“To teach in the zone of proximal development, Vygotsky says the teacher must first generously model how to work through a task, highlighting and naming how a particular strategy or strategies can be used to successfully complete it” (Wilhelm, p. 13).
Recently, the educational leaders at my school announced that all core teachers would do Think-Alouds with students before our students experienced this year’s Iowa Assessments. And so I’ve been re-reading Wilhelm’s Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies (2001). Wilhelm is one of my guides when it comes to ELA instruction, and I’ve also been trying to fuse my evolving practice of think-alouds with Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies. To help me with application, I’ve made frequent reference to Wilhelm’s General Process Strategies. So far the challenges for me have been to find the right texts and the right strategies to illuminate what the students need in a reasonable amount of time. I’m finding my alouds run a bit too long. But I’m hoping with practice, I’ll become more at ease and enter the zone.
Wilhelm’s General Process Strategies for Think-Alouds (pp. 42-50)
Step 1: Choose a short section of text (or a short text). The text should be interesting to students, (ideally) connected to present inquiry, and in the student’s ZPD. Give each student a copy of the text with room for responses.
Step 2: Decide on a few strategies to highlight. (To the standard list of predicting, connecting, visualizing, attending to text features and structures, clarifying/monitoring/repairing comprehension, making inferences, generating questions, I have been highlighting Beers and Probst’s nonfiction signposts).
Step 3: State your purposes. (“Tell students that as you are thinking aloud, you want them to pay attention to the strategies you use so they can explain what, why, how, and when you used them” (p. 44).)
Step 4: Read the text aloud to students and think-aloud as you do so. This is a process of using first-person narration to name and explain.
Step 5: Have students underline the words and phrases that helped you use a strategy.
Step 6: List the cues and strategies used.
Step 7: Ask students to identify other situations in which they could use these same strategies.
Step 8: Reinforce the think-aloud with follow-up lessons.