Show your thinking

I have always unashamedly confessed to being mathematically challenged although I must also add that with maturity, I find Maths less bewildering. Still, I am not into Sudoku or other similar numerically themed games but I do confess that there is one aspect about Maths classes that I’ve always liked. When solving any problem, credit is always given for working shown although the answer may be wrong. I think this is not just fair but educationally sound because working out the problem is the useful part of the Maths lesson not the answer. It also shows what you understand about the mathematical process and what your thought processes are like.

In English, we don’t have such a procedure. And what a pity it is. Time and time again when I am working with teachers on comprehension or cloze tasks, I always suggest that we need to focus more on how children arrive at the answer instead of just the answer itself. In other words, show the tracks of their thinking! I was more convinced about this after completing Harvard University’s on-line course on Making Thinking Visible. How can we know what is going on in the minds of students? How can we help them to make that thinking visible so that we can help them to think better? In the same vein, how can teachers reveal their thinking processes to students so that they understand how their teachers have worked out or thought through certain problems or issues?

In comprehension and cloze, I suggest that teachers teach their students to annotate their texts as they read. Annotating is not just a matter of running their highlighter over certain words. While annotating, students can do a number of tasks such as:

• Determining important ideas.
• Making connections to what is read by writing notes.
• Giving comments on ideas read.
• Expressing interest, delight, bewilderment, or any other relevant emotion.
• Drawing diagrams and charts to track or summarise ideas
• Writing subheadings or short summaries.
• Asking questions of the content, writer’s style and intentions.
• Making inferences and interpretations.
• Noting the use of literary devices and their effects, etc.

For cloze passages, they can additionally show, through annotation, which clues they have tapped on to help them predict the answers for the blanks. At the end of the lesson, paying attention to students’ annotation reveals more about how they have thought through and carried out the task than merely looking at the answers. If students are able to understand and follow a process to working out the answers, they are in a much better position to go on to doing any other similar tasks on their own.

Teachers too should always show their thinking. Don’t just dish out the correct answers at the end of a task; talk through the process you went through to arrive at the answer. This procedure, known as a think-aloud, is extremely valuable in any classroom, as learners will then be able to “see” and hear how the teacher has tackled the task in question. Dishing out the correct answer and getting pupils to copy it down is a complete waste of time. What would students learn from doing that? The same answer is unlikely to surface during an exam. In order for teachers to think-aloud effectively, they need to go through the process of working out the answers themselves. It’s only through such a struggle that they begin to realise where the difficulty and the complexity of the task lie. Much as I empathise with teachers’ unrelenting workload, I am more convinced that working on students’ tasks is an integral part of lesson preparation.

I recommend teaching students to think-aloud their thoughts too as the think-aloud is a powerful tool when used in group work. Used with reading tasks, this strategy can improve students’ understanding of the text and the task. Learning is always a social activity and meaning making is best done when one is able to share thoughts. Classroom tasks like reading and writing always benefit from discussion and think-alouds. Students who have learnt to articulate the thoughts that have led them to certain conclusions not only become better learners but they also help other students to learn.

We’ve had the thinking schools slogan for years now but not enough has been done to infuse thinking into the primary literacy classroom. But it’s never too late to start. If we begin by valuing good thinking in class instead of correct answers, students will learn that the learning journey is more important and sometimes more pleasurable than merely getting to the destination of the correct answer.