Hello! Last week I wrote about ‘sparking the flame’ in terms of getting students to recognise that learning can be seen as a skill. Through questioning and examples, we can raise awareness that they can’t trust their intuitive judgements.
Today I’ll cover another essential starter metacognition technique: the think aloud.
What is thinking aloud?
You may have come across the idea of thinking aloud as something students should be doing. And indeed, in some circumstances it can be a very useful formative strategy, where students (for example) solve a problem together, sharing ideas as they go.
A group brainstorming session is also a form of thinking aloud in this sense (though the idea that groups come up with more ideas than individuals is a myth!).
Teachers modelling thinking
Here, our focus is more on teachers thinking aloud.
As the teacher, you are the most metacognitively sophisticated individual in the classroom. However, this expert thinking is hidden when the thinking is done in advance, e.g. by sharing prepared examples and problems and solutions.
Thinking aloud means demonstrating how you would think through tasks and problems to the class. It could include:
How you would plan a piece of work;
How you would tackle a question or solve a problem;
Deciding what strategy to use;
Making choices (and justifying those choices);
What you would do to ‘troubleshoot’ if things went wrong;
How you would judge your own work.
Sharing these aspects of a teachers’ expert thinking with students allows them to benefit from them. It’s a form of modelling, and scaffolds learner metacognition, too.
Applications of thinking aloud
The technique of sharing and modelling your thinking can be applied to a wide range of classroom tasks. Texts are an obvious one – you can talk about how to respond to a text, analyse and evaluate it, for example (Ness, 2016). Teachers can also model problem solving, creative tasks, and so forth.
Texts
When thinking aloud about a text, you can comment on points such as:
Word choices;
Aspects that seem confusing;
How you can figure out a meaning using context;
Predictions of what might come next.
Problem solving
Here, the think aloud might include:
Comments on the type/category of problem;
Observing potential pitfalls or misconceptions;
Discussing how much time the problem is likely to take;
Modelling how to set out an answer, e.g. format or space needed.
Regardless of the task, it can be especially valuable to model real thinking, at times including hesitation and confusion!
Further guidance
Researchers tend to advise teachers to prepare for thinking aloud, and a straightforward way to get started would be to look at any lesson plan and identify where in a lesson this technique may fit.
As your confidence grows, you may feel more and more comfortable doing this on an ad-hoc basis. It is, after all, a little artificial to prepare your think-alouds in advance!
This may also be a great skill to try out as part of a staff teaching & learning community. Doing so can help to grow your confidence with thinking aloud, especially when tackling previously unseen problems/texts.
As a reminder, I’m speaking about metacognition at researchED Aberdeen this coming weekend: Saturday 11 May 2024. Hope you can join us! Check out this tweet for more details.
All the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.