A Strategic Approach to Reading

Launched in response to MOE’s “Teach Less, Learn More” initiative, HoM was developed based on the 16 types of intelligent behaviours described in Habits of Mind: A Developmental Series, by educators Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick. Changkat Primary School identified seven of these habits as “thinking” habits, viz.:

1. Thinking flexibly
2. Thinking about thinking
3. Questioning and posing problems
4. Applying past knowledge to new situations
5. Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
6. Thinking interdependently
7. Gathering data through all senses

Students viewing the SPACE framework during class.

As teacher Ms Suzanne Chia explains, “These habits will help our pupils to learn well not just in primary school, but throughout their education. So we decided to teach these habits explicitly, by infusing them into a reading comprehension module for Primary 5.” Launched as a pilot project in 2006, the module’s eight lessons focus on helping pupils to develop the following three characteristics of a strategic reader:

1) Self monitoring
Habits of Mind used: questioning and posing problems, thinking and communicating with clarity.

Pupils learn how to generate questions that will help them understand the meaning of the text. As they first read the text, they are taught the think-aloud strategy, i.e. to verbalise their thoughts and ask themselves questions as they read. They also use active reading symbols to record these mental processes, so that they and their teachers can monitor their learning. For example, “?” indicates pupils have a question or need clarification, “???” means they are confused and “+” refers to new information or learning something new.

2) Self-managing
Habits of Mind used: thinking about thinking, applying past knowledge to new situations.

During their second reading of the text, pupils self-manage their understanding by deciding what reading strategies to apply to help them “fix” their understanding. They also reason why they would choose one strategy over another. In the process, they use reading strategy symbols to visually track their mental processes. For instance, “rr” indicates that they have reread the text, “v” represents visualising and a triangle represents researching.

3) Self-modifying
Habits of Mind used: remaining open to continuous learning, thinking interdependently.

After each lesson, pupils reflect on the HoM they applied to help them in their reading. They even evaluate the effectiveness of the reading strategies they used. Pupils do paired “think aloud” activities to help each other understand their reading.

English teacher Ms Syarifah Fatimah says that pupils have shown improvements in their narrative writing by using the SPACE framework.

Sounds like a lot to absorb? It certainly was, and when the HoM lessons were introduced last year, pupils did not take to them immediately. Now, they’ve come to appreciate HoM as an integral part of their reading. Pupil Irsyaad Hasif says, “Now I feel more confident. I know the difference between thinking in your mind and thinking aloud. When I think aloud, I get an even clearer idea about the passage than just by thinking in my mind.”

The Next Step: Narrative Writing with HoM

This year, Changkat Primary School took HoM a step further in teaching writing strategies to all Pri 4 pupils. "As the pupils took to the reading strategies well, we thought the HoM approach would work with teaching other important skills too," says teacher Ms Syarifah Fatimah. Where writing is concerned, it's all about teaching HoM strategies in tandem with SPACE, a narrative framework that highlights the main components in story-writing: setting, purpose, actions, conclusion and emotions.

Pupils learn what a writer’s purpose is for each component and how they can go about achieving it. For example, one “purpose” of a writer might be to build suspense, which pupils can do by hinting at what is going to happen in their story and making their readers wonder along in anticipation. At the same time, SPACE teaches pupils Habits of Mind like thinking interdependently, applying past knowledge to new situations and thinking and communicating with clarity and precision.

Becoming Proactive Learners

With the new writing lessons for Pri 4 pupils and the expansion of the reading strategies lessons to include the entire Pri 5 cohort, HoM is well on its way to becoming an essential and effective teaching strategy at Changkat Primary School. Besides helping pupils to become lifelong learners, it also prepares them to face situations in which the answer is not apparent - precisely the kinds of dilemmas or uncertainties that have become all too common these days.