Reading And Writing Together

Reading, Responding and Reflecting
JEAN LIFFORD, BARBARA BYRON, JEAN ECKBLAD, AND CAROL ZIEMIAN
Background
Why do so many of our students, even so-called good students, year after year “construct”the same misreadings of many of the literary texts used in class? Why, forinstance, do students insist that Eveline is simply behaving as a dutiful daughter when she refuses to run away with Frank, thus ignoring Joyce’s description of her as “passive, like a helpless animal”? Why do students agree with narrators like Jack in Canin’sstory, “Lies,” that the father tells the truth and the mother lies, or with eas . . . Rather they create something in the process of reading and what they create depends not only on the text itself but also on who the readers are and what they bring with them to the reading” (Probst 62). As Constance Weaver proposes in Reading Process and Practice, “The reader brings meaning to the text in order to get meaning from it” (38). Like process writing, this approach did encourage our students to see themselves as meaning makers when it came to reading; no longer did they view literature class simply as a game of “Guess what’s in the teacher’s brain.” By responding in journals about their reactions to what they read, students did consider the emotions, insights, and connections to their own life experiences that the text elicited. And they did appreciate this focus on their ideas. In surveys, they made such statements as, “Now my ideas are valued,” or “Now I do much more thinking when I read.” However, even with this emphasis on the reading strategies that students could employ to access and understand increasingly difficult texts, we did not see these strategies becoming an inherent part of their reading, thinking, comprehending process. As Probst also noticed, while students did become more actively engaged in the reading process when they wrote in response journals about their transactions with works, too often their responses were loose and strayed from the text. It soon became evident to us that telling students to speculate, hypothesize, question, reflect, and wonder in their journals did not always result in responses where they actually thought about ambiguities, tried to fill in gaps, or pondered contradictory or alternative interpretations. Instead, students seemed to want to “naturalize” a text by judging characters and events according to their own values (McCormick, Fowler, and Waller 120). According to Martha Rozett in Talking Back to Shakespeare, student readers often reduce texts to fit their experiences. They “apply interpretive conventions that frequently put a good deal of emphasis on characters as responsible members of society, accountable for the consequences of their behavior” (16). In addition, as Michael Smith explores in Understanding Unreliable Narrators, students find it too easy to ignore point of view, assuming that narrators are reliable and that, most likely, authors are speaking through the central character (144). Moreover, in responding to poetry or to especially dense or ambiguous passages in prose pieces, students miss specific clues to meaning by ignoring pronoun referents; attending superficially to word patterns; and skipping over confusing passages, terms, and vocabulary. Study In English classes grades six through twelve, then, we have experimented with more direct instruction of the explicit strategies that students should use when reading. Perhaps equally important, we have included more frequent, ongoing, diverse opportunities for students to debrief and reflect on their effectiveness in integrating these strategies into their reading processes. As Laura Soldner states in “Self- Assessment and the Reflective Reader,” activities that encourage students to write about their thinking and reading strategies help them to “examine whether what they are doing is working in order to build on their successes or to reflect upon the difficulties they are experiencing so they may determine for themselves what steps to take to resolve their struggles with reading and learning” (2). The Rhode Island English Language Arts Frameworks devotes an entire standard to metacognition and self-evaluation: Students will be aware of how they gain meaning from text, how they create text to communicate meaning, and how their previous knowledge and experiences are brought to bear on text. This consciousness is crucial if students are to adjust or adapt their thinking strategies to changing circumstances.
