Have you ever noticed that at the end of the school day, you and your fellow teachers can barely drag yourselves out to the parking lot, so exhausted and drained from the day? And yet most of our students skip out of the classroom, seemingly without a care.<\/p>\n
They still have so much energy left! How?!<\/p>\n
I think one of the reasons this happens is that, as teachers, we are so used to carrying the thinking load for our students. We worry that not all of our concepts are being taught because we haven\u2019t given our students the time to simply think. We believe giving them this time will slow down our curriculum (in reality, it speeds things up in the long term). By doing this, we\u2019re putting a great burden and a lot of anxiety on our own shoulders.<\/p>\n
What we should be doing instead is showing our students how to carry the thinking load themselves, demonstrating the value of productive struggle, and putting a stop to teacher-dependent learners. This is a must\u2014both for teacher sanity and student success!<\/p>\n
A method that really worked with my students was teaching them how to think through modeling. That\u2019s right, we have to teach them how to think. It seems both obvious and crazy, right?<\/p>\n
After all, if they can\u2019t think, they can\u2019t learn.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite tools to use is thinking stems. Thinking stems provide students with sentence frames. These \u201cstarters\u201d help students use comprehension strategies to come up with unique thoughts about what they\u2019re reading.<\/p>\n
Reading is a social act, one that expects students to have the ability to think deeply about the texts they\u2019re reading. That\u2019s why it is so important for them to be THINKERS. It\u2019s not easy to explain such complex ideas to our readers, yet knowing how these ideas work and how to use them is of utmost importance.<\/p>\n
When we encourage students to dig deep and really THINK about what they\u2019re reading, we see their understanding increase and the growth they\u2019ll experience in both their reading and writing.<\/p>\n
Thinking stems really are a great way to start your students on the path to this increased understanding. And I want to start you off with a pack of FREE thinking stems posters I\u2019ve put together. They\u2019re great class discussion starters and can serve as reference points during independent reading.<\/p>\n
My Thinking Stems pack includes eight posters that offer sentence stems on the following strategies:
\nReading Voice\/Thinking Voice
\nBackground Knowledge
\nMaking Connections
\nQuestioning
\nPredicting
\nVisualizing
\nSummarizing
\nSynthesis<\/p>\n