Thinking About Our Thinking??

A great deal of research is telling us that students of all ages need time to reflect on their thinking and generally talk to each other about their work.  Over the last few days we have been working on how to use INFERRING (reading between the lines) to help us draw conclusions about what we read and how inferring can help us to understand what we are reading more deeply. In the pictures below, the students are taking a piece of writing and looking for the clues that help them make inferences about the text. They are also including evidence from  the text that help them to draw their conclusions.

After that we take a few samples and discuss them as a class. We look at our criteria for inferring and discuss some examples that groups have pointed out. The pictures below are the next step in the process. The students are then give some sticky notes and asked to go through the examples from other groups of students. The students are asked to look at the work and give their friends an honest critique of their work. We encourage 1 positive comment first and then one or two critiques. Students sign their sticky notes in order to avoid anonymous negative only comments.
There is a great deal of learning going on throughout this whole process. Students learn to evaluate each others work against a set of specific criteria. They get to 'see' other groups thinking reflected in the work they produced. Students also discuss what makes a good inference-they get to hear from their peers and not just from the teacher. This activity will be followed up with individual practice with inferring from both fiction and non-fiction texts.