What is Conditional Knowledge

This chapter shares an instructional practice that has been used with undergraduate pre-service teachers to help them become consciously aware of their own cognitive processes for literacy tasks, as well as how to prepare think-aloud demonstrations for elementary age students. Using asynchronous online discussions, pre-service teachers were given a pre-writing or reading comprehension prompt and asked to think-aloud during their own work with a task. Secondly, after instruction in research-based components to include in think-alouds, pre-service teachers prepared a recording of how they would model a related literacy task for elementary age students. The asynchronous format with peer critique allowed pre-service teachers to try out think-aloud practices within an uncritical space, thus encouraging them to take greater risk in sharing their thought processes aloud with others.