One summer, my principal called to offer me “an exciting opportunity,” which in my experience, translates to him running through the halls yelling, “Help! I am so desperate and I will not take no for an answer.” I was granted a handsome stipend in exchange for sacrificing my prep period to teach a sixth class. “You are going to love these kids,” he promised. “They are your kind of crew.” I had no idea what that meant.

On the first day of class, I found myself accompanied by 13 boys and 2 girls, all of whom had been assigned a second English class due to their less than stellar scores on the state exam. We met during the period when their peers enjoyed a second elective class like theater, art, or physical education. They were not pleased. Among the members of my “bonus” class, I had a third of the basketball team, the gregarious class president, and a notoriously gifted shoplifter.

The principal was right, these were “my kind” of kids. Most of all, they were vocal. Not a wilting blossom in the bunch. In addition to perpetual chattiness, we all shared another weakness, the dreaded reader fog. Like them, as a pre‐teen, I had suffered from the torture of decoding an entire dense page of my independent reading book, only to realize I had been wondering when the cute boy who sat in front of me during math class would finally ask me out. Thinking aloud helped to clear the fog, although I always got some grief from teachers for being too social. It came as no surprise that my “bonus” class also took to thinking aloud right away.

• “Really?” they asked when I introduced my reader fog remedy. “We can just yell out whatever pops into our heads while we're reading?”
• “Well, you don't have to yell,” I said.
• We began reading Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. They made an insufferable chorus.
• “Miss, can you bring us on a hunting field trip?”
• “Did you guys know I was a dog in a past life?”
• “Do redbone coonhounds actually have red bones?”
• “Who would win in a fight, a mountain lion or Darth Vader?”
• “Carissa stole my pencil case when I was in the bathroom!”

Carissa, whose name is not actually Carissa, also stole my phone at some point during the year. She would have made a talented cat burglar, but I think the experience may have actually reformed her. The more we became comfortable with the sound of our own voices in class, the easier it was to delve deep. When she returned the phone, of her own volition, it came with a sincere apology that taught us both a lesson about redemption and self‐explaining.

Throughout class, I tried to clarify that thinking aloud was more than just piping up with free associations. “We're trying to make predictions and form connections based on our prior knowledge,” I told them. They improved with time, and I watched them grow more and more invested in the story itself. By the tragic end, no one could contain their tears. Even the toughest among us (Carissa, obviously) was touched by the loyalty and love exemplified on the page. The basketball players cried like precious little babes.

Self‐explanation is one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal for deep learning; I've seen it work time and time again. In my experience, we spend too much time quieting down children in our classrooms. It turns out an extensive body of research tells us that inviting learners to speak aloud their thought process while they are learning something new can support deeper learning. The researchers call this self‐explanation. In other words, learners benefit greatly from explaining aloud what they are doing during the completion of a task.

As I recall, my noisy “bonus” class showed 12% higher growth on the state test that year than the grade level average because self‐explaining helped them engage in active reading and encouraged them to build connections. Even the most reluctant readers can often be duped into talking about themselves and how their life relates to a book. Self‐explanation opens the stage for personal connections, debate, and skill‐based practice. Start with just six minutes a day. The best self‐explanation not only prompts learners to explain what they are doing, but also why they are doing it. Tying the doing to the knowing is the shortest path to growing.

WHAT'S THE THEORY?

Little kids are honest (sometimes too honest). If you get a bad haircut or spill a cup of coffee in your lap on the ride to school, avoid the kindergarten wing. They rarely mean to insult; it's just a matter of lacking the self‐regulation necessary to keep quiet. I'll bet at some point in your youth you were given the sage advice, “If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, I think we should be cautious when telling our children to pipe down.

Sit in the next room from any small child playing by herself and I guarantee you'll hear her think aloud. “I'm making you a cup of tea now, Betty,” my niece will tell her favorite doll. “I know you had a hard day at school and this will make you feel better; we just need to wait for the water to boil and then we can add the tea bag.” I'm sure she is simply mimicking the words of her own mother, but I relish the chance to hear what goes on inside her little head. “Be careful Betty! It's hot,” she warns.

In my niece's game of tea party, I recognize her understanding of sequence, safety, and social‐emotional well‐being. It would be a shame to tell her to stop talking to herself. Creative chatter is nothing to be embarrassed about. Youngsters reach their imaginative peak while they are at their least self‐conscious. For this reason, we should be encouraging kids to talk to themselves and explain their decisions aloud as frequently as possible. Maybe this looks like my niece's game of tea party or maybe it looks like a middle schooler live streaming a video game while he talks his followers through every move. Whatever it may be, self‐explanation will help learners recognize problems or gaps in their own understanding and empower them to begin filling those gaps—or provide you with the opportunity to fill them.

