Reading is Thinking!
The most important skill students need to learn is how to think! If students can think about their own thinking and determine the strategy that he/she needs to use in any given situation, success in that situation can happen. As educators and parents, we must be explicit in teaching thinking by modeling our own processes out loud and then providing opportunities to use thinking strategies with various levels of scaffolding. We must take students from concrete situations to sensory-type situations that use different learning modalities to reading texts that require higher level thinking. In Tanny McGregor’s book Comprehension Connections (2007), she provides tangible examples that demonstrate effective practices for the classroom and home. I’ve created a quick chart that lists research-based meta-cognitive strategies, definitions, and activities that start at the concrete level and take students to the abstract use of the strategy.
Happy teaching,
Kelly Harmon