Cognitive Strategies Toolkit

Cognitive strategy instruction develops the thinking skills that will make students strategic, flexible learners. People use such strategies all the time, like writing a note to remember an important fact. For some students, cognitive strategies must be explicitly taught so they will be able to consciously think, “This is the information I want, and this is the tool I can use to get it.” Students must also have multiple opportunities to practice cognitive strategies. Thus, strategies become power tools, with greater flexibility.

The following toolkit was developed for teachers of English Language Learners participating in a California Writing Project study of the Pathway Project. It describes eight tools that every adolescent and adult reader should have at hand.

Following is a list of sentence starters to help students access the strategies. The author of Pathway Project study explains,

In addition to declarative knowledge, students need also to develop the procedural knowledge of how to implement the strategies on their own as well as the conditional knowledge of when, why, and for how long to access the strategies in their tool kits as independent readers and writers. To foster such knowledge and to provide students with practice in using the cognitive strategies during teacher assigned and, especially student-selected reading, Pathway teachers also supplied students with the sentence openers shown to use in dialectical journals and in marginal notes in response to texts. These sentence starters later became guidelines for students as they met in writing groups to comment upon each other’s writing.