For example, in one study of 205 middle school students, researchers found instructional explanations and self‐explanation prompts, along with worked examples, positively impacted learning outcomes (Huang and Reiser, 2012). Worked examples refer to model responses that include the step‐by‐step process to arrive at a solution. Imagine looking at someone else's scratch paper from a math test while you try to solve a series of similar problems. When paired with self‐explanation, worked examples can help students make enormous gains.

In the study, five mini‐lessons were administered to seventh and eighth graders regarding proper comma use. The first half of each lesson, across all conditions, included examples of correct comma application. The second half of the lesson also provided certain groups with self‐explanation prompts, instructional explanations, or a combination of self‐explanation prompts and instructional explanations (Huang and Reiser, 2012). The achievement was then measured based on an assessment of 18 sentences without any commas. Students given both self‐explanation prompts and the worked examples showed the strongest learning outcomes and spent the most time on task (Huang and Reiser, 2012). It follows that the more we prompt our learners to talk themselves through challenging tasks, the better off they'll be.

One teacher who uses the power of self‐explanation regularly is Jennessa Burks, a fourth‐grade teacher in the Cambridge Public School system, a city probably best known for America's oldest and most prestigious university, Harvard. Burks is a huge proponent of using first drafts and scratch paper to help model self‐explanation for her students. “We provide students with worked examples frequently,” she told me. “And when I say frequently, I mean there's a push for us to do it daily. I think students often learn well from each other by sharing their individual thought processes as they solve a new problem or approach a new task.” For instance, Burks often models the editing process for the whole class using a checklist before having students engage in the process in pairs. Her worked example remains available for students to refer to throughout the lesson. “This helps them prepare to conduct writing conferences themselves,” she said. “I often think it's helpful for students to get a bigger picture by looking at a worked example before they dive into an assignment, especially when it comes to something that might take some more abstract thinking or feel like a larger project to tackle” (2021). Burks never assumes her fourth graders have the innate ability to explain their thinking. She shows them what it looks like, provides them with a checklist, and pairs them strategically until they are comfortable thinking aloud on their own.

Thinking aloud is a form of metacognition. Metacognition, the understanding and awareness of one's own thought process, can begin very early in a child's development. For example, in Ontario, Canada, a play‐based full‐day kindergarten curriculum was first introduced in 2016 and has warranted great success (Braund and Timmons, 2021). The Ontario model asks kindergarten students to narrate their own thought processes in three distinct ways: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences, and metacognitive regulation. Metacognitive knowledge requires recognition of strengths and weaknesses. For example, a kindergartener might say, “I am very good at sharing my toys, but it's hard for me to remember to say please when I ask someone else to share their toys.” Metacognitive experiences require articulating one's own problem‐solving processes and strategies. For example, “I know what sounds the individual letters make, so when I put them all together, I can sound out the whole word.” Metacognitive regulation requires setting goals and asking clarifying questions. For example, “I want to be able to write my full name by the end of the year. What is the best way to practice?” The Ontario curriculum urges educators to model the use of problem‐solving language in support of these three forms of metacognition.

Teaching children to think aloud before they become too self‐conscious about it gives us an opportunity to peek inside their minds and clear up lingering misconceptions. Researchers Heather Braund and Kristy Timmons pay particular attention to the role that co‐regulation plays in Ontario's kindergartens (2021). The Ontario curriculum describes co‐regulation as a means for innovative thinking when learners are: “collaborating with peers to create and modify things, using their own ideas, and building on the ideas of others” (Braund and Timmons, 2021). In addition to a learner dictating his thoughts aloud for his own benefit, Braund and Timmons emphasize the ways in which peers and teachers can also benefit and support one another through co‐regulation. Engaging in metacognition, or thinking aloud, in front of others is a pivotal element of the Ontario program's success.

In their research, Braund and Timmons conclude, “It is imperative that co‐regulation becomes a hallmark of Kindergarten programming. Given the important role that co‐regulation can play in the early years, policymakers need to provide explicit (and theory‐based) definitions of co‐regulation and social shared regulation” (2021). One concrete example of co‐regulation in the Ontario curriculum allows students to design their own play environments and negotiate their own selection of materials. Obviously, this level of student voice requires tremendous resources. The models that follow attempt to facilitate metacognition and co‐regulation without breaking the bank or maximizing an entire lesson. Self‐explanation can, in fact, be succinct, painless, and priceless.

