Glossary of Terms

Glossary of Terms

Golden Lines:

By Golden Lines, we mean a phrases or sentence or group of sentences that struck you as interesting, surprising, key, or perhaps lines you would like to hear others’ opinions about.

Evidence/Interpretation Notetaker, a type of Metacognitive Log

Metacognitive logs provide a place for students to think and write about their own reading process with extended assignments, such as textbook chapters, whole books, the texts for a course project, or for other media such as videos, math problems, observations in a science lab. The Evidence/Interpretation Notetaker is one kind of Metacognitive log.

Talking to the Text

This routine is similar to a Think Aloud because it is a reading process analysis, and it is done while reading a text. Most importantly, Talking to the Text (TttT) is first completed individually or as a private reading experience. Readers are asked to mark their texts so that they have a means of revisiting their thinking. Also readers have time to process their text, reread for comprehension, make detailed annotations on the text, question the material, and draw inferences and conclusions, which take time to derive.

Think Aloud

Think Alouds ask readers to verbalize their thinking as they read. Readers interrupt their reading to talk or think out loud about the text, visualize the text, make connections, sort through puzzlements, make predictions, and ask questions about the text.

Think-Pair-Share

Think-Pair-Share is a discourse routine we use to refer to reflective thinking about text, pairing up to listen and further reflect on the text, and then sharing our thoughts on the text. This routine supports metacognitive conversation as readers learn about the reading processes of others.

Reading Strategies List

A Reading Strategies List is a group-generated compilation of strategies that readers identify as part of their process in working through comprehending a text. Prompts that help readers identify their strategies can be open-ended, such as:

"What did you do to make sense of this text?"

"Where did you encounter challenges?"

"What did you do to help with these challenges?"

As participants offer their responses to these open-ended questions, skillful teachers can probe further with follow-up questions that help deepen understanding of the diverse kinds of thinking/reading processes. Samples of effective probing questions on participants' reading processes include:

"Where in the text did you use that strategy?"

"How did it help you?"

Through these probing questions, Reading Strategies Lists can reflect more nuanced kinds of reading processes.

This list helps provide a common classroom language for discussing how to approach various texts as it captures the reading processes of a classroom. These lists should be posted in the classroom; students will refer to these strategy lists when their texts demand more academic and varied reading skills. Rather than a static list of recommended strategies, a Reading Strategies List is a living document coming out of specific reading experiences that all members of a class community can add to over time.