Teaching to instill thinking structures

“I hope to bring an air of authenticity,” Anne Marie begins. She is 64 years old, petite, slightly arthritic, dressed in tasteful patterned tunic jacket over black pants. “This is a reading strategy that works with our students at my high school.”

She describes why we, as thirteen English teachers (three of us are not present, having been required to attend a required Beginning Teachers’ workshop in a different location), are good readers. We visualize; we watch verb tense switches for time flashbacks; we note tags on dialogue to see tensions between speakers. She asks us to teach to the students who can’t even ask a question, as, for them, “Reading is invisible.”

“Real reading is re-reading,” Anne Marie says as her theme to model her workshop topic: The Socratic Seminar. And while some of us refresh our memories about this device to teach close reading and others are exposed to it for the first time, we listen to each other’s thoughts. It was a refreshing time: colleagues in dialogue, using a public sphere to exchange ideas about pedagogy.

At one point in the discussion, we listed “Strategies we use to develop close reading.” It is as follows: ask each other questions to clarify, to allow people to share, and to redefine meaning; Paraphrase; Sentence structure analysis; Access prior knowledge; Denotation versus connotation; Relations between words; Visualize; Create personal responses; Relations between words; Interpret; Place in personal context; Syntax and semantics (mine); Context; Repetition; Define terms; Ideal versus reality: conceptions of the world; Analogize; Synthesize in one sentence; Take another point of view and explain it; Author’s intention; Whose voice is omitted? Power at play.

So much of this is, as Anne Marie suggested, part of who we are as teachers.

After the afternoon break, we, in small group,s are assigned to identify “metaphors of playwrights.” Each group comes up with similar ideas. It's starting to feel a bit too much now like the traditional classroom: content plus content equals learning.

The lack of transition to higher level study at our professional development allowed me time to reflect. And I came back to a constant theme of mine: I’m concerned that we as teachers don’t extend often enough into conversations about teaching students to think.

For me, there is no systematic, linear unveiling of literary techniques. Rather, the students’ own language and questions allow me to lead them toward meaning making. I am a vehicle for Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, in which young people fill in gaps of knowledge with adult mediation. My primary influence lies in the cognitive domain: I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify assumptions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking. The latter component is particularly important within a critical literacy framework, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after alternative literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world. So, how do you instill in your students a way to make meaning through thinking in your classroom? Share your thoughts and we’ll develop a dialogue.

In the meantime, be well, happy, and hope-filled. I’ll “talk” to you next week,

Carolyn


Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.