Description: Thinking aloud allows others to see what you think by narrating how you think as you read text or discuss an idea. Often students are directed to read a chapter and take notes on important ideas. Knowing how to think about what is read and knowing what such thinking looks like is innate to good readers. Students often do not know what good thinking is, so teachers must constantly model it for them and ask them to model it in order to shape their performance through feedback.
Another important outcome of modeling a think aloud is the realization that reading is complex. When the teacher models, false starts, guesses, confusions, revisions, and questions he or she demonstrates the thinking/reading process.
Step-by-Step
- Use think-alouds to
- demonstrate what students should do and how they should do it
- reflect on what they read
- help them comprehend their reading
- develop their internal reader
- Use think-alouds in a variety of configurations, such as
- teacher to students
- student to teacher (in conferences or class discussion)
- students to students
- author to readers (via interviews with the authors or the teacher’s summary of an author’s remarks taken from an article)
- Express your thinking aloud
- on paper
- in your head
- a small/large group
- on a tape
- Keep in mind that think-aloud strategies are not a sequence but a set of habits of mind common to all effective readers which, if used well, can help readers make sense of a wide variety of texts in different media and of varying complexity. When we use the think-aloud technique, we
- predict
- describe
- compare
- make connections
- monitor and correct
- question
- clarify
- apply previous or new knowledge
- identify what is important
- troubleshoot and problem solve
- speculate
- Think alouds provide the teacher an informal assessment of students’ thinking and comprehension that can be used to structure the culminating assignment.
- Use this strategy when assigning a reading to a class to model for them how they should approach the reading. This clarifies their purpose and directs their attention allowing them to read more effectively.
- The think-aloud helps readers better understand what they are reading by forcing them to think about what they read as they read it. A think-aloud might be personal or philosophical, addressed to the author or oneself. During a think-aloud, encourage students to interact with the text by doing any or all of the following:
- speculating
- guessing
- wondering
- observing
- arguing
- philosophizing
- conjecturing
- estimating
- hypothesizing
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson139/rubric.pdf