review and coach groups to solve their own challenges. By the time they reach college, students’ vision for what a study session looks like must be crystal clear.

Core idea: Teach students to advocate for their own understanding.

The college lecture lesson was a shift for teachers at North Star’s high school, but that structure — combined with a number of other lessons designed to bridge the high school/college instruction gap — has proven to be one of the keys to college readiness. Alumni don’t just report that they see a difference, they demonstrate it by persisting in college at higher rates than in years past.

As Chiger and Zenobia show, the path to college need not be one of blind faith or boredom. Rather, if we want students to become successful undergraduates, we have four years of high school to teach them exactly how.

CITATION: Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2014). IN PRACTICE LEADERSHIP: Make students college-ready in high school. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (5), 72-73.