For our overall program of comprehension instruction we found the profiles of what thoughtful readers do developed by David Pearson, Laura Roehler, Janice Dole, and Gerald Duffy most helpful. Thoughtful readers (1) use prior knowledge, (2) “monitor their comprehension” as they read, (3) use fix-up strategies to repair comprehension that “has gone awry,” (4) “are able to determine what’s important” in reading, (5) “synthesize information when they read,” (6) “draw inferences during and after reading,” and (7) ask questions. Pearson et al. also offer some instructional “rules of thumb.” These include (1) teaching a small number of key strategies well and applying them frequently, (2) recognizing that reading is not a set of isolated skills picked up sequentially; rather it is a “process of emerging expertise,” and (3) treating reading strategies as adaptable. In addition, Pearson and his colleagues emphasize the importance of metacognition by concluding that good reading instruction helps students to “develop understanding about reading,” in terms of both large concepts and “how, when, and where” to use specific strategies (153–169). In addition to these broad comprehension factors that help students construct meaning, John Chapman suggests that teachers focus on explicit factors of language structure that students need to consider if they are to develop a meaningful big picture. In other words, two processes are at work almost simultaneously. As I. A. Richards posits, readers must both construe meaning (complete a careful literal reading) and at the same time construct meaning (question, wonder, and interpret) (Berthoff 18). Activities for Practicing Strategies As part of our current literature instruction, in addition to the typical reader-response, open-ended prompts we had been using, we now include a number of activities that help our students practice specific strategies and reflect on and assess how effectively they use these strategies when they read. Writing is fundamental to most of these activities. The very act of writing not only reflects thinking, but actually stimulates it. Beginning writing activities for each unit, then, consist of exploratory journal E n g l i s h J o u r n a l writing, focused responses, and reflective pieces. These activities, what Peter Elbow calls first-order writing, help students to develop or “complicate” their thinking, and they are, of course, by nature active, eliciting discovery exploration, and hypothesis. To help our students, particularly younger students, figure out how to begin to respond, we model our own thinking processes. As we read aloud a text, we make explicit to students what we are thinking. We consider implications of the title, make predictions, and ask ourselves questions: Who is this person? What is he like? What is he doing? Why is he acting in a particular way? We attempt to answer these questions as we learn new information. We also try to show how we connect the events in the text to events in our own lives, to other books we have read, to movies we have seen. After modeling our thinking for about a third of the story, we ask the class to list what they have noticed about our strategies. The students then continue to read the story and, in journals or with a partner, practice responding and building meaning, using the strategies modeled. Supporting the premise that “all learning begins with a question,” we frequently ask our students to jot down all questions that a literary text raises. Next, we sometimes have our students complete
a “write along.” This process began as a “thinkaloud” modeling technique for the beginning of a book where the students shared their thought processes with the rest of the class (Davey 44–47). However, we soon modified this technique to the “write-along,” where they do the same thing, but on paper. After each paragraph readers write about what went on in their heads during the reading: what they visualized, what they discovered, what words they didn’t recognize, what expectations were aroused, etc. This method, while time consuming, is particularly effective with less able students. Not only do they learn from their peers during classsharing, but the act of writing about one paragraph at a time engages them more fully in actually thinking about what they read, while also guiding them to attend to the specific details of the passage. A more sophisticated version of the “write along” is Vendler’s “line-by-line” technique used for poetry. Students produce wonderful responses to poetry with this technique. For a unit on Shakespeare’s sonnets the class began with Sonnet 73 (“That time of year . . .”), writing all the thoughts and questions that surfaced in their minds after reading each line of the poem. Together they shared their thoughts, discussing images, shifts in meaning, and implications. Next, pairs of students chose two sonnets, wrote line-by-lines for both sonnets,
shared and discussed them with each other, and then each student in the pair elected to write an analysis of one sonnet. The resulting essays were wonderful and revealed close, thoughtful analyses of the twenty or so sonnets selected. Supporting the premise that “all learning begins with a question,” we frequently ask our students to jot down all questions that a literary text raises. Upon completing their list of questions, students are asked to reread the piece and then write a response that focuses on some or all of the questions they originally asked. This focused response can then be used to generate topics for an essay, analyzing more fully the meaning they have constructed. Recently a group of ninth-grade students followed this procedure for “Reunion,” which appeared on the 1988 AP exam. They developed perceptive questions about point of view, theme, author’s purpose, etc. They asked, Why hasn’t the narrator seen his father since the divorce? Why did he suddenly want to see his father? Why is the father “his future, his doom”? What significance does the narrator’s journey hold? Their ensuing responses led to perceptive analyses of the prose piece. One student wrote about her embarrassment for the boy in “Reunion.” She also explored the possible reasons for the