Introducation

A New Approach: Thinking Reader

Thinking Reader is designed to do one thing: to ensure that students, even struggling students, get the systematic support and practice they will need to become skillful, strategic, self-aware, and moti- vated young readers.

Drawing on Reciprocal Teaching research (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and other research on effective strategy instruction (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley, 1990), CAST and Tom Snyder Productions developed the Thinking Reader approach. It provides for the explicit use of strategies with an integrated system of prompts, hints, models, and feedback designed to encourage students to make predictions, ask questions, summarize, clarify, visualize, and make personal responses about what they are reading. A multi-level strategy system of scaffolds provides different levels of challenge and support for each student and

5teaches them directly about the strategies they use in Thinking Reader. Additionally, through an electronic work log, students are prompted to review and reflect on their work in relation to their learning goals, supporting student goal-setting, self-monitoring, and self-efficacy. Teachers have access to the work logs and are able to use them for evaluation and to guide instruction.

Thinking Reader succeeds in this task by embedding these teaching techniques directly within a new and flexible medium for reading, creating an apprentice reading environment, one that replaces “fixed” and inert reading materials with “dynamic” and supportive instructional ones. Within Thinking Reader, every apprentice reader finds an appropriate level of challenge, and the systematic individualized support and guided practice that they will need to succeed.

The pedagogies and new technologies that underlie Thinking Reader have been researched and developed over many years. Specific prototypes have been refined and tested experimentally in middle school resource rooms and regular classrooms. The final outcome is a unique combination: solid, research- based methods for comprehension instruction embedded within an innovative new classroom medium for reading. The effect is to reduce many of the barriers to teaching reading comprehension.

First, Thinking Reader provides needed support for the teacher. By embedding research-based instruction and support directly within the materials, teachers have a powerful ally. Each student consistently finds, within the pupil edition, a fully supported apprentice reading environment that extends the reach of their teacher: virtual “mentors” that teach and model effective practices of good readers, prompts that scaffold students as they practice new strategies, and feedback that helps them continue to grow.

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