Strategies to Work Through An Unknown Text

The great thing about being married to a Biochemist is there are many texts lying around our apartment that make absolutely NO sense to me. The fact that I can even explain to people what my husband does and is studying in class is a success. "When you go to the hospital and you have blood drawn or a test run, he is the guy in the lab that will run the tests." Beyond that, I am clueless. When I asked my husband which text would be "easiest," my husband choose something that was "easy" and would be "straightforward." I even clarified with him, "No, I need to pretend I am an English Language Learner, so it is okay if I struggle through it," (in retrospect I think that was my own way of giving myself an excuse in case I REALLYYYY struggled with what I was reading.)

So, the topic of my reading was: Gram Staining 
As he handed me the text, he said "This is something every microbiologist HAS to know."

Before I began to read, I used the strategies that I use whenever I teach my students, and that is to preview the headings, pictures and captions, so that I could try and get a grasp for what gram staining.

Below, you will see the first caption I read. Right away, I knew that there were going to be questions. But, I see that the text has bolded key ideas, and plenty of visuals to support my understanding.

As I began to read, I had a pretty good understanding of the importance of gram staining after finishing the introduction. I decided I would continue on, and just read through text one time through. However, because of how few words I knew, I began to get distracted. I made sure that I would keep my focus, especially because there were words that did stand out to me, like lipids, (thanks biology teacher for allowing me to always remember that lipids are fats,) and Staphylococcus because who doesn't love food poisoning!

After reading the text one time through, I understood this basic information about gram staining:

• In order to run a test on cultures, they need to sit for 24 hours or less for your best results
• Gram stains that are under decloroized or over declorized will not allow for an accurate read
• Cells that appear purple are positive 
• Cells that appear pink are negative 

Even with this information, I do not feel confident, at all about what gram staining is. So, I turned to trying to understand what some of the bolded words were in the text. Assuming this was like any other textbook, I turned to the back of the book to find the glossary. SURPRISE! There was no glossary. 

Next, I tried to break the words down to see if I could come up with meaning:

• Decoloraization: Removing color of cell? With alcohol or acetone? 
• Primary Stain: Crystal violet (in text clues)
• Mordant: Something that holds something together, like mortar? 
• Crystal Violet-Iodine Complex: ?
• Counterstain: Safranin is the counterstain, but I still don't know what it does. 

Before turning to my teacher and the Internet, I dove further into the images and captions. However, I began to not feel any more confident in my understanding of this process. 

When I Googled gram staining, the definition below came up: 

This helped me a little bit to understand that the gram stain test was used to distinguish between two bacteria groups, and depending on their color after the test is ran, the bacteria was either Gram positive or Gram negative. Now, what in the heck is Gram positive and Gram negative?

At this point, I reviewed with my husband the above information and he said I was on the right track, but then he said, "That book is missing a major component of what gram staining is. So you can either google the procedure for gram staining, or look at this other book." Keep in mind, this book was 1076 pages long, and I was told to only read one small paragraph. 

Within this paragraph I got the definitions for Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria, and the loose ends for what this procedure was used for, and it turns out my knowledge of lipids was good background information to have after all. Would I be able to perform this procedure in a lab? No! But, I feel confident that I have enough understanding to explain to someone else what gram staining is.

Reflection and Strategies Used: 

I am so thankful for going through this process! I have been taught how to support ELL students on how to access a test, but I have never had to work through the steps myself. I think this was also important to realize that if we practice skills enough, students can take them on when they are not in the classroom, and really utilize the strategies on their own. 

As I laid out above, the strategies I used varied depending on what I was trying to figure out when I was reading. I would narrow down that the concept of gram staining became more clear through the following scaffolds: 

• Previewing the text by looking at the pictures and captions 
• Defining bolded words using context clues and breaking the word apart (prefixes, suffixes, rootwords.) 
• Looking for key ideas that I had background information on (lipids, Staphylococcus)
• Identifying the most important who's and whats that stood out to be
• Summarizing  the ideas with a partner (my husband,) to make sure that I was on the right track 
• Using multiple texts/levels of texts to support my learning (google definition and two text

Sources:

Mahon, C. (2000). Textbook of diagnostic microbiology (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Saunders.

Leboffe, M., & Pierce, B. (2011). A photographic atlas for the 3rd edition microbiology laboratory (4th ed.). Englewood, Colo.: Morton Pub.

Gram Staining. (n.d.). Retrieved January 14, 2015, from http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/research_methods/microscopy/gramstain.html