Chapter 6 is titled Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse. In this chapter, Tovani discusses her experiences of how she tries to get students to think while they are reading. She notes that teaching kids to show their thinking "doesn't miraculously happen because I've assigned it." The guidelines she expects students to follow when they mark text include:
1. Write the thinking next to the words on the page that cause you to have the thought.
2. If there isn't room on the text to write, draw a line showing the teacher where the thinking is written.
3. Don't copy the text, respond to it.
4. Merely underlining text is not enough.
5. There is no one way to respond to text. Students are encouraged to ask questions, make connections to something familiar, give opinions, draw conclusions, and make statements.
Tovani then discusses tools for holding thinking. These include highlighters, sticky notes, pieces of text on bulletin boards, and so on. She notes that the key to keeping students interested is to mix these tools up. Her favorite way of helping students to hold their thinking is to write directly on the text.
A term that Tovani coined to describe teacher-designed tools that help students hold thinking is "comprehension constructors." These are sheets that help students name their thinking and make it visible. These sheets are a concrete way of taking students through an abstract process, which has shown to really help them understand the material.
Teaching students how to read a text is of important. Most of us don’t read properly to gain knowledge form a text. I can read something and not remember what I just read. So as teachers we need to give students those tools so they may learn form and gain the knowledge that will help them as they grow.
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