When Michele Lesmeister first decided to model Think Aloud, she was worried that her adult GED students would be bored, and she was nervous about her own performance. Instead, her students were immediately engaged, often interrupting to add their own comments.

Michele addressed her nervousness by preparing in advance.

“Modeling was, at first,” she says, “very stressful because I was unaccustomed to showing others my own reading processes. I had to find a natural pace for myself, and this took practice, lots of false starts, and reworking the passages. I found that if I did a thorough text analysis first and then set it next to my clean copy under the document reader, I was much more explicit.”

“When I modeled,” Michele explains, “I methodically worked my way through the passage noting everything I found from specialized or new terms, to punctuation, sentence structure, and any clues like transition words to show the interplay between groups of words or ideas.”

“What I realized later was that the students could identify the reading issues I had with certain passages. When I skipped over something, the students noticed and asked why.”

“One day during a modeling exercise, I stopped for a moment. A student said, ‘You look like you are thinking about something important—does that mean that you are having a relationship with the text?&rsqyo;”

“‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘I am engaging the text and this takes time and energy, doesn’t it?’”

“Another student said, ‘So what you are doing is active, like active learning.’

“Then the first student added, ‘I always thought that reading was a passive activity, and we had to be quiet, like in the library. This . . . whatever you call it, RA [Reading Apprenticeship], is helping me realize that when a writer writes something, it is a lot more than words. Yeah, before I thought it was just words.’ ”

“This group of students was realizing what I had come to see. The power of working together to discuss the process of reading and understanding had become the class’s goal: to not just ‘read words’ but to understand more of what they read.”

“By my modeling and behavior, I gave the students permission to try to tackle harder passages and not fear challenges or stumbling blocks. If they did not know the answer, someone else might or we could all help.”