Think Big With Think Alouds, Grades K-5
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Think Big With Think Alouds, Grades K-5

A Three-Step Planning Process That Develops Strategic Readers

Molly K. Ness

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eBook - ePub

Think Big With Think Alouds, Grades K-5

A Three-Step Planning Process That Develops Strategic Readers

Molly K. Ness

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About This Book

A think-aloud process that comes close to bottling magic Grab a pencil, and you are on your way to dynamic lessons using Molly’s three-step planning process.

  • Read Once: Go wild, putting a flurry of sticky notes on spots that strike you
  • Read Twice: Whittle your notes down to the juiciest stopping points
  • Read Three Times: Jot down what you will say so there’s no need to wing it in front of the kids

Molly helps you focus on just five strategies: asking questions, making inferences, synthesizing, understanding the author’s purpose, and monitoring and clarifying. Includes more than 20 ready-made think aloud scripts, activities, templates, and more.

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Publisher
Corwin
Year
2017
ISBN
9781506364940

Chapter 1 The Genius of Think Alouds To Think Big, Readers Need to Hear What “Big” Sounds Like

Image 3
© Rick Harrington Photography
Several years ago, I attended a professional conference. Teachers crammed into a hotel ballroom to see literacy gurus Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher give a keynote on reading comprehension. In the session, Doug made an offhand comment, stating, “We all know that think alouds are highly effective, yet teachers don’t do them or can’t do them.”
I left that conference feeling unsettled, because I knew there was truth in what he said; he had his finger on the pulse of what was going on in classrooms. I had always put great stock in think alouds and as a professor had presumed my graduate students would go out into classrooms and use the strategy seamlessly. When it came to think alouds, I was a lifelong card-carrying member! As a classroom teacher, I had used them during my routine read alouds so that my students were privy to the thinking I did while engaged with a text. As a clinician at a university reading clinic, I consistently saw the multiple ways think alouds benefited readers who struggled to comprehend. As a coach and mentor for novice teachers, I modeled think alouds to showcase their effectiveness.
Upon my return to New York and to my life as a teacher educator, Doug’s statement still nagged at me. Maybe think alouds were the equivalent of the recommendation to eat six servings of fruits and vegetables a day—it’s something we know we should do, but don’t always get to. If it was indeed the case that teachers don’t think aloud, why not? I did what I call “geeking out”—I dove into research, and set up my own yearlong investigation exploring these questions. (Perhaps this bookish tendency explains why celebrity sightings for me include reading researchers, rather than Hollywood stars or famous athletes.) My project, outlined below and described in further detail in subsequent chapters, aimed to address these questions that Doug’s observation had raised:
  • Were there data about the frequency with which teachers think aloud? How likely are teachers to include this strategy in routine classroom instruction?
  • In teacher training and professional development, how well do we prepare teachers to think aloud? Where do teachers struggle to think aloud? Where do teachers succeed?
  • Are there factors that hold teachers back from thinking aloud? Are there other obstacles, besides the lack of instructional time? Do teachers feel too exposed or self-conscious in doing them?
  • Might think alouds be hard to master because they involve making use of complex skills simultaneously? Why have they not caught on?
My research goal was to discover actual implementation of think alouds, with an eye to naming the challenges so as to improve teachers’ ability to think aloud. With current and former students, I formed a research team of early-career teachers. We spent a year focusing entirely on thinking aloud in K–5 classrooms. We read about think alouds in professional books and journals. I modeled think alouds—both effective and intentionally ineffective ones—in my university courses. We watched and critiqued videos of teachers thinking aloud. My participants wrote and implemented multiple think aloud lesson plans. Across the year, teachers grew in their confidence in creating think aloud lessons with logical stopping points, a variety of relevant comprehension strategies, and rich monologues designed to help young readers understand the metacognitive processes of reading.
The spoiler alert here regarding the research findings is that when teachers received meaningful instruction on why, how, and when to think aloud from me, they increased their own self-efficacy in creating well-prepared think alouds. In short, I discovered that it was the careful planning of think alouds that mattered most. This research study is further described in Chapter 6, but summarized in the following table.
Table 1
The lessons learned from the elementary teachers who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected on think aloud lessons are the basis for this book. A year after conducting that project, this book is the result of what I discovered about teachers’ usage. Based on my research—and the lessons I learned from teachers’ think alouds—I developed a step-by-step process for implementing think alouds in K–5. This process is the heart of the book, because it really makes the think aloud strategy far easier to pull off successfully. Most important of all? Think alouds become classroom instruction students like—a lot. Over the years, I have seen the bewildered looks from students suffering from their teachers’ poorly executed think alouds. I’ve observed teachers—with the best of intentions—transform their think alouds into endless monologues more suitable for an off-off-off-Broadway play. But with the strategies outlined in this book, the think aloud becomes an energized, brief instructional burst that involves young readers to the point that they can more easily take on the strategies modeled. With this book, I aim to
  • Explore what a think aloud is and what a think aloud is not
  • Demonstrate the power of thinking aloud in building students’ engagement and reading comprehension
  • Dispel the myths that think alouds are too labor-intensive or time-consuming to occur in routine classroom instruction
  • Delineate my three-step planning process so that think alouds can be easily implemented across grade level and text genre
The title of a 2008 article in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy by Diane Lapp, Douglas Fisher, and Maria Grant about interactive comprehension instruction reads, “You can read this text—I’ll show you how.” In the same vein, the subtitle of this book that was in my head as I wrote it was “You can think aloud—I’ll show you how.” My aim in this book is to make think alouds, a widely recommended instructional strategy, commonplace in today’s classrooms.

