Literacy Think Aloud

This strategy will help students to:

• Uncover their own thinking processes as they learn and understand a concept.

 Implementation:

As a student reads a text or performs a task ask them to pause to explain their thinking, including decisions about what to do next.

Ideally suited to guided instruction, student think alouds are the opportunity for the teacher to listen to the thinking processes of the students as they engage in new learning.

You might like to assess this with a simple checklist.

When asking students to think aloud, ask them to use sentence starters such as:

• So far, I’ve learned…
• This made me think of…
• That didn’t make sense.
• I think ___ will happen next.
• I reread that part because…
• I was confused by…
• I think the most important part was…
• That is interesting because…
• I wonder why…
• I just thought of…