Laurens-Marathon
February 22, 2012
Quick write on how Think-Alouds
can help you as a teacher.
Think-Alouds can help
teachers:
 Deepen their own awareness of the reading process
 Use this heightened awareness of their strategic and
interpretive process to help model these strategies
to kids
 See what students do and don’t do as they read,
which helps the teacher to assess students and plan
appropriate instruction
 Understand what in a text confuses readers
 Support readers to identify problems and monitor
their own comprehension
Ways to present ThinkAlouds:
 Teacher does Think-Aloud; student listens
 Teacher does Think-Aloud; student helps out
 Students do Think-Alouds as large group; teacher and
other students monitor and help
 Students do Think-Alouds in small group; teacher and
other students monitor and help
 Students do Think-Alouds individually; compare with
others
 Teacher or students do Think-Alouds orally, in writing,
or on overhead, with Post-it notes or in journal
Quick write on how ThinkAlouds can help students.
Think-Alouds Help
Students to:
 Understand that reading should make sense
 Move beyond literal decoding
 Learn how to make sense of text by using many
different strategies
 Use particular strategies when reading certain text
types
 Share ways of reading
 Learn about themselves are readers
6 Steps of Effective
Instruction
 Teacher explains what a strategy consists of
 Teacher explains why this strategy is important
 Teacher explains when to use the strategy in
actual reading
 Teacher models when to perform this strategy
in an actual context
 Teacher guides learner practice
 Students independently use the strategy
Use Think-Alouds to
Model:
 Setting purpose for reading
 Making predictions
 Connecting personally
 Monitoring Comprehension
 Using Fix-Up strategies when needed
Prompts That Guide
Students to Use Strategies
 Set Purpose for Reading
 Research shows it is important to model
purpose setting for students
 It is up to us to help students see the
purpose in everything they read
 Prompts (See Handout)
Make Predictions
 As you begin reading, begin predicting
what will come next.
 Correct and revise predications as you
gain information from the text.
Connect Personally
 Show how you use your own
experience to help make meaning,
and the ways you bring your
experiences of other texts to help
you understand this one.
 This is “relating life to literature”
 “Relating literature to life”
Visualize
 Show how you take the sensory and physical
details the author gives you and expand them
in your mind’s eye to create an image or a
scene.
 This ability to “see” what one is reading, to
create accurate mental model and/or sensoryrich story worlds as one reads is crucial to
engaged reading.
 Demonstrate how you develop and adapt
images as you read
Monitor Comprehension
 Demonstrate how expert readers
constantly (though subconsciously)
monitor comprehension by asking,
“Does this make sense?”
 Show that you expect what you read to
make sense to you and that if it doesn’t
you will stop to identify this as a
problem.
Fix-Up Strategies
 Used to address confusion and
repair comprehension
 Follows Step 5
 Demonstrate how you use various
strategies when you can’t grasp
something or wish to check your
understanding
Fix-Up Strategies

rereading
 Reading ahead to see if that will clear things up
 Reviewing and synthesizing previous ideas from
the text and relating these “chunks” of concepts to
the confusing ideas
 Replacing a word or words they don’t know with
one(s) that they know and think would make sense
in this context; looking up a word in the dictionary
 Changing their ideas or visualization of the story
 Asking someone for help