What Think Alouds Are

Before I dive headfirst into defining think alouds, I’ll give you a glimpse into the thinking aloud I did with a newspaper article I encountered in USA Today. Just to exemplify the multitude of comprehension strategies that I used with a common, everyday sort of text, I’ve written out the exact thoughts that went through my head as I read. If I were thinking aloud in front of young readers, I’d say these things aloud—hence the name think aloud. A second think aloud from an additional news article can be found in Appendix A.
This think aloud showcases the richness of all of the reading strategies and maneuvers that we—as proficient readers—do every day. In this short article, I stopped eleven times—to visualize, to predict, to make inferences, to clarify, to set a purpose for reading, and to deduce the author’s purpose. My guess is that if you had read this article, and I had flagged particular stopping points, your thought process and internal conversations would be quite similar, because these stopping points are in a sense prompts from the author. Getting good at selecting these stopping points is the crux of what I want to teach you in this book. This experience was not cumbersome for me to plan—it happened in my bathrobe over my morning cup of coffee. With practice, think alouds are low-stress to plan and enjoyable to share with your students, and even have that great combination of high entertainment and high impact on students’ progress as readers.
Image 4
Before too long, your students will be ready to apply the active meaning-making process you model to their own reading. You’ll read about the dice activity shown here in Chapter 7.
© Rick Harrington Photography
Table 2
The passage above demonstrates how applicable think alouds are to the texts that adult readers encounter. But what about the poetry, storybooks, and expository text that we use to teach and that fill our classroom libraries? To give you a quick overview of the ease with which think alouds can be applied to some of the most recognizable children’s texts, I’ve provided very brief think alouds on the next pages.
A think aloud is a teaching strategy in which a proficient reader (in this case, the teacher) verbally reports or models his or her thinking as he or she approaches the text. Think alouds require a reader to stop periodically, to reflect on how a text is being processed and understood, and to relate orally what reading strategies are being employed (Baumann, Jones, & Seifert-Kessell, 1993; Block & Israel, 2004). My favorite definition of a think aloud comes from Baumann, Seifert-Kessell, and Jones (1992), who described it as “the overt, verbal expression of the normally covert mental processes readers engage in when constructing meaning from a text” (p. 144). When I examine this definition, I tease out the following essential subcomponents:
Table 3
Table 4
Table 5
Table 6
Table 7
  • Think alouds are transparent efforts to show the deliberate reading actions by the teacher.
  • Think alouds are a language-based activity, where the teacher talks through the thought processes he or she employs while reading.
  • Think alouds guide the sophisticated process of reading comprehension, making and extracting meaning from a text (Snow, 2002).
  • Think alouds are meant to be quick explanations—not lengthy or convoluted extrapolations—of what is going through the mind of a proficient reader.
To further define think alouds, let’s examine some of their important characteristics.
What Think Alouds Are
  • Think alouds are purposeful.
  • Think alouds are a powerful metacognitive tool.
  • Think alouds build students’ independent abilities to comprehend text.
  • Think alouds are an essential step in learning.
  • Think alouds apply to all classroom contexts and content.
Think alouds are purposeful. An effective think aloud has clear connections between the text and the strategies you’re modeling. A well-planned think aloud begins with a careful perusal of the text, focusing on the opportunities inherent in that text. An effective think aloud logically connects those text elements to comprehension strategies. Mysteries, for example, are logical texts to use for think alouds about generating predictions. High-quality narrative texts for children, like A Bad Case of Stripes (Shannon, 1998), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl, 1964), and Tuck Everlasting (Babbitt, 1975), offer ample opportunities to make inferences and to think through the author’s purpose. Expository texts, like the works of Gail Gibbons and Seymour Simon, are prudent choices to encourage students to generate questions. As explained by Lapp and colleagues in 2008, teachers who provided effective think alouds “allowed the text to guide their selection of the comprehension strategy to be modeled” (p. 380). This is a crucial point; whenever we model a strategy or reading behavior with a think aloud, it has to be wholly natural—that is, completely a strategy that would bubble up authentically in the mind of a reader approaching that particular text.
By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to examine a text and connect its features to the most relevant comprehension strategies and to subsequently generate the think alouds to model those comprehension strategies. When we don’t carefully consider the alignment between our lesson’s objective, a particular text, and the logically related comprehension strategies, we diminish the power of our think alouds.
Think alouds are a powerful metacognitive tool. An essential component of think alouds is metacognition, or awareness of one’s own thinking and learning processes. Readers with metacognitive knowledge have a clear understanding of themselves, the tasks in which they engage, and the thinking strategies to apply to these tasks (Thomas & Barksdale-Ladd, 2000). To conduct think alouds, teachers must be aware of their own reading strategies (Duffy, 2003; Maria & Hathaway, 1993). To facilitate this process, I provide an exercise to encourage you to become metacognitive in Chapter 2.
Think alouds build students’ independent abilities to comprehend text. Think alouds help readers to monitor their comprehension. Through a think aloud, students can see that getting through a text requires stamina and struggle. In order to comprehend a text, purposeful readers interact with text by questioning it, wondering about it, slowing down, and rereading it. Through think alouds, teachers facilitate students’ independ...

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