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The Development of Interactive Thinksheets

Assisting Readers and Writers at WIRC: The Development and Testing of Interactive Thinksheets to Bring Reading and Writing Together

Tim Madigan, James L. Collins, and Jaekyung Lee

State University of New York at Buffalo

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association

April 11, 2006

Introduction

Researchers and educators have for decades argued that collaborative instruction, active learning, explicit modeling of cognitive strategies by teachers, and repeated, increasingly independent practice by students enhances the reading comprehension of struggling readers and writers (see, for example, Beers, 2003). Curiously, all this collaborative instruction, active learning, and strategic modeling has not seriously explored the possibility of bringing reading and writing together at the point of transaction with text. Likewise, the study of reading-writing relations with writing happening apart from reading, usually after reading has been going on for decades(as in Tierney & Shanahan, 1991),and much less frequently before reading(as in Hefflin & Hartman, 2002). This paper develops the argument for engaging students with reading and writing simultaneously and reviews some important research on reading-writing relations and argues that research using thinksheets—step-by-step guides to problem solving which teachers use interactively with students—provides a promising means to examine the efficacy of using writing to improve reading comprehension as students interact socially and transact with text in meaning-making ways.

Whatever an educator’s focus, whether reading or writing, one must acknowledge that the two concepts work hand-in-hand. Too often, however, writing for the purposes of demonstrating reading comprehension takes the form of end of story selection “Comprehension Questions” or worksheets prepared by teachers or as part of Skills workbooks as part of reading anthologies. The issues with this use of writing are that they are generally brief, rarely at or beyond paragraph length, and are usually completed (or not completed) by students in isolation and upon completion of reading tasks.

As a result of this type of instruction that is all too common in classrooms across the United States, we as the Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension (WIRC) Team have developed an idea which incorporates interactive thinksheets into writing and reading instruction. Specifically, thinksheets integrate reading and writing by putting writing in the service of reading comprehension. In other words, writing and social interaction are incorporated during reading instruction as a means of developing and enhancing reading comprehension. As thinksheets are incorporated into a reading lesson, the teacher interacts with the students on an individual basis by employing the workshop method of writing instruction as students complete the thinksheets. Students, then, transact with the reading as they use thinksheets as scaffolds while they are guided through the text. These concepts are what separate the thinksheet from the traditional worksheet. Again, thinksheets are used during a reading task and are interactive with the teacher, and enable students to transact with their reading as they complete them. Essentially, the concept of thinksheet is not simply the tangible pieces of paper provided to the students by the teacher. Rather, a thinksheet is the whole package of the paper, the text, and the interaction that takes place between the students and the teacher. It is the opportunity for students to construct new knowledge is a socially mediated context. The culmination of a thinksheet is a writing piece that allows students to demonstrate their comprehension and newly constructed knowledge of a given reading selection.

The concept of the thinksheet was developed by Carol Sue Englert, Taffy Raphael, and Becky Kirschner in the mid nineteen-eighties. Their thinksheets were initially designed as part of a study to examine the metacognitive abilities of students during the writing process. Specifically, their study examined changes in students’ metacognitive knowledge as a result of participating in writing programs which emphasized social context or text structured instruction(Raphael, Kirschner, & Englert, 1986). For their study, they developed several types of thinksheets depending on the social context of the lesson being studied. For instance, they developed a thinksheet focusing on audience that asked students questions such as, who will read your paper? What will they think is interesting about your paper? How do you want your reader(s) to feel when they read your paper? Why are you writing about this topic? For text structure, Raphael and her colleagues designed editing thinksheets to prompt students to act like editors and consider parts of a peer’s writing they liked best and parts that may have been confusing (Raphael, et al, 1986). Similarly, the group developed organization thinksheets that asked questions such as: What is the problem? Cause? Steps of solution? The key words think sheet prompted students to identify parts of their writing. For instance, it asked students to “circle the key words that tell there is a problem.”

In this early inception of the thinksheet, Raphael and her colleagues incorporated thinksheets in an effort to assist students with their metacognitive processes during writing. For instance, as students wrote, they used the think sheets to answer questions for themselves in order to internalize the strategies they used while writing.

Englert and Raphael expanded this work to include special educations students with their notable Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing (CSIW) program (Englert & Raphael, 1988).

