Teachers can use ‘think alouds’ as a teaching tool to assist with their students comprehension.

Try to think aloud as you write, explaining how you decide what to include, what changes or revisions you make as you write, what words you choose, and how you start, develop, and end your piece.

You can also use a whiteboard to engage students in a collaborative writing project while teaching or practising specific writing skills.

What a ‘Think Aloud’ might look like in practice…

1. Explain to students that you will show them how you create images in your mind when you read a text. This think-aloud will take something that appears mysterious to children, visualizing it, and make it something they understand and think they can do too.

2. Teacher chooses a part of a text to read aloud.

3. Begin reading. Pause to verbalise your thinking and the images created in your mind. Reveal how you created the images in your mind. Explain to students how you selected rich words from the text, connected to your own personal experiences and prior knowledge and pulled phrases from the text that connect to the five senses to create the visual image.

4. Describe to students how creating the image helped them understand and enjoy what was happening in the text.

Similarly, you can use this when reading and all the thoughts that come to mind.

When students are able to articulate and provide examples of their actions, they gain a deeper understanding of their behaviour that they may have previously overlooked.

Have you ever used think-aloud as a teaching strategy in your class? If so, have you found it to be effective? We would greatly appreciate you joining the conversation and leaving a comment below.