Exploring Metacognition

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Exploring Metacognition

• Showing Kids How Smart
• Readers Think

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Question to Ponder

• What are the specific skills or
• knowledge that students need in order
• to read effectively?

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Thinking Strategies

• Connecting
• Inferring
• Summarizing
• Synthesizing
• Analyzing

• Predicting
• Visualizing
• Questioning
• Critiquing
• Notice and analyze the
• authors craft
• From Subjects Matter by Daniels and Zemelman

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Thinking Strategies Are Concrete Tools for
Understanding

• To help students see how these tools are used,
  the teacher must think aloud what is going on in
  his mind as he reads.

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Model Think Alouds

• If teachers can begin to slow down their thinking
  and notice what they do as expert readers of
  their content, they will know how to design
  effective strategy instruction.

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Model steps and thoughts of expert reader.

• Students need to SEE what happens in the minds of
  proficient readers through modeling and then
  gradually apply the strategies to their own
  reading and problem solving.

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What is a Think Aloud?

• Think Alouds help students understand the kind of
  thinking that is required by a specific task.
• The teacher verbalizes her thoughts as she reads
  or processes information.
• The student sees how the teacher attempts to
  construct meaning with unfamiliar vocabulary,
  making predictions, visualizing, connecting to
  what they know, verbalizing what confuses them,
  and uses fix-up strategies.

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The Process

• Explain that reading is an ACTIVE process that
  involves thinking and making sense of text.
• Select a passage to read and develop questions to
  ask yourself about difficult points or unfamiliar
  vocabulary.
• While students read the passage silently, read it
  aloud. As you read, verbalize your thoughts, the
  questions you develop, and process you use to
  solve comprehension problems.

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Process continued

• It is helpful to change your voice when you are
  reading and when thinking aloud so students can
  see there is a difference.
• Model coping strategies ask questions, make
  predictions, describe what you see, connect to
  what you already know, determine what is
  important, verbalize obstacles and what fix-up
  strategies you will use.
• After reading, have students list cues and
  strategies used and identify other situations
  where they could use these same strategies.

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Process continued

• Reinforce think alouds with follow up lessons.
  The goal is to gradually release the
  responsibility for use of this strategy to the
  student.
• Have students work with partners to practice
  think alouds when reading a short text.
• Periodically revisit this strategy.

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Read the following passage

• Read it to yourself slowly.
• Think about your thinking as you read.
• Jot down your thoughts, questions, words that
  gave you pause, processes you used to solve
  comprehension problems
• Think about predictions, visual images, or
  connections to your life.

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Salvador with eyes the color of caterpillar,
Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth,
Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember,
is a boy who is no ones friend, runs along
somewhere in that vague direction where homes are
the color of bad weather, lives behind a raw wood
doorway, shakes the sleepy brothers awake, ties
their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds
them milk, corn flakes from a tin cup in the dim
dark of the morning.
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Salvador, late or early, sooner or later arrives
with the string of younger brothers ready. Helps
his mama, who is busy with the business of the
baby. Tugs the arms of Cecilio, Arturito, makes
them hurry, because today, like yesterday,
Arturito has dropped the cigar box of crayons,
has let go the hundred little fingers of red,
green, yellow, blue, and nub of black sticks that
tumble and spill over and beyond the asphalt
puddles until the crossing-guard lady holds back
the blur of traffic for Salvador to collect them
again.
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Salvador inside that wrinkled shirt, inside the
throat that must clear itself and apologize each
time it speaks, inside that forty-pound body of
boy with its geography of scars, its history of
hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags, in
what part of the eyes, in what part of the heart,
in that cage of the chest where something throbs
with both fists and knows only what Salvador
knows, inside that body too small to contain the
hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar
of grief, is a boy like any other disappearing
out the door, beside the school yard gate, where
he has told his brothers they must wait.
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Collect the hands of Cecilio and Arturito,
scuttles off dodging the many school yard colors,
the elbows and wrists crisscrossing, the several
shoes running. Grows small and smaller to the
eye, dissolves into the bright horizon, flutters
in the air before disappearing like a memory of
kites. -Sandra Cisneros From Woman
Hollering Creek and other stories
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Your thought process

• As an expert reader, your comprehension skills
  have become second nature.
• Were you able to S L O W down your thought
  process enough to determine how you make meaning?
• Examine the chart on the next page to determine
  what processes you used to make meaning.

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Assessing Use of Think-Aloud Strategy
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Think Aloud Example

• Zacks Lie
• (Click to view)

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Reflect to yourself

• What strategies were modeled?
• Why would those strategies be used when
  introducing a new book?
• When would you use the strategies that were
  modeled in the think aloud?

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Thinking Through the Process

• Go to
• (Click to View)

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Your turn

• To begin to feel comfortable with the process,
  try a think aloud with your students in the next
  few days.

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Assignment Model a Think Aloud

• When the teachers thinks aloud all she is
  noticing and doing as
• she reads, the students finally see all the
  steps and motions
• of an expert reader.
• 1. Choose a short section of text. It ought to
  be challenging and present some difficulty to
  most of your readers. What text would interest
  the student you have chosen for the course? What
  reading is at the appropriate level?
• 2. Decide on a few strategies to highlight.
  Brainstorm why and how these strategies will be
  helpful. What strategy(s) would support the needs
  of your student?

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Model a Think Aloud Assignment

• 3. State your purposes. Ask students to pay
  attention to the strategies used so they can
  explain what, why, how, and when you used them.
• 4. Read the text aloud to students and
  think-aloud as you do so.
• 5. Have students underline the words or phrases
  that helped you use a strategy.

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Model a Think Aloud

• 6. List the cues and strategies used.
• 7. Identify other situations (real world and
  reading situations) in which they could use these
  same strategies.
• 8. Reinforce the think aloud with follow-up
  lessons.

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Reflection of Assignment

• Reflection Please submit a summary of the first
  seven steps of your think aloud
• Reflection How can think alouds help my
  students better understand what they read? Write
  a reflection of the process that is a minimum of
  two fully developed paragraphs that contain no
  less than four sentences each.
• Submit summary and reflection via Groupwise
  attachment.