Within the context of CSIW, emphasis is on teacher modeling and the use of think alouds to introduce writing sub-processes (Englert & Raphael, 1988). Students rehearsed the strategies modeled by the teachers through their use of thinksheets. The students’ use of thinksheets in this way provided a scaffold until students were able to internalize the strategies. For the CSIW program, thinksheets were packaged in a series to guide students through the writing process. In this sense, “think sheets scaffold writing by presenting a series of prompts that frees writers from trying to remember the self-questions and strategies for each writing sub-process” (Englert & Raphael, 1988, p. 518).

The CSIW program incorporated thinksheets to provide a scaffold for students. The thinksheets were an avenue for students to internalize strategies in order for them to become automatic through the sub-processes of writing. In a follow-up, Englert and Raphael (1989)provide a clearer definition of thinksheet, which evolved into think-sheet, and at the same time explicitly provide the difference between a think-sheet and a traditional worksheet. The authors do this within the context of the CSIW curriculum, and they state,

CSIW think-sheets are curriculum materials designed to make writing processes and strategies explicit to students. The term, think-sheet, was selected to underscore their differences from traditional worksheets. Worksheets are typically used in elementary classrooms to promote students’ independent practice of learned skills. They are generally instruments for practice and later assessment by the teacher, and are often the basis for determining when a student is ready to “move on” to the next skill. They are rarely used to promote peer interactions, with the one exception of when students are asked to check each other’s papers for accuracy. In contrast, think-sheets were developed as a tool for use during modeling and peer interactions. Their purpose is to provide support for teachers during modeling of writing component subprocesses, and later, to serve as reminders to students of appropriate strategy use during the subprocess in which they are engaged. Thus, they are tools used as a paper is developed, and are not evaluated as final products at any time … the think-sheets serve as a “window” into the cognitive activities of the students, rather than as an evaluation source.

Englert and Raphael offered these remarks about the incorporation of thinksheets in the CSIW program, “Think-sheets emulated mature thinking and monitoring processes, and helped reduce the attention students needed to coordinate executive routines by prompting and sequencing strategy use” (p. 131). The think-sheets served as guides for students to develop and internalize cognitive strategies approaches to their writing. The hope was that through the use of think-sheets, students would eventually be able to complete the cognitive processes modeled on them internally, without the aide of the think-sheets.

However, Raphael, Kirschner, and Englert noted some possible shortcomings of thinksheets. First, the recognized that students could view thinksheets as an end unto themselves rather than a springboard for students’ self-regulated and flexible thinking (Tierney & Readence, 2000). Second, students may focus little attention on the purpose of thinksheets as a series of scaffolding devices with the intended purpose of fostering the internalization of cognitive processes, and students may view them as distinct from one another and miss the intended goal of their use (Raphael, Englert, & Kirschner, 1988).

Since the early 1990s, there has been little progress in the development of thinksheets by Englert and Raphael, or any others for that matter. A sign of this appears in Tierney and Readence (2000) as their citations of think-sheet design note only the work of Englert, Raphael, and Kirschner from the 1980s. However, what has occurred is a flurry of uses for the term thinksheet (or think sheet, think-sheet). Too often, unfortunately, these applications have only one commonality with the work conducted by Englert and Raphael, and that is the name thinksheet. Much of the work since Englert and Raphael uses the term thinksheet in place of the traditional term worksheet. One tell-tale sign of this is that articles and books that reference the use of thinksheets provide no theoretical support of lack mention of Raphael, Englert, and their colleagues. This provides at least some indication that the inclusion of thinksheets in reference to a handout to students is simply amisappropriation of the term and missed the point of the concept. Thus, what results is nothing more than a traditional worksheet.

Another sign of worksheets disguised as thinksheets is the timing of their use within the context of a lesson. Thinksheets provide scaffolding and are problem-solving tools to be used during a process (such as the writing process). Therefore, when a thinksheet is referred to as a task to be completed after a reading task, for instance, as a manner of assessing comprehension without providing the scaffolded support intended, or as further practice of a learned activity, then the result once again is simply a worksheet.

WIRC Thinksheets

As we began our work with the development of the Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension strategy intervention program (WIRC), we took a second, deeper look at thinksheets. In our view, the thinksheet has moved beyond cognitive strategies with the addition of the role social practices play in the context of their use in the classroom.

