THINKING in the New ELAR Standards

Thinking, contrary to some comments, is NOT gobbledy-gook. But what does it look like with our instructional materials and pedagogy? People always ask my what in the world I'm talking about when I say that our approach must consider thinking. ELAR is a PROCESS. There is almost ZERO content after you address phonics and basic grammar. Our content IS thinking. And I'm not just talking about memory techniques like mnemonics. And I'm not just talking about cognition, short-term memory and long-term memory. And I'm not just talking about consolidation, storage, and retrieval.

Here's a tiny example:

From Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

In my young years I took pride in the fact that luck was called a lady. In fact, there were so few public acknowledgments of the female presence that I felt personally honored whenever nature and large ships were referred to as feminine. But as I matured, I began to resent being considered a sister to a changeling as fickle as luck, as aloof as an ocean, and as frivolous as nature.

The phrase "A woman has the right to change her mind" played so aptly into the negative image of the female that I made myself a victim to an unwavering decision. Even if I made an inane and stupid choice, I stuck by it rather than "be like a woman and change my mind."

    The old way of working through this text would be to ask questions about the content of the text. What is Maya Angelou saying about being a woman? But that does NOTHING to teach a kid how you would actually know that. Keeping our questions focused on the text itself without a focus on thinking turns our work into teaching the text and not the reader. I say that all the time, but no one really knows what I'm talking about.

     We certainly do not want most of our questions to be text-specific/dependent. ELAR standards are process based. Some of our questions need to be about what your brain does to make sense of text. For example, what do I do to monitor for comprehension when I come across something in the text that does not make sense? That is not a text-specific question, but it is definitely one we need to ask. Consider what our brains do here that should be taught that can transfer to any text.

    When Maya Angelou states that she does not want to be associated with something “as fickle as luck” in Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now and we don’t know what she’s talking about, what should we do? 

     Well, we look at idioms, personification (luck is a lady), definitions of fickle. We research. We talk about it. Then we think about what it literally means. We think about connections to ourselves, the world, and other texts. Fickle as luck – luck is not knowing whether or not you will win or lose. Fickle people keep changing their mind and you can’t tell what they are going to do. And remember that song, Luck is a Lady? Now we have to connect back to the text. What is Angelou talking about here in terms of being a woman and her journey? Well, we have to go back and think about our connections. Why is not knowing whether or not you will win or lose an insult to being a woman? I have to connect to myself: Do I want people to always wonder whether I’m going to be nice or mean? No. I want people to enjoy my company, not fear it. Do I want to be the kind of silly woman that changes her mind for no reason? Absolutely not. And so on. 

   Some of our work with texts is about recording what we are doing with our brains so we can do it next time we come across something that doesn’t make sense. We have to show kids how to THINK and what to DO. If this was my classroom, I'd model my thinking for them as I read and we'd have an anchor chart of things they could try. Then, when they were reading in shared, interactive, collaborative settings, they'd have some ideas of how to make sense of actual gobbledy-gook.

Here’s a list of what I did and the questions I asked that were not connected to the text:

• ·         I stopped when I realized that I didn’t understand what she was saying. What does this text mean?
• ·         I did some research about what fickle means. What do I do to figure out what words mean?
• ·         I looked up the idiom of fickle as luck. Might there be a figure of speech here that I am not familiar with? How can I find out what that means?
• ·         I thought about what luck personified would be. How can I visualize what that’s like in life, literally?
• ·         I made connections to my own life, the world, and other texts I have read or heard. What have I experienced and what do I know that might give me a hint here about how this is being used?
• ·         Then I thought about what the author is saying – the theme or message. Why is the author using this language here? How does this language help her communicate her purpose and message?
• ·         I asked myself how that example is connected to the text and the author’s meaning. How is this example connected to other ideas in the text?
• ·         And if we are really getting to our standards – what does this inspire me to do in my own writing? Where can I used a similar technique to connect with my reader.

     We MUST consider thinking in selecting our instructional materials and pedagogy. The example above, I hope, explains what we should be looking for. And this is just ONE example. I'd really like to know what YOU THINK! Or am I still speaking gobbledy-gook?