Issue 23: Oct 20, 2008 Connections Newsletter

Making Thinking Visible

Jennifer Partrick
Oct 20, 2008

What does it mean to make thinking visible? This means giving your students an opportunity to 'see' how you think and to share how you think. Many students need to 'see' how good readers think in order to make the thinking processes visible. Struggling readers especially need to see these strategies modeled so that they, too, can use them as they read. The following are examples that teachers can use to make thinking visible.

Think Aloud

This is a well known strategy but one that is not used enough in classrooms. This strategy refers to pausing at times to think about what has been read thus far. This is the time when the teacher stops and questions some part of the text that is puzzling to her, wonders about the choices the character made, or predicts what she thinks might happen next. The teacher needs to remember the question that was asked and refer to it if it was answered. If the teacher made a prediction, the teacher also needs to validate if it was accurate or not. Failure to answer the question or validate the prediction could be confusing to the listener, as they will not understand the purpose of doing either one.

Journal Posts

Another strategy is to write about what you are reading. As you reflect on what you have read, stop and record your thoughts. Because this writing is for the reader, any type of writing is acceptable. The writer may use words, short phrases, or sentences. For students who have a difficult time remembering what was read, summarizing as they read is a great strategy to support poor memory skills.

Drawing

Another strategy is to draw your reflections using pens, pencils, crayons, or whatever the reader prefers. Drawing pictures helps make the words visible. Drawing can also be used to facilitate comprehension. There are times when drawing what was read helps the reader to better understand the text. Sometimes the text can be too wordy, or the sentence structure may be unusual, and drawing what was read helps unravel the confusion. Remember the drawing above from an earlier article by Carolyn Boyles? It is a visual representation to help remember the Eighth Amendment, protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Talk Time

Reflect with a partner. Talk about your understanding of the text thus far. Discuss any emotions you may be feeling. Explain why the text is making you feel a certain emotion. Finding information from the text to support your thoughts is an excellent way to immerse oneself in the text. Clarifying why you think a certain way is a good comprehension tool. This is also the time to make connections between other texts or things happening in the world. Talking is one of the best strategies that readers use to support comprehension.

Act It Out

Acting out a specific part of the text can make the thinking visible. Students who may have language barriers or syntax difficulties respond positively to acting out parts of the text that could otherwise be challenging. Matching movement to specific words helps students better understand the text, especially if it was a process.

In conclusion, teachers model each one of these strategies so that students can 'see' different ways readers interact with text. Students can then use the tool that best fits them and their needs so that the outcome is always comprehension.

Jennifer Partrick is the developer and author of the award winning Learning to Read model.

This Isn’t English, Why are We Writing?!

Peggy Corbett
Oct 20, 2008

Heard often in classrooms: "I know the answer but I can't explain it!" The problem here is a student who suffers from messy thinking, and the simple answer to clearing that confusion might be writing. Research has proven that writing crystallizes cloudy thinking, yet teachers often miss opportunities to provide students a venue for becoming aware of what they know and do not know. Another missed opportunity arises from a misunderstanding of types of writers. What many mistake as writer's block is actually a block in thinking. Dianne Boehm simplifies this concept in her book Mozartians, Beethovians, and the Art of Teaching Writing. She describes writers as either Mozartians or Beethovians. Beethovians are discoverers who discover what they think during the writing process. They actually generate their ideas as they write. These writers are very messy writers who write in a non-directed way. This writing almost always needs a great deal of revision. Mozartians, by contrast, are planners. They mentally compose before they ever put pen to paper, working in a linear way focusing on what comes next. They tend to recall what they know and organize that information as they write. Their revision process is not as broad because they have mentally composed, revised, and edited throughout the composition process. Either type of writer is using writing in a way that contributes to learning and understanding.

The implications in all classrooms are the same. Writing is the ideal vehicle for getting at what students understand and do not understand. Junior Teague wrote that "nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood." All teachers have an amusing personal anecdote that illustrates the truth of this statement. The stories lose their humor, however, when we are honest about how much misinformation escapes our notice. Students are gifted at staying below the radar of our formative assessments, but writing pulls back the curtain.

Writing can help content area teachers in their efforts to provide students with opportunities to connect prior knowledge. It provides ideal summarizing strategies that benefit the student and the teacher with shared insights to understanding. Writing helps students organize their thinking, create new knowledge, and make tentative ideas become permanent ones. Learning-Focused offers a powerful one-day Writing Assignments workshop that explores immediate strategies for teachers who are ready to use writing as a way to facilitate learning in the content area classrooms. Teachers of all disciplines identify the essential content and key concepts they want students to master and leave the workshop with immediate writing-to-learn strategies that build critical thinking skills and help students learn and retain crucial information. Importantly, participants also learn the criteria for informal and formal writing assignments that assess learning without adding a burdensome paper load to their day.

Writing Realistic Rubrics

Debbie Willingham
Oct 20, 2008

Have you ever:

• feared that a student (or their parent) would challenge a grade and you would not be able to defend it adequately?

• wished your students would know what grade they deserved rather than asking what grade you "gave" them?

• wanted a better way to discuss with students, parents, and peers the meaning of quality work

One of the most difficult tasks facing teachers is that of fairly and realistically assessing students' mastery and understanding in performance, product, or writing based assessments. Many rubrics are so general or vague that they do not truly reflect the detail we would like to provide as feedback.

The answer is to use rubrics that include a fixed score using a 100-point scale, a list of criteria/characteristics that may be weighted at different levels, and specific expectations for each level of the scale for each of the criteria. Using a 100-point scale for major grades (which most rubrics are used for) keeps the teacher from having to recalculate after scoring to have a grade that can be averaged with others. This can be accomplished by assigning a percentage number grade to each item on the scale. For example, on a rubric with 4-3-2-1 as the scale, assign 4=25, 3=21, 2=18, and 1=15. For each criteria students then receive a percentage number, and when added together they automatically provide a number grade on a 100-point scale.

Because criteria to be graded do not always need to be assigned the same weight or importance, it is also advantageous to the teacher to double or triple the weighting of the most important criteria. For example, in a history class the application or analysis of content is likely more important than grammatical mistakes or neatness, so it should carry a higher (heavier) weighting (for example, application of content=50%, grammar and punctuation=25%, neatness=25%). In an art class, application of technique and neatness may be more important than use of content (for example, application of technique=40%, neatness=40%, use of history content knowledge=20%).

Within each "box" of the matrix on a rubric, whenever possible, teachers should have quantitative rather than qualitative expectations in order to avoid subjectivity. For example, "6-7 facts included in description" is better than "most facts included," as is "no more than 3 grammatical errors" is better than "several grammatical errors."

Using these simple guidelines can enable teachers to write more realistic rubrics, leading to clearer, more focused expectations and higher quality work. Remember to use your Learning-Focused Notebook or The Learning-Focused Instructional Strategies Model Part 4 Planning Units for Learning Notebook to help develop your rubrics.