Think+Aloud

A think-aloud is a strategy that shows students how good readers process a text.

Take a second and think about the dialogue going on inside your head as you read a piece of text. If there are images, you might take note of a picture that reminds you of something else or one that is particularly pleasing to you. If you are reading a mystery novel, you may be sorting through the characters in your head, predicting who might be involved in the crime. If it's a more complex piece of text, you may be asking yourself questions, telling yourself you need to re-read a section. For good readers, this dialogue occurs automatically with little explicit thought from the reader. But for striving readers, this often does not happen. A think-aloud, then, helps striving readers hear the dialogue their own brains should be trained to do.

For this task, you are to construct your own think aloud that you might use with a piece of text in your content area. This might be a narrative text, but for many of you this may very well be something from a text book or other expository source. Remember, your role as a teacher is to help students learn the language of your content area, increasing their understanding of the subject. This means you should use text you might actually integrate into a lesson. Own this task! Make it practical so that it could be used in your own classroom.

Turn in (upload to Dropbox) your lesson plan for this presentation. The main thrust of this assignment is the think-aloud itself. Model this in your application share. You can make it as interactive as you like. I have attached several links that provide tips on how to construct a think-aloud, as well as some videos demonstrating the process. The examples below show both elementary and middle levels. Think-alouds can be powerful at all levels. How you construct your demonstration or lesson plan is up to you. In addition to the think-aloud itself, you may also provide us with some background on why you selected the text that you did and how you think it will fit into your classroom. You may also spend some time reflecting what you learned from the activity and what, if anything, you might change or research more in-depth.

You may use any lesson plan template of your choice. One is provided in the Resources section of this Wiki. I am looking more for your content than how you structure the format of the lesson plan. Remember, you are sharing this category project with your peers concisely. Plan for about 5 minutes to discuss how you would demonstrate your think-aloud.

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