father’s failure to “grow up” as well as the boy’s assumption that he must become like his father. She also connected the piece to Of Mice and Men and Tuck Everlasting. Her final essay stressed the feelings of loneliness the boy reveals as he struggles to sort out the complex emotions that surface from seeing his father. Paraphrasing is an activity that even our more able students benefit from, for we agree with Ann Berthoff that it is an essential but often neglected reading skill (19–20). Last June a group of sophomore students completing an end-of-the year review were impressed with how much they remembered of Antigone, which they had studied months before. When the teacher commented on their recollection, one student countered with, “Well, what did you expect? We practically had to rewrite the whole play in our journals.” And the juniors who had been working on this strategy most of the year said that they knew they really understood something when they could put it in their own words. One commented, “If I get fouled up when trying to explain [what I’ve read to someone else], I know I have to read it over.” Another more open-ended journal activity that encourages students to return to a text and read more closely is to have them select and write about sentences that they think are significant. They can then share their ideas in pairs, come to some agreement as to which sentences seem most important, and even rank order the sentences. This procedure encourages students to begin to think about thematic implications and gives them solid quotes to integrate into any essay they may write on the text. Last year one student with many past failures captured the merit of this system when he struggled to find a quote with which to begin his essay. “I base the whole idea for my paper on that quote,” he said. In addition to these writing activities that help students think, question, and wonder as a means of constructing meaning, we have also come to realize that, as texts become denser, more ambiguous, and more challenging, students need direct instruction on how to figure out some of the more literal levels of meaning—what Richards refers to as “construing meaning.” As Chapman notes, children must become conscious of language structure, and in order for this to happen, factors of that structure— including language variety, tone, and elements of cohesion—must be made explicit. Cohesion can be described as the things within a text that provide clues for the integration of meaning. Linguists refer to anaphora, the process of linking what is being read now with what went before, and to anaphoric chains, the linguistic linking mechanisms that tie texts together, including reference groups, substitutions, ellipses, conjunctions, and lexical cohesion. Chapman says that some students only come to grasp the use of reference groups (e.g., personal or demonstrative pronouns), substitutions (appositives), and ellipses (omissions) late in secondary school. Students in two junior classes concentrated on lexical chains throughout the year. Some students had never before understood the connection between these ideas—which they had thought of as “grammar”—and the unraveling of challenging passages in reading. One of the first activities was with Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Chambered Nautilus,” found in most junior anthologies. Classes commonly had difficulty with this poem because they missed the referents for the appositives or the places where there are pronoun shifts. An added difficulty is the use of metaphors, so that in the first stanza, for example, the pronoun “its” in line four refers grammatically to “the venturous bark,” itself an appositive for the “ship of pearl,” which is a metaphor for the nautilus shell. Asked during third term what they had learned from the work we had done with several reading strategies, one student said, “When I read something that jumps around from he to she to it, I . . . stop and think about each one. In the past I probably would have taken a less productive approach.” Her classmate wrote that in the past she would get “confused” because she “would think that one pronoun always referred to the same thing. But when we [worked on] this, I realized, ‘duh,’ it doesn’t always refer to the same thing.”
In June the students were asked to respond specifically to the work we had done on the lexical chains. Most felt that their awareness of these connections had made a difference, especially in their reading of poems and particularly dense prose. A young man commented: At first it wasn’t a big deal to [identify the antecedents to the pronouns]. Then we started reading more poetry, which is confusing to me anyway. It helped out a great deal to have . . . skill in [finding] what the pronoun refers to. For example, in “First Death in Nova Scotia” the second stanza has tons of his’s. After looking for a while you could finally figure out that they refer to the loon. A classmate said, “More difficult selections become easier because I can make connections. Seemingly impossible poems become simple.” Metacognition In spite of their success, all of these activities by themselves are not enough. While they provide lots of opportunities for students to practice various strategies, they do not necessarily help students recognize when to apply them; therefore, students also need to develop a conscious awareness of exactly how strategies help them to transact with texts. A few years ago we put into place a performance assessment program that asks students at the beginning of the year to complete self-evaluations of reading. This one-time evaluation, however, was not enough, for although many students would check off that they regularly “question, wonder and hypothesize” when they read, “reread and examine sections of the text that are confusing or ambiguous,” “broaden or change [their] original interpretation when necessary,” and “recognize and evaluate the point of view of the narrator,” their written responses suggested that they did not in fact practice these strategies. We began by asking our students to comment on their strengths as readers. We soon realized that we were not providing enough specific and