The 4th grade students gathered on the floor. Their eyes scanned the classroom, somewhat intimidated by the large number of teachers who had joined them to watch the lesson. Ellin Oliver Keene, author of many books including To Understand, Mosaic of Thought, and Engaging Children, had recently flown in from Colorado to work with teachers in the area and was now modeling a lesson in our school in Byron Center, MI. Teachers stood around the perimeter of the classroom with notebooks in hand, eager to watch Ellin encourage and inspire the students to think deeply about their reading.

“I have a word to teach you, but I’m trying to decide if you can handle it,” she began. “I didn’t learn this word until I was in college.”

“We can handle it! We want to learn it!” shouted all the children.

This brilliant opening drew the children in to beginning to learn about metacognition. Metacognition, the understanding and awareness of our own thought processes, may seem like an unlikely word to teach a class of 4th graders. What could be the purpose of teaching them a word such as this after all?

Our research project is designed to address the problem of the lack of understanding and engagement during independent reading that we have witnessed in many of our students. We have hypothesized that explicitly teaching children thinking strategies will lead to deeper comprehension and more authentic engagement while reading. And the only way a child can successfully employ any of these strategies is to be metacognitive. How can a student monitor for comprehension if she isn’t aware of her thinking? If she isn’t aware of what she is thinking about while she is reading? How can a child engage deeply with a text if he is unaware of the questions he is thinking about while reading a book? The ability to be metacognitive is essential in order for a student to successfully employ reading strategies.

Soon the children appeared to lose all awareness of the large number of adults filling their classroom space as they became engrossed in the lesson. Using the beautiful book, Freedom on the Menu by Carole Boston Weatherford, Ellin modeled her own metacognitive process while reading about the sit ins that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement. At several spots in the book she stopped with the words, “Wait. I need to stop and think about my thinking.”

Gradually, students began raising their hands. “Are you thinking about your thinking?” Ellin asked each child with a voice of excited astonishment. And they were. The children began sharing the thoughts they had while Ellin was reading. Their thinking was amazing. Inspiring. Their thinking lifted the hearts of every adult in that room. At one point Ellin gently replied to a child’s thinking with the words, “That feeling you have, my dear, is righteous indignation.”

The children were then charged with a task. Choose to read or write. The students had the option to read and stop to think about their thinking. They also had the option to write about the thinking they had during the read aloud. One student expressed interest in reading Freedom on the Menu again and spontaneously a committee was formed of students rereading the book and discussing the new thinking they had during the second read. Other students pulled out notebooks and began writing, seemingly oblivious to all the visitors in the room. And many students chose to read.

The work has now begun. There is much more ahead of us. We, the teachers, have to figure out a way to continue this momentum that was started with Ellin’s lesson. We have to continue to equip students with the tools necessary to solve the problems they experience while reading, to determine what is important in the books they read, and to ask the types of questions that lead to deeper thinking. But we have now begun. And there is no doubt that the students are excited to join us on this journey.

A fourth grade teacher and I are teaming up to complete an action research project. This project started with questions regarding problems we noticed in the classroom. Why do some students have trouble finishing books? Why do some students pretend to read during independent reading time instead of being truly engaged in the book they are reading? Why are some students able to read the words on the page yet lack little understanding of what the page was about? Why do some students continue to plow through their books and are seemingly unaware of any comprehension problems they are experiencing?

I believe that the root of all of these problems is the lack of metacognition and an inability to utilize useful strategies when comprehension problems arise. In other words, students appear to lack the ability to think about their own thinking. They are not tuned into the inner voice inside their head. As a wise professor once told me, “The difference between a skilled reader and an unskilled reader is their metacognitive abilities. A skilled reader knows when she stops understanding the text and knows strategies she can use to help herself better understand. An unskilled reader is unaware when she stops understanding and continues to read despite not really knowing what is happening in the book.”

If weak metacognitive abilities and a lack of awareness of useful reading strategies are really at the heart of (or at least a major contributing factor to) why students are disengaging from books, then it is our responsibility to explicitly teach children how to be metacognitive when they read. And we must teach them practical strategies they can use that will help them to be more successful in solving the problems they experience.

And from all of that thinking, our research project was born. We have set out to determine the current level at which our students are functioning. Not each child’s current reading level. Not the children’s lexiles, NWEA scores, or number of words read in a minute. While all of that information may have its purpose, we have set out to determine something that is rarely measured on any standardized assessment. We want to know how well children are able to think about their thinking. We want to know how efficiently and effectively students are able to utilize strategies when they are reading. And even more importantly, we want to measure how much growth a child demonstrates in those areas when explicit instruction on metacognition and reading strategies is given.

It feels daunting and overwhelming. Doubts about my ability to provide the necessary instruction keep creeping into my mind. And the curricular demands of the school year threaten to steal the time needed to provide this level of explicit instruction. But it is necessary. We need to raise children who not only know how to read, but children who are readers. Children who are able to think deeply about books, who become lost in stories, and who grow as empathetic human beings. The stakes are high and we are eager to begin!