Assignment task:
This week we continue our "metacognitive conversation" as a class and share with each other a reading strategies list to show how we struggle successfully to read and understand difficult historical works, including the strategies we use to do so. We call it 'metacognitive,' because that word means that we are paying attention to HOW we think while we are thinking! This is the first step toward harnessing our cognitive (thinking) powers to more effectively make sense of the things we read and to share the strategies with each other. What is Talk to the Text? Talk to the Text is a routine designed to help you become a better reader of difficult or challenging texts. Sometimes students will highlight huge sections of a page, or underline everything. That's not very helpful, since nothing specific really stands out if EVERYTHING stands out or if everything is underlined. I tell the story of asking a student who underline everything, what were you thinking when you underlined all those sentences? His response was: "I wasn't thinking, I was reading." And that's the key for us. Our goal is to pay attention to our minds do while we reading, and to become