formal opportunities for students to do this kind of reflecting. Because we had not asked students to think about reading strategies and evaluate their own reading processes on a consistent basis, they had not been able to internalize understandings to the degree we had hoped. Jack Thomson advocates providing ongoing opportunities for helping students become conscious of the constructive strategies they use in their reading, for in doing so they can move to higher levels of response and gain greater control of what they are reading: This reflexive understanding is very powerful knowledge, and it helps people control their own learning processes. If we know what we know, and if we know how we came to know it, we are powerful people . . . [And] once readers realize how and why they have read a text in a particular way, they can then choose to read it in alternative ways. (132, 144) Recently, we decided to incorporate more frequent opportunities for students to reflect on and analyze their reading practices. While we have always suggested that students test their interpretations by making sure that their ideas are not contradicted by elements of the text, and, as Wilhelm says, “Nothing is projected for which there is no verbal basis” (27), students have not found this kind of self-testing easy. Again, by providing specific occasions for them to revisit reading responses, perhaps students would become more self-conscious and more in control of the way they respond to texts. We began by asking our students to comment on their strengths as readers. Some of the more sophisticated responses included such comments as, “I read over sections more than once and look for different meanings,” or “I look for things that could possibly be used for documenting a theme later on.” However, like their self-evaluations, their responses in reading journals did not support their assessment of their reading strengths. For instance, one group of students read and responded to a series of short stories and autobiographical excerpts such as Joyce’s “Eveline” and Canin’s “Lies.” In these responses they tended to evaluate the characters’ decisions in moral terms; they failed to consider the author’s criticism of the world in which the character lived; and they neglected to consider the implications of the character’s language or what the character said as an indication of who the character might be. Although teacher comments— What do you mean by this? What might be the character’s motivation? What does this show about her? Don’t stray so far from the text.—helped somewhat, students did not necessarily apply this kind of practice to the next story they read. Even when specifically directed to consider endings carefully and to notice how the words the characters use provide wonderful clues about the character, the students did not find it easy to apply guidelines. What is interesting, though, is that the students, on the whole, did a very thorough job of responding to their peers. They made the following kinds of statements: Discuss the ending further; what does she mean by her last sentence? How has she emotionally changed? What do you make of this? What are Alice’s characteristics that lead you to say this? Why do you think she does this? What fascinates us is that they can make these kinds of statements about their peer’s work but still continue to misread themselves. Perhaps having the language to describe one’s reading process is just the first step. Perhaps, like the reading process itself, any conscious application of strategies is a recursive as well as a spiraling procedure. It is recursive in that it begins and returns to an act of reading and spiraling in that each act of reflecting should help the reader gain increasing control over strategies. We asked our students to think about all the steps they go through from the time they begin to read to the time they feel they have made sense of what they have read. Another metacognitive activity that we now use at intervals is to ask the students to reread all of their responses, as well as the comments we had written on them, and then write again about their strengths and weaknesses as readers. One student listed several items she needed to work on: “to expand ideas instead of dropping them, to explore implications, to be less vague and define words, to avoid overstatements.” Another student wrote that she needs “to try to go deeper into the text and explore possible implications . . . and try not to use big morals and other overstatements.” Another said that she wanted “to work on examining the author’s ideas word by word . . . and to work more on trying to figure out the point of the story.” A fourth said that he wanted to develop his ideas more and to “consider the author’s point more and the author’s attitude toward the character and his world.” Again, though, having the language and applying it to one’s reading processes were two different matters. After directly teaching a variety of specific strategies and providing diverse opportunities to reflect on how effectively the students used these strategies, we experimented with Walter Haney’s suggestion that the students visualize their reading processes through a series of drawings or pictograms. Haney, Professor of Research at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy at Boston College’s Graduate School of Education, has been doing research on how drawings can be used to elicit, in a jargon-free way, feelings and thinking processes. In particular, he has had those in educational settings draw pictures as a means of gaining insight into perceptions about a school and its culture. Like Dr. Haney, we have found the pictogram activity to be a most enlightening exercise. We asked our students to think about all the steps they go through from the time they begin to read to the time they feel they have made sense of what they have read. “Think about all the thought processes you go through. Try to capture all that is involved in a series of drawings or pictograms,” we told them. Not only do these drawings provide us with a great deal of insight into how our students read, but they have also helped the students themselves to understand in a