Roosevelt Elementary School: Teacher Learning
Long Beach, California
The work of teaching is not only difficult, but it is also fast paced. It is the exceptional teacher who is self-reflective and aware of metacognitive processes (see Chapter 15, Inviting Explicit Thinking). Too often teachers are so focused on working with students that they rarely turn inward to notice what and how they are thinking. Yet I believe our students should be learning to do what we adults do as we internally process our experiences. Our internal dialogue and thinking is often hidden away as well as our emotional states. In order to do this, teachers need to let students know what is happening in their heads; this can't happen if teachers are not aware of what they are doing. Once my teachers began learning Thinking Maps, they suddenly realized the types of thinking that were flowing through their minds and how the maps can show the students their adult thinking strategies and processes.
When my teachers became aware of their own thinking processes and how the Thinking Maps can communicate this to their students, they were so surprised that they had to check with someone to see if "they were doing it right." One very experienced teacher had an insight during a lesson about "the city and the country" in her first-grade class of Englishlanguage learners and came to me to check in. Lots of conversation had happened during her lesson, but at the end of the lesson, she realized that she could have organized this information into a Tree Map.
An example of this is the Tree Map created by a cooperative group about an emotion that surfaced during the reading of a Junie B. Jones book (Figure 10.1). These five students were able to use the map to organize their thinking about anger: what it is, references to characters in other books who show anger (text-to-text connections), what it looks like, and then, things that one would say when angry. "M-r. Angry" is at the top of the tree. By visually modeling a process for thinking through ideas, and even working through the contents of emotions, a teacher can let her students know how she had organized this information in her head. The students see thinking evolve and then use the tools independently and in cooperative groups. Language and cognitive development then go hand in hand.
More information about Roosevelt Elementary School is part of the book Student Successes With Thinking Maps — read excerpts from this chapter and other chapters about the student successes.