Assisting Readers and Writers at WIRC: the Development and Testing of Interactive Thinksheets

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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

Timothy Madigan, Sean Turner, 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 (for example, see, 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. Researchers have for decades studied reading-writing relations with writing happening apart from reading, usually after reading (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.

The Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension (WIRC) Team has developed an idea which incorporates thinksheets into writing and reading instruction. Specifically, thinksheets integrate reading and writing by putting writing in the service of reading comprehension. They are to be used as students read a text. Also, as they 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. 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 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 however was developed by Carol Sue Englert, Taffy Raphael, and Becky Kirschner(see, for example, Raphael, Englert, & Kirschner, 1988) 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.

In our view, the thinksheet has moved beyond the 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 two or three 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. Students transact with their reading as they complete the thinksheet, thus learning to put writing in the service of comprehension. Students also interact with the teacher and sometimes with peers while working on thinksheets. The logic entailed in thinksheet design is this: Writing is an instrument for the social construction of knowledge (Madigan, Collins, & Lee, 2005).

The Evolution of the WIRC Thinksheet

Year I

In year one of the study, we developed and piloted 120 thinksheets, 60 in each of two categories, Write to Read and Text to Test. We tested and revised the thinksheets and they are currently being used, in some cases with additional refinements, in year two.

Early thinksheets had essentially two parts, the culminating writing task at the end and the questions that scaffold students to reach that end successfully. An example of this was based on the Harcourt fifth grade selection Oceans by Seymour Simon. The thinksheet asked students to read certain paragraphs from the selection and determine the topic, main idea, and supporting details for each paragraph. The students were next asked to complete a writing task to incorporate the blocks of writing they had put together by identifying topics, main ideas, and details from the reading and writing in the previous section.

The result of this format though was heavily teacher centered instruction as the teacher moved the students through the identification of main ideas and details. As a result many of the students wrote identical extended writing pieces. The WIRC team then incorporated a workshop style of instruction in which the teacher leads brief (five minute) mini-lessons followed by five to ten minutes of work, or writing time, for the students. We expected that a 30 to 40 minute lesson would have several blocks combining mini-lessons with workshop style reading and writing focused on the thinksheet. We also expected the mini-lessons to get shorter and shorted as the workshop blocks get longer and longer. We take the name for this style of instruction, the “Gradual Release of Responsibility,” from research on reading comprehension (for example, Anthony, Pearson, & Raphael, 1993).

However, as we continued to analyze student extended writing, we noted they relied heavily on listing their ideas. This type of writing demonstrated to us that students were not logically organizing and thinking about how to apply their answers from the first section in the context of a longer, connected, cohesive response in the extended writing section. We adjusted our thinksheet design to move students beyond this type of writing—listing—to more cohesive text that logically moves the ideas forward in a line. This change was evidenced in the thinksheet for the Harcourt fifth grade selection Evelyn Cisneros: Prima Ballerina by Charnon Simon.

We worked to help students organize and think more deeply about their responses by having them complete a graphic organizer. In the Evelyn Cisneros example, the graphic organizer was a web with numbered spaces for students to fill in the information and organize it in a logical and meaningful way.

When students completed the thinksheet for Evelyn Cisneros, their extended writing was more detailed, and they more frequently brought in their own ideas based on their notes from the reading. The verbatim, unreflective copying from the first section, which we earlier observed, lessened as students began to create their own meaning through guided writing.

Year II
The first structural change we made to the thinksheets in year 2 was in the extended writing portion. We wanted to continue to move students away from mindless, verbatim copied, listed writing. In order to do that, we provided suggestions for the structure of the extended writing response. Within theme one of the fourth and fifth grade Harcourt texts respectively, we altered the extended writing page to include prompts to call out the parts of extended writing: Introduction, supporting details, and conclusion. The idea was to assist students with further organizing their ideas to include in the graphic organizer. Our hope was that by including these sections, students would move away from listing in order to meet the needs of the writing structures.

We next took this structural assistance a step further by providing students with starters for their extended writing. For example, the thinksheet for the Harcourt fifth grade selection Dear Mrs. Parks, we asked students to write two paragraphs based on two pieces of advice from Rosa Parks. To do this we provided students with the following starters in the extended writing section of the thinksheet: “One piece of advice that Mrs. Parks gave that I found helpful was” and “I found this advice helpful because.”

However, the remaining writing space confined students. In an effort to prevent students from listing by providing structure for them, we actually seemed to limit their writing, and as a result, their ability or willingness to transform their knowledge about the text through their writing.

Our next innovation combined the ideas we attempted before: Structural hints and starters. But, rather than limit the students’ writing by inserting the starters directly in the extended writing space, we included hint boxes along the left side of the extended writing page. An example of this was in the Harcourt fourth grade selection Nights of the Pufflings. This example also demonstrates how the hint boxes, like the rest of the thinksheet, are specific to the selection being written about. The first hint box included the following: “Introduction: State your main idea.” The second and third hint boxes provided students with information to assist them in developing support for their main idea. These boxes read as follows: “First body paragraph: Explain what the pufflings do at the end of the summer;” the second, “second body paragraph: Explain how Halla and her friends rescue the stranded pufflings.” Finally, the last hint box called for the students to write their conclusion and to “summarize what you have learned by reading and writing about the pufflings.”

