The process of thinking and understanding is what we as teachers hope every student can achieve in our classroom. Enhancing students' metacognitive processes is the first step. I believe Math is a subject that would best allow students to see and understand their progress throughout the lesson. From watching my fifth grade observation class at Farragut, the teacher provided ample amounts of feedback and explanations that would help foster the children's understandings. The teacher would have students walk her through the steps to a math problem to check for their understanding of the right sequencing of operations. Their ability to do the right operations is immediately reflected in their answering of the problem. The teacher can ask questions throughout the lesson of how and why the students went in a particular order. This will allow students to correct their understanding as they go instead of waiting till the end of a lesson.
Another subject that is great for having children think is Reading. While beginning a book at Farragut, the students would look at the title page and pictures and predict what the story could be about. The teacher would ask them why they made their predictions and what evidence there was to support it. This checking of understanding and reasoning can help the teacher aim questions at the students to provoke more thinking on the students' part. The more questions we encourage students to ask, the better we can help them piece everything together and further their ability to think and understand.Read more...
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I like your point that teachers need to ask questions. It is important to make sure as a teacher we are fostering to our studnets metacognition. How and Why questions are great to help studnets to start thinking about their own thinking. I agree that we as teachers need to encourage students to asks! I love the pictures you found as well.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that reading and math are too subjects that are perfect for teaching metacognitive strategies. I really like that you discussed practical ways to implement metacognition into the classroom, because I think it can be overwhelming sometimes and I forget that questioning and predicting are two simple yet effective ways to get students to think about their thinking. Great job :)
ReplyDeleteI also really liked your pictures too!
ReplyDeleteGreat idea about asking questions to check for comprehension. With our students, it's really important to make sure we pick up any misconceptions quickly, and that we make them aware of how they're learning. I'm glad that your observations have been very successful in giving you these ideas!
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