The same strategies that make good scientists make good readers and writers: curiosity, questioning, imagining, connection with other experiences and ideas, getting caught up in the material at hand. Research indicates the above processes, among others, are active in good readers and writers. As a science teacher, I knew these processes were essential for a good scientist. However, in my experience the last four years with the UCLA Writing Project and last year as a full time literacy/standards coach made me aware of the contribution to deep thinking processes that reading/writing strategies could make.

Too often in my classes, "read chapter five and answer the questions at the back of the chapter" was my nod to "reading" or "writing." Discussion was the " meat" of our critical thinking. During my work with the Writing Project, and as a standards coach last year, I worked with teachers to consciously develop reading and writing strategies that promoted deeper thinking by their students. I began to formulate my own vision in collaboration with other teachers—across the curriculum—of how literacy should be and could be a legitimate part of my science curriculum.

The T-Chart described below is something that I used repeatedly with teams of teachers last year, and one that a number of the teachers found useful. It represents a compilation of bits and pieces I have tried over the years along with "gems" from others and from research and other readings. The first week students have a science notebook. This notebook is exclusively for reading/ writing activities in the science class. I took a section of our science text and read it aloud to them. As I was reading, I commented on what the material seemed to be about, raised questions; made connections with other material; remarked about what it reminded me of; considered analogies; digressed on what was interesting to me about the subject and how it might be applied; and considered possible experiments related to the material. This felt very awkward at first. The kids wondered what I was up to; then I saw signs of interest in my approaching the text in a brand new way—new for all of us!

After this monologue, I asked the students what kind of things I was doing, and the chart below resulted. They copied it into inside cover of their science notebook. I remarked to them that half of their education is INFORMATION and the other half is their RESPONSE to that information. I talked to them about how good readers-writers-scientists engage in this type of active questioning. This chart will be one of our ways of nudging ourselves into just such thinking about all that we do this year.

T-Chart Question and Response
INFORMATION		RESPONSE
What is "on the page"? --direct information found in a portion of text you may have read aloud; the facts --what is happening in the story; what are the parts of the argument		What is "between the Lines"? --What words, phrases do you like? What clues do they give about the meaning or purpose or sense of the passage? --What questions do you have as you are reading? Where do these questions lead? --What words are unfamiliar? What do they mean? What do they add? --What seem to be key sentences? --What main concepts begin to emerge for you? --How do the parts of the story or argument or concept fit together?
Wonderings What is "off the page"? --wondering: what do I wonder about now? --memory: what does this remind me of? --application: what areas of my everyday life incorporate these ideas? --feeling: how do I feel about this story? --imagination: e.g., student writes short narrative

After my modeling the T-chart process, students work in groups and then individually. My goal is for this chart to become routine in the class as a thinking strategy for a portion of the text, a video, a demonstration, or even a mathematical task.

The students wanted to know why I include the section on "wonderings." Here, again research shows that "imagination" is not a pleasant extra in teaching concepts. The student whose imagination is expected to be active by the teacher is the student whose thinking will go deeper. It makes conscious to the student and teacher that in whatever form INFORMATION comes to them they must make sense of it in a very personal act we call "learning." And it is a way of saying that the deepest learning involves all aspects of imaginative, emotional, thinking life in an exciting holistic dance that can only be described as a personal work of art.