Reflection: A Habit of Mind

Fredrick makes a provocative admission when he writes in "Looking in the Mirror...," "to an outsider, it may look like we spend a lot of time on reflection and not a lot on literacy skills (p. 1928). To me, it looks like Fredrick has found a way to effectively create, or at least plant the seed for, a habit of mind that will serve as an invaluable tool in his students' future literacy building endeavors. Reflection, self-evaluation, or metacognition, whichever term we use, is what experienced readers and writers do every time we sit down to read or write--it's how we make meaning. Novice readers and writers must be explicitly taught these metacognitive strategies, because as experience with young people shows us, and as Fredrick illuminates in his article, these are not strategies that adolescents necessarily use instinctively or naturally. If, as Fredrick aims to do in his class, we can teach students to articulate a skill they have learned, find evidence of that skill in their own writing, and are able to set goals for future learning, then it is reasonable to believe that we can ask students to transfer these metacognitive strategies to the acts of reading and writing; that is, ask students to enact matacognitive strategies while they are in the act of writing or reading, which should presumably enhance their meaning making processes and communication. Mariolina Salvatori explains in "Conversations with Texts," experienced readers and writers "have developed a kind of introspective reading that allows them to decide--as they read and as they write--when to pursue, when to revise, when to abandon a line of argument, and when to start afresh" (p. 446) Isn't it possible to teach students the skills to read in this way--a method of reading that will also inform their writing?