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By Doug Buehl
What were you thinking?
What were you thinking . . . when you said . . . when you purchased . . . when you decided . . . when you chose . . . when you dated . . . when you planned . . . when you found yourself . . . ?
What were you thinking? How many times has that particular phrase slipped into our daily conversations? Usually we ask it when we can’t believe what someone has done, or is contemplating. But just as frequently, “what were you thinking” is posed as a rhetorical question, the implication being that maybe you weren’t thinking at all.
Thinking, of course, occurs out of sight, the internal result of “those wheels turning” in our minds. We have to infer what other people are thinking, by observing what we can see: their actions. We rarely have the opportunity to witness it live, unfolding in public before us. Unless, of course, someone tells us what he or she is thinking, while actually doing it.
“What were you thinking?” is the preeminent question that governs the learning that we, as teachers, support in our classrooms. But exactly how this learning is to be realized is a mystery to many of our students. Rather than being able to “listen in” on the thinking of successful learners, many students instead are on their own for figuring out what they need to do to effectively perform classroom tasks. Their struggles and failures may lead many of them to conclude that they lack the ability to learn the material. If students were regularly supplied with strong “mental models” for thinking as they read and learn across the curriculum, they could gradually emulate effective thinking themselves. Therefore, making thinking public must assume a central role in classroom learning.
Researchers such as the WestEd network refer to these public discussions of thinking as “metacognitive conversations” (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999). Metacognition is a state of awareness about one’s thinking; a person who is metacognitive not only tracks what she is thinking, but also monitors how she comes up with her thoughts and why she decides which reading strategies will work best to achieve comprehension. Metacognitive learners are in personal control of their learning.
The Strategy
Donna Ogle, past president of the International Reading Association, observed at an IRA conference in 2004 that although effective instructional strategies are becoming more commonplace in classrooms, students do not necessarily “own” them. Ogle’s concerns were that students were not privy to the “insider thinking” that made a particular strategy an effective method for organizing learning in a classroom. As a result, students were not necessarily becoming more independent learners; instead, they depended on constant guidance from teachers in order to effectively learn course content. What is often missing is the metacognitive conversation.
Step 1: Begin by taking frequent opportunities to model your thinking about a host of texts related to your curriculum. Students do have daily access to a person accomplished in engaging in successful thinking within your academic discipline – you, the teacher. Short texts, or excerpts from a text students will continue reading, including the textbook, make excellent sources for modeling your thinking.
These “think-alouds” need to underscore that the brain of an effective learner is constantly abuzz with mental activity, that thinking is not accidental but highly purposeful, and that your thinking may be continually open to revision and reinterpretation. In addition, proficient readers sometimes encounter difficult texts, and like the students in your classroom, do not immediately “get it.” But proficient readers know what kinds of thinking to try to make sure that they can achieve a satisfactory level of comprehension.
The WestEd researchers term this mentoring dynamic as a “reading apprenticeship.” An apprentice works with a skilled veteran to learn a trade. In the classroom, the teacher is the skilled veteran, the individual who can model how an “insider” within an academic discipline thinks and how this thinking guides effective behavior.
Step 2: Extend the metacognitive conversation by including your students in the dialogue about thinking. Your objective is ongoing classroom talk about not only what students are thinking but also how they arrived at their thoughts. When students provide a response in your classroom, they should immediately expect a follow-up: “Talk about how you figured that out.” “Tell us more about your thinking.”
These text-based discussions ask students to notice and then reconstruct their thinking as they read. Students who fairly rapidly achieved a comprehension are not always cognizant of what it was that they did that served them well. Asking them to articulate their thinking re-immerses them in their thought processes, which may lead them to discover further ideas about a text.
This step is especially critical for students who struggle with learning. Less proficient readers tend to observe people around them “getting it” on a daily basis, without truly knowing what they could do differently during reading that would help them achieve a better understanding. As a result, many of them may question their intelligence and adopt a fatalistic approach to reading: “I probably won’t be able to understand it, no matter what I try.”
Metacognitive conversations involve all students in the inside game of learning: the how and why as well as the what. The more students are able to “eavesdrop” on the mental deliberations of others, and begin to contribute their own versions of possible ways to think about a text, the more comfortable all students will become with tracking and adjusting their thinking during learning.
Step 3: Schedule regular debriefing sessions during classroom lessons that prompt metacognitive conversations. Students need to recognize how the structure of a lesson enhanced their learning. Previous Reading Room columns have emphasized instruction that cues proficient reader strategies such as: making connections to background knowledge, posing questions to oneself and of the author while reading, searching for implicit meanings in a text by making inferences, creating sensory images that are elicited by the author’s language, determining what is most important in an author’s message from the background information, and constructing a personal synthesis of a text that summarizes one’s comprehension.
Debriefing sessions focus discussion on how the classroom activities and tasks engaged learners in the above proficient reader modes of thinking. As a middle school teacher once commented during a professional workshop: “That strategy worked so well the kids didn’t know what hit them.” The teacher in the case was highly satisfied with the learning that took place when she organized the instruction around certain classroom strategies. But if “the kids do not know what hit them,” then they are not positioned to begin to assume these types of thinking behaviors independently. Without a debriefing session, the students will leave the classroom still unduly dependent on a well-organized lesson to guide their learning. If students are to transition into increasingly independent learning, they need to regularly talk about their own thinking during the course of an effective lesson.
Step 4: The metacognitive conversation phases described above all can be categorized as “external” conversations: they take place in public, they are social in that multiple learners are included in the discourse, and students are not compelled to infer the direction of thought that led other students to their interpretations and conclusions.
Ultimately, these metacognitive conversations need to become self-programmed as “internal” conversations – the mental dialogues we have with ourselves that shape our thinking as we read and learn. The WestEd researchers recommend the analogy of the “metacognitive bus” as one means of portraying this mental trait to students:
Imagine you are sitting on a seat in the middle of bus with a book in your hands. You are trying to read, but you are also continuously distracted. At times you are looking out the window; at other times you watch as people board or depart. At times what you are reading makes sense, and at other times your eyes are just looking at the words as you daydream about something else.
Now imagine your “metacognitive” self occupying the bus seat right behind you. As you’ve been reading and losing your train of thought, you realize that your metacognitive self has been sitting behind you and noticing everything. Nothing has escaped your metacognitive self: every time your attention has wandered, every time you have just read words and not made sense, every time your reading has not been proceeding effectively, your metacognitive self pokes you in the back and whispers in your ear what you should do instead. You realize that if your metacognitive self was not there, if the seat behind you was empty, you would probably never get much from any efforts to read your book. You need to be in both seats to make reading work.
A variety of methods can be used with students to prompt the “internal” metacognitive conversation. Asking students to talk about their thinking in journal entries or learning logs is a popular strategy. Double-entry diaries, a form of two-column notes, is another method frequently used in classrooms to encourage the internal metacognitive conversation.
Advantages
Metacognitive conversations are a natural fit for classroom discussions about learning. These critical discussions need to assume a permanent and organic role in classroom routines.
Further Resources:
Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C. & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Doug Buehl, teacher, Madison East High School
Wisconsin State Reading Association.
Posted October 2, 2006