Stop Sign Reading

STRATEGY: “Stop Signing” ~ Metacognition
© Laura Benson

What is it? Stop sign reading reflects a reader’s habit and dispositions to create understanding before, during, and after reading by talking to oneself. Monitoring one’s understanding, a reader’s self-awareness of his/her knowledge and understanding – or lack of understanding – is voiced with self talk such as “I’m thinking…” or “I know that I know” or “I know that I need to know” as well as “I bet…” and “I wonder…” and “I learned…” to name just a few here J. [Additional self talk menus will be posted soon.]

Thinking Strategies/BRAIN SKILLS FOCUS:
Monitoring understanding with self talk and conscious interaction with text.
Repairing understanding when it breaks down or becomes confused with fix-up strategies and additional self talk.
As skill with stop signing grows:
Accessing background knowledge to make connections between what is know and what is being learned from reading “this” text;
Asking questions and developing inferences before, during, and after reading to create deeper understanding of text and fuel motivation for reading;
Searching intentionally for new knowledge and/or important ideas;
Visualizing text information/concepts/events/people to create a “movie” of text; and
Retelling, summarizing, and organizing one’s thinking about reading of text to synthesize understanding.

PREREQUISITES
Teacher modeling of stop signing
Collaborative practice between teacher and students of stop signing
Emerging confidence to take risks and interact with text before, during, and after reading text

PROCESS
ü Before reading, Reader stops at introductory text information to stop and talk.
ü During reading, Readers stops at self determined pace/chunks to stop and talk and further develop understanding of text being read.
o Especially for young students and/or those who are new to the concept of monitoring their own understanding, teachers may nudge or assign students a pace such as “Let’s stop at the bottom of every page to think and share our thinking with one another.” Over time, teacher will ask students to begin stop signing/stop and talk during their independent reading and monitor students’ implementations carefully and frequently.
ü After reading, Reader stops to talk about his/her understanding of text.

STEPS INVOLVED when utilizing Stop Signing Reading with Written Responses/ Notebooks [with immense respect to Andy & Evelyn Rothstein, authors of Writing to Learn J ]
Set up double spread notebooks pages (e.g. pages 8 and 9 facing each other)
Write term METACOGNITION on top of page
Skip a line and write, “I know that I know something about…….
Skip a line and write, “First,”
Move to the middle of the page or go to the next page (facing) and write, “In addition,”
Go to the middle of the page and write, “Finally,”
Go to the bottom of the page, about two lines from the bottom, and write, “Now”
This setup will allow the students to write their first metacognition piece “I know that I know something about…..” This statement will then be followed by three supporting statements and a conclusion (“Now you know something that I know about….”

RELATED LEARNING PRINCIPLES
Value of understanding why and how to monitor understanding when viewing, hearing, or reading text in any context/content area
Integration of writing with subject areas increases knowledge
Comparing prior knowledge with new knowledge brings greater metacognition
Becoming aware of what one needs to know and how one goes about learning how and what to know is a step in learning how to learn

APPLICATION
According to Arthur Costa, metacognition is one of the essential characteristics of intelligent behavior that, together with curiosity and wonderment, motivate people to seek additional knowledge. David Perkins expands the concept of metacognition to knowing one’s prior knowledge, recognizing new knowledge, and identifying expected knowledge. The application of metacognition works especially well in developing and building reading comprehension.