Psychologist Tania Lombrozo of Princeton University recognizes self‐explaining as a way of achieving the sensation of the “aha” moment:

There's a phenomenon called the self‐explanation effect that I think most people have probably experienced. And that's the experience of coming to understand something better as a result of trying to explain it to yourself or to somebody else. Part of what's sort of mysterious and amazing about the phenomenon is that that's a kind of learning that occurs even though you're not getting new information from anybody else or from the external world. You're just rearranging and scrutinizing what's already in your head. And in the course of doing that, you can sometimes have one of these “aha” moments and come to realize that you understand something better, or sometimes come to realize that you thought you understood something but there's actually an important gap in your knowledge that you need to fill. (Vedantam, 2021a)

As Lombrozo points out, self‐explanation is not just about discovering truths, but also recognizing falsities. By encouraging students to speak their understandings aloud, they are likely to experience either an emotional rush of satisfaction or the motivational pull of dissatisfaction. The stronger the sensation, the more defined their neural pathways will become. You know what that means—a long‐term memory is imminent.

IN SHORT

• Providing learners with worked examples (a more experienced learner's draft or scratch paper that “shows their work”) will help novice students talk themselves through new types of problems and skills.
• Encourage students to verbalize their strengths and weaknesses during play and collaborative work.
• Praise students for explaining their problem‐solving strategies to their peers and give them ample opportunities to do so.
• Model goal setting at the start of every lesson by sharing your learning objective aloud and urge students to do the same by articulating their own goals on a regular basis.
• Start as soon as possible. Children can become self‐conscious about self‐explaining if the behavior is not normalized among peers early on.
• Students who can self‐explain are able to rearrange the information in their brains to arrive at an “aha” moment.

MODELS

Self‐explanation is a pivotal path to improving learning outcomes. Don't fret about the noise. By implementing these simple small‐teaching techniques, you can get into a productive routine and cut out the chaos of everybody speaking at once. Make time for students to turn‐and‐talk. Take intentional breaks and prompt students to identify the underlying principles, themes, and main ideas emphasized in your lesson. Students don't need to generate these principles for themselves—consider providing a list of possibilities, then asking students to choose and defend just one. Over time, they may become capable of articulating underlying principles in their own words, but particularly in the case of new material, this added step can often place too many demands on the working memory. Start small. Find an exciting stopping point and model what self‐explanation looks like for your students.

PRINCIPLES

Self‐explanation is perhaps the most basic small teaching technique in this book, but it does not come naturally to most students. Model for them. Prompt them. Pair them. There are plenty of people in front of whom I would feel embarrassed if they caught me singing in the shower or talking to myself while I cooked dinner. There are also people who I wouldn't think twice about catching me in solo conversation. Be the latter. Make your classroom a safe and comfortable place to get caught talking to yourself. Embrace the noise.

SMALL TEACHING QUICK TIPS: SELF‐EXPLAINING

Self‐explanations can take place during any sort of cognitive task to increase mindful learning. Remember to identify stopping points throughout your lesson for self‐explanation to take place. Make students feel comfortable hearing the sound of their own voices.

• Push students to think aloud and tie their knowledge of information, principles, theories, and formulae to the specific task they are completing. Encourage them to articulate how what they know is connected to what they are doing.
• Assign every student a turn‐and‐talk partner. After they arrive at a solution independently, ask them to turn and discuss it with their partner, and then revise their own answers accordingly.
• Ask students to choose an underlying principle or the main idea from a list on the board and explain how it connects to the task they are completing. Then, encourage them to explain how the task connects to the daily objective.
• Use strict discussion protocols with clear rules to provide structured opportunities for self‐explanation. Always leave time for reflection to debrief after using a discussion protocol with students.

CONCLUSION

I have never turned in a piece of writing to an editor without reading it aloud to myself. Something about hearing my own words pass through my lips helps me to recognize the errors I am blind to on the page. I pause and say, “Well, that doesn't make any sense.” Then, I devise an edit. I am no longer ashamed when strangers catch me reading aloud in an empty room. Many of the smartest people I know talk to themselves. The benefits we receive from this practice are ones that our students will experience as well. Normalizing structured self‐explanation in my classroom has helped students recognize their own errors—and correct them—in an impactful way. I model thinking aloud, daily.

One of the greatest benefits of self‐explaining is that it fosters active engagement during class time. Think of self‐explanation as an especially helpful strategy for your students in the early stages of mastering a new cognitive skill. Practicing metacognition will help students solve math problems, write papers, and conduct science experiments with a purposeful and mindful approach. In addition, self‐explanation allows ample opportunity for teachers and peers to correct misconceptions before they linger.

Go ahead, turn up the volume.