Chapter 6

Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse

"I don't look at a book as a whole bunch of words. I look at it as some one's thinking, and the information the author wants me to know"- Brad, high school senior.

Cris starts with an example of getting the students to think while "reading" a picture. On the first day of school, she shows a picture of the Navy Seals climbing up a rope ladder to a helicopter. A shark is coming out of the ocean water about to bite the man on the ladder and in the background are hills, and there is a giant shot of a red metal bridge. She then asks the students what they think of the photo. She has to ask a few times, before a student speaks up and says they think the photo is fake. Another student replies they agree with that statement, but another student uses evidence from the picture to determine that the photo is real. And a conversation about the photo has begun. While the students were talking, Cris had been jotting down the types of thinking she saw the students doing. She then shows them her notes, letting them know of the thinking that they were doing while "reading the picture".

If students are taught how to think while reading then they are more likely to return to texts, participate in discussions, and will have an easier time starting on writing assignments. Having the students mark their texts gives them a way to review and study for a test. Students can mark their texts by highlighting, using sticky notes, or by writing in the margins. Cris acknowledges that marking texts with a purpose will not happen overnight. It will come with practice and we have to provide tangible models that will show them what we are expecting of them. We can do this by giving them guidelines. The guidelines Cris uses are as follows:

• Write the thinking next to the words on the page that cause you to have the thought.
• If there isn't room on the text to write, draw a line showing the teacher where the thinking is written.
• Don't copy the text; respond to it
• Merely underlining the text is not enough. Thinking about the text must accompany the underlining.
• There is no one way to respond to text. Here are some possible options: Ask a question, make a connection to something familiar, give an opinion, draw a conclusion, make a statement.

The next day at school she gives her students an article from the paper to read and asks them to write down two pieces of thinking down in the margin. As the students are doing this she is walking around the room to see who is decoding information, who hates to read, who is struggling to read, and who is comprehending. The students leave and at the end of the day, she makes overhead transparencies of the 4 or 5 examples of good thinking that she can show in a positive way. The next day she shows the transparencies and goes over it with the class. She tells the class what kind of thinking the student has used, but at the end shows an example of a student's work that said, "I did not write anything." This student told Cris on the first day of class that he was not going to read and no one was going to make him read. She decides to go ahead and explain to the student and the rest of the class that she is not a mind reader and that when they do not write anything down, she has no clue what is going on. She then tells the student that he will be able to go back and write down what he is thinking after participating in a discussion over the article. After this experience, the student turned in every assignment there after.

The next section talks about the tools used for thinking which are highlighter and sticky notes. There are drawbacks to using these tools, if the students don't know how to use them purposely. Next, she goes on to the topic of whole-group thinking. Cris uses a whole-group charts to show how the class is thinking. She would model how to mark a text and show her thinking process, so that the class will get a better understanding of what she is expecting. "Comprehension Constructors" is a term she uses to describe teacher-designed tools that help hold thinking. It is used "to pull kids through a comprehension process." In order to make one of these, she says that she is thinking about how she would read the piece and what she would need to get through it.

The next section is titled, "Who can help you?" To be honest, I'm not too sure what this was about. She talks about a chemistry class. She tells the students that good readers asks questions and one student asked what if they don't have questions? She tells the student that maybe he will and shows the class some of the questions she had. The same student tells her that of course she had questions because she wasn't a science teacher. She then asks them if they thought their chemistry teacher had questions. They said no. So she asks the teacher and to the students' surprise she did have questions. Both, Cris and the teacher tell the students that they had to find the answer to their own questions ad that the first step is to read the text and write down any questions that came up. They then had to go back and circle the 4 or 5 questions they liked the most. Lastly, the students would use the comprehension constructor

The next few sections talk about double-strategy, double entry-diary, quad-entry diary, and integrating notes and comprehension constructors. The double-strategy/entry diary is about quoting from the text and making a connection to the quote. The quad-entry diary is consisted of  4 rows and 3 columns. The rows can be what you want defined and the three columns are what they know, what they don't know, and an example of.  At the end of the semester, each student will choose their own comprehension constructor  they are comfortable with to help them show their thinking.

I liked how this author tells the reader that there are blank copies of the different comprehension constructors in the appendix of the book. There are also diagrams of the students' work that show the reader how each is suppose to be use.

Renee