most concrete way some of the thinking that goes on in their brains when they read. We find that the range of strategies included in the drawings mirrors strikingly the level of sophistication of the reader. In analyzing the pictograms of a cross section of sixth graders, for example, we are able to see that they use a wide range of reading strategies. Most of the students indicate that they reread, sound out words, and look up words in the dictionary. They also try to construe the meaning of words from context and go back and forth trying to gain meaning. In addition, students use writing to help them understand a text. They take notes, respond in journals, write down definitions, and draw pictures. Many also stop periodically to check for comprehension. What is apparent, though, is that better readers usually have more strategies to call upon. One sixth grader, for instance, pictures ten steps as part of her reading process (Figure 1). Her pictograms reveal that she sees reading as a very complex activity where the reader has to visualize what is happening; develop questions about any difficult passages; consider how the text relates to life; and, through writing, construct a meaning. Her pictogram also delineates reading as a recursive process of questioning, hypothesizing, writing, rereading, more speculating, and more writing. While indicative of some fairly mature reading strategies, her drawing includes steps that are typical of many of the sixth graders who participated in this exercise. We credit this understanding to the increasing use of reading journals, literature circles, and performance assessment in the elementary grades. E n g l i s h J o u r n a l 51 Overall, though, what we notice in their pictograms is that sixth graders tend to be more concerned with sounding out words and finding their meanings than are older students. (Interestingly, though, older students concentrate on the word level when they encounter very challenging reading such as poems whose meaning is often too cryptic to be derived from context.) Some sixth graders, however, depend too much on this narrow range of strategies. A second sixth grader captures the reading processes of students who are still struggling at the word level. Some of these students are absorbed with word meanings, and some, like the one whose pictogram appears in Figure 2, sees reading as decoding. To this student reading is simply a process of sounding out words. If he can read the words, he has “read” the book. Interestingly, we used to find more of these readers, even in high school, when phonics was sometimes emphasized at the expense of meaning. Instruction now focuses on a balanced program of both phonics and reading for meaning, decreasing the numbers of students who are primarily word callers. An analysis of a cross-section of drawings by older students provides equally fascinating insights into their reading processes. (Figure 3 is a representative drawing.) One characteristic of almost all of the drawings is the absence of any reference to a teacher. Given all the arguments critics have made over the years about how teachers have made students dependent on their authority and on their questions, we think these pictograms are a startling indication that reader-response practices have at least removed the teacher from center stage. Another item that most students include in their drawings has to do with the act of writing. In some form or other these students, like many of the sixth graders, indicate that writing is an integral part of the way they construct meaning. Whether they are sitting at desks, lying on their beds, or using symbols to represent various steps, journals,pencils, and pictograms of stick figures writing are evident in each visualization. Again, perhaps more than we have realized, reader-response theory has influenced our students’ reading processes. The very fact that they indicate that they can write about a text without teacher intervention suggests an overall confidence in reading ability that we did not see seven or eight years ago. Another generality that surfaces is the students’ awareness of the recursive nature of reading. The majority capture in some way the act of rereading, revisiting, or rethinking some part of the text being read. Some even devote more than one pictogram to this rereading, rethinking procedure. In interviews they verified that they reread in order to look more closely at specific words and also to make sense of confusing passages. One student mentioned that he used to think that rereading was bad. “Now I learned that this is good because it allows me to pick up details I missed the first time.” Another student in his visualization has the stick figure say, “Step 4 repeat steps 2 (I’m reading it again for subtleties.) and 3 (I’m confused at some points.)” Several also make specific reference to times of confusion when they read. They indicate confusion either through the use of a question mark in a bubble above a head or through statements in the bubbles such as, “I don’t know what’s going on here,” or “I’m confused.” An equal number of students depict light bulbs above the head. One student even has two light bulbs at two different points in her ten-step reading process. These question marks and light bulbs suggest very active kinds of reading, reading where the students seem to struggle to cope with complex or difficult passages and to construct meaning out of that confusion. The majority of the students, too, in bubbles above the thinkers’ heads, draw scenes from what they are reading, indicating that visualizing characters and actions in their heads is an ongoing part of their reading processes. A large number of students, in addition, include a minimum of five steps as part of their reading process visualization, while most have many more steps. Perhaps the number of steps that students use to describe their reading processes reflects, to some degree, their awareness of all that they must do as they try to make sense of a text. Interestingly, the students who include fewer steps also tend to write the least in their journal responses. Another item that appears on many of the visualizations of older students