Whisper Phones are a great way to help students recognize that thinking is just talking out loud. A whisper phone is a tube of PBC pipe that forms a phone-type shape that connects the mouth to the ear. If you talk at over a whisper, it really hurts your ears, so you have to only whisper.
This is a great way for students to do think-alouds to themselves while reading. Think-alouds are an amazing and powerful tool that aid comprehension. What the student does is they think aloud (I know, wow, right?) while reading a text or doing a math problem (with whisper phones, it is best to use them with reading because some kids need both hands to figure out the answers to math problems.). They think aloud in different strategies, such as "What do I think is going to happen next?" and "What did I just read?"
The idea behind think-alouds is that the student is doing comprehension strategies DURING reading as compared to the typical comprehension strategy that a lot of teachers use which is AFTER reading. By doing a comprehension strategy after the reading, it is not maintaining and better insuring that the students were paying attention to the text while they were reading.
Many students I would venture, read in this style: They move their eyes around a page at a "reasonable rate" and then after an appropriate amount of time has passed, they turn the page. A strategy like a Think-Aloud and whisper phones combined together can be a powerful tool to help them get better comprehension.
A logical question is: Do I have enough time to teach this think-aloud? My answer is this: Have you ever read a story to your students? If you have, then you have enough time to teach think-alouds. While reading a text to your class, you could stop at certain points in your reading and think-aloud. You can show how to think aloud for predictions. For instance, if you are reading a mystery book, you can make a prediction based on some information about who committed the crime.
Another possible statement is: "Well, I can't have students talking out loud when they are supposed to be silently reading." Here is the thing, by saying something out loud, our brain remembers it much better. Sure, they will be talking out loud when they first start this strategy. But you and I don't have to talk out loud in order to utilize this strategy. We can think it, but students who are first learning how to use it will be talking out loud. This is where the whisper phones can come in really handy, lots of whispering in your classroom is better than all out talking, right?
In the end, it all comes down to us. We can decide that we don't have time to teach a really good comprehension strategy, or we can take the time and teach it. And I would predict (I just used the word, so I guess I am thinking-aloud right now) that our students will do better on high-stakes tests if we give them the strategy of think-alouds.
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