ýTRUCTIONAL LEADER INSTRUCTIONAL LEADER INSTRUCTIONAL LEADER

ModelingExpertThinking

Students learn morewhen they have theopportunity to listen tohow the teacher thinksand solves problems.

By Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher

Nancy Frey (nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu) is professorof teacher education at San Diego State Uni-versity and a teacher leader at Health SciencesHigh and Middle College in San Diego, CA.

Douglas Fisher (dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu) isprofessor of teacher education at San Diego

State University and a teacher leader at HealthSciences High and Middle College.

Watch the Video!

Watch a teacher use a think-aloud strategy as he reads anarticle with his class:www.principals.org/pll 11 Ofisher.

58 1 Principal Leadership I NOVEMBER 2010

he ninth-grade Earth Scienceclass is focused on live videostreamed from a news agency

showing the eruption of a small vol-cano located near the Eyjafjallajoekullglacier in Iceland. The teacher narrateswhat he is seeing as he watches withhis class. "As I'm watching this, I'm

thinking about how unique this erup-

tion is," he says. "With most volcanoes,there are earthquakes that signalsomething might be happening. Butthese volcanoes around Iceland don'tgive any warning. I checked on theUSGS Web site, and the tremors werereally small."

He continues, "I'm also noticingthat the eruption is more like a fissure.

See how it's tearing here?" He ges-tures. "It's awfully close to this glacier.If the fissure keeps widening, it's goingto have an impact on the glacier itself."

The teacher concludes, "I know thisarea [in Iceland] is where the Eurasianand North American tectonic platesmeet, because I looked on this map.

I'm guessing that there's been signifi-

cant movement of those plates, andthis volcanic eruption is the result."

Without the teacher's exposure of

his thinking, his students would be leftto their own devices to draw conclu-sions about the natural disaster theywere witnessing. In a matter of twominutes, the teacher demonstratedhow he used his background knowl-edge ("I'm thinking about how uniquethis eruption is"), consulted resources(the United States Geological Survey

and a tectonic plate map), appliedexpert noticing ("See how it's tearinghere?"), and speculated ("I'm guessingthat there's been significant move-ment"). This teacher's use of a think-

aloud procedure is an example of howexpertise is shared in the classroom.Students deserve, at some point in the

lesson, to experience the curriculum

from an expert's perspective. This pro-

vides them an opportunity to imitate

the expert thinking, almost like an ap-

prentice would in learning a new skill.

Imitation is one of the ways humans

learn, and modeling taps into this sys-

tem (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2008).

Thinking Like an ExpertTeachers regularly use modeling and

demonstration to show students how

a skill, a strategy, or a concept is used.

Although it's often associated with

such performance tasks as swinging

a tennis racket or playing a musical

instrument, modeling is equally effec-

tive for cognitive and metacognitive

tasks. Modeling includes naming the

task or the strategy, explaining when

it is used, and using analogies to link

new learning to familiar information.

The teacher then demonstrates the

task or the strategy, alerts learners

about errors to avoid, and shows them

how it is applied to check for accu-

racy. Modeling is often accompanied

by a think-aloud procedure (Davey,

1983) to further expose the decisions

made by an expert as he or she pro-

cesses information. For this reason, the

think aloud consistently contains "I"

statements to invite the learner into

the mind of the teacher.

This is a profound shift from what

most teachers are accustomed to do-

ing. Much of classroom instruction

is in the second person and is inter-

rogative in nature ("When you look

at this eruption, what do you see?").

Lecturing and quizzing become the

order of the day, and students walk

away from the class under the false

assumption that somehow the teacher

just "knows" the answers. They are

not made privy to the speculative, at

times hesitant, thinking of the content

expert. What's lost are the naturalstutter steps made by someone who isdeeply knowledgeable of the com-plexities of the topic.

It's understandable that manyteachers struggle with making this apart of instruction. The majority ofinstruction they have encounteredhas been interrogative. They don'thave an internalized model of whatan effective think aloud sounds like.Therefore, it's useful to introduceteachers to some indicators of high-quality modeling and thinking aloud.We've found it particularly helpful forteachers to watch one another modelthinking aloud and then talk abouthow it felt, both as the person model-ing and the person observing expertthinking. Some indicators we look forduring teacher modeling include:

" Naming a strategy, a skill, or atask

"* Stating the purpose of thestrategy, the skill, or the task

"* Using "I" statements"* Demonstrating how the strat-

egy, the skill, or the task is used"* Alerting learners about errors

to avoid"* Assessing the usefulness of the

strategy or the skill.Consider a mathematics teacher's

modeling for solving problems withexponents. In this case, the exponentshad variables in them: 2x-3 = 42x. Whilemodeling, the teacher said, "I see thatthe bases aren't equal, so I can't yetset the exponents equal. If I can getthe bases equal, then I know that theexponents are equal. The strategy Ican try is factoring because it mighthelp me get the bases to be equal. Ican't factor the left side any further,but I can factor the right side of theequation. Using my factor tree, I seethat four can be factored into 22. But I

have to be careful about the distribu-tive property. I know that if I don'tput parentheses around the expo-nents, I might forget to distributethe exponents correctly. Now thatI have the bases equal, I know thatthe exponents are equal. So mynext step is to rewrite the equation,x+3 = 4 x. And now, I just crank itthrough. When I get down to it, Ithink that the answer is 1. But I knowthat I'm not done yet. I have to checkmy answer by plugging it back intothe original equation."

Although one problem modeledin this way may not result in students'complete understanding, regular useof modeling builds students' familiar-ity with skills they can use to under-stand the content. Over time, studentsdevelop habits for problem solvingand critical thinking that are disci-pline specific. We know that histori-ans, mathematicians, scientists, artists,and literary critics think differentlyfrom one another (Shanahan & Sha-nahan, 2008). Modeling is one of theways that students are apprenticedinto that type of thinking. When theyhear history teachers, science teachers,English teachers, art teachers, coaches,mathematics teachers, and so on,share their thinking, students beginto develop an appreciation for thenuanced differences between contentareas, which is essential if students areto develop their own expertise in adiscipline.

Importantly, after adequate time inscaffolded instructional support thatincludes modeling, students shouldbe able to complete tasks using theskill or strategy that was modeled forthem. In other words, modeling givesstudents examples, not recipes, thatthey can follow as they complete theirown work. PL

REFERENCES

N Davey, B. (1983). Think aloud: Model-

ing the cognitive processes for reading

comprehension. Journal of Reading, 27(1),44-47.

0 Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2008).

In a reading state of mind: Brain research,teacher modeling, and comprehension instruc-tion. Newark, DE: International Reading

Association.

E Shanahan, T, & Shanahan, C. (2008).

Teaching disciplinary literacy to adoles-

cents: Rethinking content-area literacy.

Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59.

NOVEMBER 2010 1 Principal Leadership 1 59

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

TITLE: Modeling Expert ThinkingSOURCE: Princ Leadership 11 no3 N 2010

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and itis reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article inviolation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:http://www.naesp.org