involves some kind of discussion, either between two students or in a group in a class setting. Some even add both small-group and whole-class discussions. In interviews they state that discussion is often key to the way they make sense of a text. Student talk helps them to process their thinking, and the ideas of others inspire them to make connections and come up with new understandings. The group discussion, then, does not conclude the series of drawings but instead serves as a tool for the student’s rethinking. Typical of those who draw about student talk, one student pictures light bulbs above the One student mentioned that he used to think that rereading was bad. students’ heads in group discussion, while another member of the group has bubbled above his head the words, “I never thought of that.” In other words, students feel that group or class discussions do not provide them with a final message about the text. The discussion, instead, helps them to think in new ways about the text and to integrate these new ideas with the ones they have already formed. Several pictograms indicate changes in mood: frustration, perplexity, then elation. Many students, in fact, end their visualizations with a pictogram of a smiling face. These variations, however, also seem to verify that the students perceive that reading is not a passive activity and that they must actually “transact” with the text if any meaning is to be constructed. A pictogram drawn by a senior (Figure 4) illustrates the sophisticated reading strategies an excellent reader can orchestrate. During an interview this student confidently and unhesitatingly explained his visualization: I always read with a pen or pencil in hand as I was taught. I jot down passages that I find important. The first thing I do is discover the point of view—the head with the I, He, They—where they’re speaking from so that I can tell what might be true or false. Next—the picture with the earth, sun, and stars—I look for connections to the universal level of meaning. The three faces, happy, sad, and no expression, basically represent the attitude of the character involved, what his thoughts are, whether positive or negative. The tree, rock and animal also relate to relationships, the relationship to nature. The picture of the head with a brain represents what the character might be thinking. The question mark relates to the purpose of the character’s existence and the various aspects of his personality. The arrows pointing at the character relate to all the external forces acting on the character. The three houses and a bunch of people represent society in general and how the character is accepted.
This student’s visualization is especially interesting and complex. In particular, his focus on all the forces at work on a character as well as how the character perceives those forces would suggest a willingness to be tentative as he reads, allowing new insights to lead tore considerations of meaning. The student did mention that his reading is still improving. “I’m OK at themes and analyzing the text, but I need to spend more time on specific language as well as point of view,” he said. Overall, though, he felt that drawing the actual steps of his reading process has made him much more conscious of what he should be doing when he reads. In addition to the wealth of information that we teachers have gathered from these drawings, the students’ follow-up interviews revealed that they, too, had learned a lot. As one student so succinctly said, “Now that I’m more conscious of this process, I can concentrate on doing these things when I read.” Many of us notice that, in subsequent journal entries, this visualization exercise has helped students apply more of the strategies mentioned in their pictograms. The overall improvement in reader-response activities most likely results from the accumulation of various metacognitive tasks that we have incorporated throughout our classes. But we also think that the pictograms of their thinking processes and the follow-up explanations for each of the steps pictured have been a force in helping students actually internalize these strategies. As Kathleen Black states, “This method [drawing pictures illustrating procedures] was used in the belief that the abstract, visual nature of the task would discourage students from giving standard and possibly untrue responses to the question of how they went about writing a paper” (207). The visualizations also counter, to some extent, concerns that any measures of metacognition may simply measure recall of taught procedures, not applied understandings (University of Oklahoma 1). From what we have seen in our students’ subsequent reading responses, Kathleen Black is right. Although Dedham students had been taught the procedures and even learned the language to describe reading processes, they had not always translated these procedures and this language into actual practice. The nonstandard approach of drawing pictograms, though, has encouraged students to think about how they think. The drawings, then, work in two ways: They bring to a conscious level what has been “below conscious awareness” (University of Oklahoma 1) at the same time that they reinforce and concretize the importance of higher-level thinking and reading strategies. The visualization activity, combined with a greater emphasis on direct instruction of strategies, increased opportunities for students to practice strategies, and the effort and time put into metacognitive activities has resulted, we conclude, in more probing, careful, open-minded reading. As Robert Marzano states in Assessing Student Outcomes,“Human beings have the ability to control their own behavior, even their own thought processes, by using effective habits of mind” (23). Selfassessment is at the heart of learning to develop these habits of mind. John Abbott, in his article on the kinds of classrooms that develop broad intelligence, agrees. He says, “The ability to think about your own thinking is essential in a world of continuous change. Through metacognition, we can develop skills that are genuinely transferable . . . This deep reflective capability is what helps us devel0p new possibilities”