It is never a sign of insanity to think aloud, it also enhances your mental ability. It is also called private speech. It enables you to achieve focus. It is a behavioral pattern that you should practice daily to achieve self-regulation. As a child, you learned by thinking aloud. It was a form of demonstrating your knowledge or opening yourself to learn You sound out words, express ideas, form sentences. Anytime you were corrected, you rehearse until you have imitated correctly or conformed to the established model in the family, school, or neighborhood, etc. As you grow older, you internalize this act of thinking aloud, and your speech shifts to interpersonal communication. So what are the seven ways thinking aloud can help you think and learn better?
1. Spur Curiosity During Learning
The goal of curiosity is to enable you to gain a more in-depth knowledge of things that are crucial within the scope of our experience of the world. This covers the concepts you have learned in school and those that are relevant to your daily lives. Individuals who think aloud are usually curious about the different range of topics and develop broad interests. Thinking aloud helps you retain inquisitiveness about people and the world around you. It enables you to gain an in-depth understanding of beliefs, culture, and viewpoints that are shared aspects of what makes us human. Those who think aloud are
lifelong learners. They are lifelong learners because they are naturally and practice critical thinking. Thinking aloud will help you apply your best thinking habit to solve complex problems. It also helps you to achieve constructive outcomes. As you think aloud, you will find answers to crucial questions. You don't make decisions based on assumptions, but you can explore the topics deeper. You also gain deeper facts locked up within the information.
2. Enhance Your Creativity
Creativity is one of the most significant skills you need to survive beyond school. Learners who think aloud nurtures their creativity and the ability to solve problems. It is a requisite skill to collaborate in the workplace. The tendency to think aloud means you can transfer the same knowledge and process to more complex problems to achieve effective results. Thinking aloud is relevant in business, marketing, and professional networks. It helps you to develop creativity on how to advertise, increase revenue, and advance your career. You will also learn to question assumptions about different topics. When you think aloud, you ask 'how' or 'why not? Private speech has limitless potentials. This applies to young and old learners. It will enable you to
train your brain to be creative.
3. Reinforce Your Problem-Solving Skill
You become an instinctual problem solver when you think aloud. Problem-solving has been ranked to be the most crucial ability that you can build on as a learner. You will be positioned to address complex by thinking aloud about how to engineer innovative solutions. Albert Einstein once said,
' It's not that I am smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer.'
He once propounded that when you are allocated one hour to perform a task, spend 55 minutes to define and research the problem while you spend 5 minutes to solve it. Private speech affords you this kind of commitment and patience. It is also the very reason you will learn how to
understand the problem and solve it effectively. Thinking aloud also positions you to face complex problems to survive, succeed, and be significant in life. When you think aloud, you can curate solutions to big problems such as overpopulation, global warming, water shortages, energy crises, pollution, need for health care, and electronic waste management etc. As these problems and others continue to evolve, those who think aloud would continue to be relevant in producing lasting solutions to them.
4. Cultivate Multi-Faceted Skill
As you think aloud, you are nurturing, not just a skill, but many skills. Thinking aloud is a cross-curricular cognitive talent. It exercises your mind, and once your mind is empowered, you will not only stay healthy, but you will be more productive. Thinking aloud enhances your:
- Observational skills
- Reasoning skills
- Logical thinking
- Evaluative skills
- Language skills
- Organizational and planning skills
- Open-mindedness
- Creative visualization methods
- Decision making
The list is inexhaustive, but this is an overview of what you develop and promote when you think aloud in your daily lives.
5. Foster Independence
Thinking aloud helps you think independently, which is of the most essential learning goals. It helps you to become independent during the learning process. You don't depend on the instructor to achieve learning outcomes, but you learn to take responsibility for your learning. The keyword here is 'responsibility.' When you learn how to be more responsible while learning, you can learn how to take charge of your life. Thinking aloud will not only position you as a great learner but a great thinker and leader. You will learn how to appreciate the world from your point of view and experience. You become more confident, and you learn from your mistakes as you build a successful and productive life. Thinking aloud helps you to be s
elf-directed as a learner. Your thinking becomes organized. It also means this kind of proactive thinking ability becomes part of you as you nurture it through the lifelong learner. When you are successful in your thinking ability, you can make progress beyond learning in your future pursuits and relationship with pride and confidence.
6. Improve Your Reading Comprehension
You become motivated to identify the distinctions between reading words and understanding the text when you apply the process of thinking aloud. You also gain insights into the reading complexities and expand your understanding of what it means to be a great reader. How does this apply to life? You will learn how to read through assumptions and base your knowledge on realities.
7. Develop a Life Skill
You develop a lifelong skill, not just a learning skill, as you think aloud. According to John Dewey,
'Education is not preparation for life; it is life itself.'
Thinking aloud helps you to become successful within and beyond the classroom. You learn how to lead your life through life. The bottom line is you don't need your teachers once you have completed a learning phase; you become the leader and the teacher. Learning also becomes a continuum for you.
How to Adopt the Thinking Aloud Strategy
Thinking aloud or private speed is a crucial learning tool. The more you engage your brain in different dimensions, the more you can connect and
retain what you learn. You read, create diagrams or pictures, use motion or music, converse with others, and with yourself. Most time, you talk through with your friends or in a group to recall a topic you have learned. In other cases, you may not need a second party to think aloud. Thinking aloud helps you to leverage multiple senses and personal experiences in processing and to reinforce your learning. You can think aloud to:
- memorize vocabulary by vocalizing the words
- talk through mathematical problems to arrive at possible solutions
- edit papers by reading the words aloud
- appreciate poetry through dramatization.
Here are three ways to think aloud:
1. Spot the Juicy Tipping Points
The first approach to adopt if you want to think aloud is to sift through the text. Read the text while holding your sticky notes, search for spots to make inferences, ask questions or think through the intent of the author. These are the juicy tipping points that lead to the next challenge or comprehension opportunities.
2. Know When and Where to Think Aloud
Examine each tipping point and reflect on the purpose of the point. This will help you scale down the points to more manageable points, so you don't become overburdened or detracted from the process. You need to also factor in the purpose of picking the text you want to learn, your objective, and the strategies you are familiar with before reading the text.
3. Write on Sticky Notes
Writing on sticky notes provides a guide for your thought pattern during the learning process. It helps you to stick to what's significant and discard what's less prominent. It also helps you to be purposeful throughout the learning process.
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If you want to be a great thinker and a lifelong learner, thinking aloud shouldn’t be a one-time exercise for you, but an all-the-time endeavor. You will become productive in your personal life and also become relevant to the world.
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