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Reading Between the Lines: A Metacognitive Approach to Deep Reading

2013 CRLA Conference

Presenters: Allen Williams and Leonard Geddes

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Kate Chopin – “The Story of an Hour”

Please take about five minutes to read through the short story.

Think about:Your immediate reaction to

the story and its ending?What’s important about the

story?

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Metacognition

“an appreciation of what one already knows, together with a correct apprehension of the learning task and what knowledge and skills it requires, combined with the agility to make correct inferences about how to apply one’s strategic knowledge to a particular situation, and to do so efficiently and reliably.”

Taylor, S. (1999). Better learning through better thinking: Developing students’ metacognitive abilities. Journal of College Reading and Learning , 34-45.C

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What do I know?

What must I know?

How do I get to what I need to know?

What strategies will get me to what I need to know?

What’s the quickest and surest way of getting there?

What will I be able to do once I am there?

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Relationship Between Metacognition and Critical Thinking

“Critical thinking can be seen as having two components:

1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and

2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behavior” (Scriven & Paul, 1987).

http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

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Applied Critical Thinking: Invisible Man

Real student examples of remembering, understanding, applying, and analyzing from writing assignments based on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

What might examples of evaluating and creating look like when applied to literary study?

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Instructional Design and Metacognitive Instruction

Metacognitive instruction is an approach to teaching that incorporates both the course content and ways of thinking about content into the instructional design.

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Scaffolding Example: Deliverance

Themes Motifs Symbols

• Nature• Sex• Gender• Responsibility

• Foreboding/Dread

• Artificiality• Death• Dirt/excrement• Strength/

Weakness

• Pencil (3)• Beer steins (4)• Fountain (16)• Eye (22, 28)• Birds/Owl (25)• Arrows (32)• Shotgun (128)• Canoe (136)

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Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to: independently and analytically read a variety of literary texts and express

their comprehension through various tasks; identify literary devices that are used to represent abstract ideas or

qualities; provide meaningful, content-focused contributions to class discussions; collaboratively work with peers on complex projects and assignments; independently write coherent, well-supported arguments about text; evaluate, design and create texts for a variety of purposes and

audiences; and express knowledge and comprehension of major texts and traditions

of language and literature written in English as well as their social, cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts.

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Feedback/Questions

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