The Making Visible Project at Chabot College (18 minutes)
As you watch the film, write down
comments and/or situations to which
you can relate.
1. define metacognition;
2. describe how it is used by good
readers;
3. describe how lack of it creates
poor readers;
4. practice “Inquiry” in reading;
5. learn to use Charting to
improve reading skills;
6. learn a way to be a
strategic, reflective, and
self-regulating reader.
“meta”
after or beyond
“cognitive”
mental process of
knowing
They help you:

be a person who has learned to learn;

know the stages in the process of
learning and understand your
preferred approaches to it;

identify and overcome blocks to
learning so you can bring learning from
academic to on-the-job/career
situations.
Readers with poor metacognitive skills:





often finish reading a passage without
even knowing that they have not
understood it;
are unable to process and use what they
have read;
are unable to make adjustments in their
learning processes and monitor their own
learning;
approach reading with a negative
attitude;
set themselves up to fail.
Practice INQUIRY
in-kwuh-ree (n), inquiries
 the
act of seeking truth,
information, or knowledge
 an
 the
investigation
act of inquiring or
of seeking information
by questioning
A Reading Inquiry
HOW you read
is as important as
WHAT you read.
Should we read everything the same?
The
Challenge
 We read different texts in different
ways.



Reading is an invisible process.
For effective readers (or when one is
reading effectively) this is especially
true.
In order to conduct an inquiry into what
we do when we read, we need to
make this invisible process
visible.
Begin by Understanding the Difference
Between Content & Form
 Content is WHAT a text is about,
in the words, what the author is saying.
 Form is HOW a text is written,
in other words,
what the author is doing.
“Superman and Me”
by Sherman Alexie
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I
suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I
read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I
cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the
comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a
Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian
Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most
standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some
minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle- class by
reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived
on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and
government surplus food.
“Superman and Me”
by Sherman Alexie
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I
suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I
read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I
cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the
comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a
Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian
Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most
standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some
minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle- class by
reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived
on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and
government surplus food.
For the first paragraph
in Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me”
Sherman Alexie introduces the concept that
he learned to read from a Superman comic
book by illustrating what he does and does
not remember, and then he describes how he
grew up in poverty, but not without hope, on
a Spokane Indian Reservation.