Even with these hint boxes, we remained concerned about the level of listing and ability of students to connect their writing logically as they transformed their knowledge about the reading.

Select and Connect: The Call for Cohesion

As year 2 progressed we were still concerned with the level of copying ideas in the form of lists on the extended writing, so we began to call out cohesion in students’ extended writing. We looked deeper into the existing cohesion and cohesive ties research. Cox, Shanahan, and Sulzby (1990) note that, “in a cohesive text, the author’s thoughts are related to each other through a series of cohesive ties between words in the text” (p. 50). These relationships, or connections, were exactly what we were looking to call out in student extended writing on the thinksheets. We hypothesized that if students can develop cohesion or connectivity in their writing, this would aide in their ability to transform their knowledge as they wrote about a text and move them beyond reliance on the knowledge telling that is associated with listing in the form of expository writing.

The changes that we developed to create the “Select and Connect” thinksheet were twofold. First, the directions to students in each of the three sections (ideas, organization, and extended writing) were altered to present a more coherent and scaffolded single task. For example, the instructions for the ideas section of The Harcourt fifth grade selection World of William Joyce Scrapbook read: “While you are reading, answer the questions that focus on what William Joyce tells us about how becoming a writer and illustrator in The World of William Joyce Scrapbook. The graphic organizer directions read: “Now that you have identified a lot of details about how William Joyce became a writer and illustrator, study the details and select the ones you believe to be most important for describing how he learned to do what he does. Put those details in the boxes below, beginning with your most important detail. This will help you to write on the next page.” The students were asked to select specific information from the ideas section to meet their needs. The selection of specific information was intended to develop a more clear scaffold to the extended writing, the directions for which read, “In the space below, describe how William Joyce became a writer and illustrator based on the important details that you gathered on the previous page.”

To further scaffold students through their extended writing, the hint boxes were also altered to call out connectivity in student writing. Fr instance, the World of William Joyce Scrapbook thinksheet included hint boxes that read: “Introduction: Who is William Joyce and what are you going to say about him?” “Body: Use your important details to describe how William Joyce became a writer and illustrator;” “Conclusion: What do you think should be said here?” Not only were these hint boxes intended to call out the students’ connections in their writing, but the conclusion box was intended to help students think about what they wrote—to become metacognitive.

As year 2 moved on, we continued to refine the “Select and Connect” thinksheets. Specifically, in the extended writing section, we included more hints to call for connectedness in student writing. For example, the thinksheet for the Harcourt fourth grade selection A Very Important Day, the prompt asked students to write about how the author uses snow to show that people from all over the world are excited about becoming American citizens. The first hint box stated, “Introduction: Tell us what you are going to write about.” The second was much more extensive in its intended assistance to students, and read, “Body: Show us how the author uses snow by writing two groups of sentences which connect the information you selected for your graphic organizer.” Finally, the third hint box read, “STOP: Reread what you have written. Conclusion: What do you think should be said here?” We continued to call for the students to be aware of their writing and to assist them with developing sentences that grew out of the previous in order to connect their ideas logically and cohesively.

The development of thinksheets continued even further as we met with a group of teachers and analyzed video of teachers using thinksheets. One instance of this was in a fourth grade classroom using the thinksheet for the Harcourt fourth grade selection In the Days of King Adobe. Here we noted several things about the teacher’s incorporation of the thinksheet into her lesson.

A Five Day Lesson

“Writing about Reading in a Fourth Grade Classroom”

Sean Turner

University at Buffalo

The purpose of this project was to identify aspects of transformation within classroom discourse of a fourth grade classroom that was part of the W.I.R.C. grant project. For the purpose of relating the findings of this inquiry with the study of the W.I.R.C. project, I will identify the social spheres that existed within the writing about reading activities that took place during a five-day period and explore how aspects of transformation, as identified in past research, did or did not take place within these spheres. The significance of this inquiry is that by identifying the various types of transformations that took place over a five-day period, other inquiry into how these transformations might be connected with specific thinksheet design, student extended writing about reading, and the W.I.R.C. instructional model will become possible.

The notion of transformation is supported by literature that has noted how aspects of transformation can be shaped within different activities. Bakhtin (1981) argued that there a transformation of voice is possible when each individual provides a separate utterance that when used in a different context (sphere) develops its own speech genre. Gee (2003) argued that identity can be shaped through various interactions between sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Freire (1990) argued that teacher and student intercommunication becomes a reality that serves as a medium for the transformation action of both. Denzin (1999) argued that the process of performing challenges existing ways of knowing and representing the world through immediacy and involvement.