Developing Student Reasoning Skills to Choose Text Evidence

Like teachers everywhere, my co-teachers and I have been working on trying to develop students’ ability to find text evidence that supports a claim. The more we work with this, the more we recognize that there are some underlying reasoning and thinking skills that are missing. 
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Thinking at Every Desk by Derek Cabrera and Laura Colosi is an excellent, quick read that explains the four basic thinking skills that students need – Distinctions, Relationships, Systems and Patterns. The authors use the Yin Yang symbol to capture the interrelatedness of these four categories. 

Today’s lesson plan focused on Making Distinctions. I created Distinction Pockets for students so that they could practice sorting a variety of items, discussing their reasoning.
How to:

1. Buy heavy duty page protectors and cut off top third. 
2. Draw a line down the center with a permanent marker. Mark one side “not.”
3. If desired, print sticky labels of the YinYang symbol and stick this in the middle (see photo.)
4. Provide students with a variety of items to sort by making distinctions. As you can see from the full lesson plan, we began with pictures, then moved to words, then to text evidence strips. Each time, have students use a dry erase marker to write on the left side of the pocket whatever the distinction or characteristic is that they will sort by. 
5. Circulate in the room to monitor what students are placing in each pocket. Because the pockets are see through, the learning is very visible.​
6. Students can store their pockets in a three-ring binder to use in future lessons. 

You will see from the lesson plan, that we also added a challenge component. After explaining what the YinYang symbol represented, we gave a few students the challenge of developing an alternate symbol. In this photo, Ethan created some word art that represents the whole, with the parts as being distinct (I was so impressed with his thinking that I chose to ignore the fact that he left out a letter.)