We take the cognitive aspects of thinksheets already developed, the scaffolding, and modeling they provide and combine that with the social nature of the classroom experience—the student/teacher interaction. Thinksheets in our view are interactive, transactive devices intended to provide students with scaffolded problem-solving strategies to support writing. Also, a single thinksheet does not have to be one page, nor does it have to be completed in one language arts session. Our thinksheets may be several pages, each building on the previous and completed over a period of several language arts blocks (days). The end result each time, however, is an initial draft of an extended piece of writing.

A thinksheet is usually three to five pages which present a series of writing steps to help students answer a question, practice a skill, or solve a problem related to understanding their reading. Thinksheets scaffold the process of using writing to make sense of reading by helping students become active and reflective readers. An added bonus is that while they write about reading, students construct answers to the kinds of questions they will encounter on tests.

Thinksheets break large tasks into component pieces and provide support for completing the component tasks by asking the kinds of questions teachers ask in writing conferences with students. We intend our thinksheets to be transactional and interactive. By this we mean, students transact with their reading as they complete the thinksheet, and at the same time interact with the teacher and sometimes with peers while working on thinksheets.

Thinksheets are step-by-step guides to writing about reading, but again they are not meant to be stand-alone worksheets. Throughout our efforts in developing the WIRC intervention, we have been careful to not allow educators to view the use of thinksheets as a solution in itself, without devoting instructional resources needed to use the thinksheets wisely. We do not want teachers to hand thinksheets to students and then walk away. From the beginning of our work, we envisioned teachers using thinksheets interactively and discursively with students in focused reading-writing workshops where discussions and individual conferences and teacher modeling guide the use of thinksheets for students, including students who struggle with literacy. The thinksheet provides a scaffold and a medium through which students and teachers co-construct knowledge for the purpose of the students internalizing specific strategies in order to better comprehend written text. The interaction that takes place between the students and the teachers is, in essence, a scaffold in itself as the students and teacher co-construct knowledge, but the students and the teacher also take co-ownership of the discursive context of the classroom. The knowledge of this co-ownership is arguable more important than the knowledge created through it for the students. Students’ realization that they are worthwhile participants and co-owners of the discursive activities of the classroom is empowering. Once a student is empowered and participatory in the activities of the class the co-construction that takes place through the thinksheets can happen more easily as the students take a willing place within the classroom.

The logic entailed in thinksheet design is this: Writing is an instrument for the social construction of knowledge. With writing we take inchoate ideas and develop them by interacting with the ideas of others, especially in the case of the WIRC research, the ideas of others gained through reading, discussing, and conferencing. When writers cannot transform inchoate knowledge by spelling it out in detail, they have a problem (or usually several problems). The purpose of thinksheets is to help solve these problems. A thinksheet is not a worksheet to be filled in independent of the selection under study or interaction through discussion and conferencing, andit is also not a self-teaching device, to be completed independent of the teacher. A thinksheet records the result of reading, writing and conversing on paper  it presents anticipated problems in writing about reading at the same time it presents solutions. Having students write their way through reading comprehension problems may be better than only talking them through the same problems.

The following section explains how WIRC thinksheets have evolved since their conception.

The Evolution of the WIRC Thinksheets in Year I

We used participant-observation methods throughout Year I to design, try out, evaluate and revise the thinksheets. As a result, the WIRC thinksheets evolved throughout Year I to include a major redesign of our thinksheet format and contents, and it also included revisions to all thinksheets and the design of instructional activities to accompany use of the thinksheets. We developed and piloted 120 thinksheets, 60 in each of two categories, Write to Read and Text to Test; we also developed six Multiple Selection thinksheets for each grade level. The thinksheets are matched with selections in the Harcourt Trophies Series textbooks for grades four and five. We tested and revised the thinksheets and they are currently being used, in some cases with additional refinements, in Year II. We also tested a variety of methods of instructional uses of thinksheets and adopted several of them, including the reading-writing workshop and the “Probable Passage” and “Say Something” strategies. In this section we describe the general evolution of our intervention, both the thinksheets and the discursive instructional methods for using them.

Even though the general design intention and the overall goal of using thinksheets had not changed during Year I of the WIRC project, the thinksheets themselves underwent numerous trials and revisions. As thinksheets are designed to break large writing tasks into their component pieces as students are scaffolded through their writing about reading, the intention is for thinksheets to be used as students read through a selection. Likewise, the instructional role of the teacher is less that of dominant leader and more of facilitator as students work with thinksheets and reading selections.