Chapter 14 page 314
When teachers encourage students to make their thinking visible, they can encourage explicit talk
about strategies. Here is a class discussion with middle-school students that shows students who are highly
competent at discussing the strategies they use to understand and remember text (Gaskins et al., 1997, pp.
59-62). In this discussion, the students exhibit a high degree of metacognitive understanding of strategies.
Transcript Analysis
Teacher: We’ve discussed our content objective – to understand
weather and how it affects our lives. We’ve done some
brainstorming to activate background knowledge, and
now we need to begin to gather information. What is the
first thing we do to begin to our search? What do we
need to know first?
Student 1: We need to know what weather is.
Student 2: We need to know some of the vocabulary that goes with
weather.
Teacher: What is the most efficient way for us to get that
information?...
Student 3: We need to take notes....
Student 4: We could use the note-taking strategy we learned in
social studies.
Teacher: Okay, so we need a method for note taking that will
allow us to focus on the vocabulary words. Can we use
the same strategy you use in social studies? What are
the steps you use for that strategy?
Student 5: Survey to figure out what the book is about and to
decide if it will help us get the information we need
about weather.
Student 3: Read carefully to find out what the main ideas are. We
use the main ides to set purposes for reading.
Teacher: Why do we set purposes for reading?
Student 6: To keep us involved in what we read.
Student 7: To help us sort out what is important in the book, and
what is interesting but not useful. We keep track of the
important information that helps answer our purpose
questions.
Student 5: To record important information in an organized way.
Information to answer each purpose question is written
under the question.
Teacher: After we set purposes for reading, what is next?
Student 7: Reread the material to take the notes.
Student 5: In social studies we write the purpose questions on
notebook paper and take notes under each question.
Teacher: Those are all excellent suggestions for note taking, and
it sounds as if that process works in social studies.
Information in science books is organized a little
differently, and our purpose for reading these easy
science books is a bit different from your purposes for
reading in social studies, so I have designed a note-
taking sheet for taking notes in science class. Let’s take
a look at it. It has three columns – a column for key
Teacher explicitly mentions three
strategies: setting a content
objective, brainstorming, and
gathering information.Students bring up the note-taking
strategy they have learned in
another class—thus transferring
what they have learned from one
class to another.Students can explicitly discuss the
steps they use in the note-taking
strategy. They bring up several
sub-steps that are part of the note-
taking strategy. These substeps
include using main ideas to set
purposes—a goal-setting strategy.
Students can explain several good
reasons to set purposes for reading.