Final Analysis of Teaching
Inquiry Question:
How can I as a teacher of primary grade students, encourage the use meta-cognitive strategies such as self reflection/evaluation and “thinking about thinking” to promote student engagement, motivation and critical thinking skills?
How do I feel about my question after teaching?
Throughout this inquiry I have realized how broad my question truly is. Metacognition has many different facets to it. So it is and was difficult to sort out which I should be focusing on. There is the general "thinking about thinking" but there's also self regulation, motivation, self-reflection, activating prior knowledge and making connections, identifying/choosing strategies and much more. In future inquiries it may be useful and more productive to narrow my investigation to one or two (if related), aspects of something as broad as this particular topic of metacognition. This analysis includes a wide spectrum of different types of metacognition and relates to diverse concepts involved in metacognition in a classroom environment and metacognitive strategies.
How was metacognition addressed and/or manifested in my lessons?
Teacher Modeling for Metacognitive Thinking and Strategies
I was working with six year-olds who had not yet had much expectation or instruction regarding metacognition, if any. So I knew that one of the best ways I could encourage and introduce metacognition was through teacher modeling, making my personal metacognition visible and highlighting their own moments of metacognition. I chose not to introduce them to the term "Metacognition" itself although I have read about teachers that have successfully. My objective though was not to have them learn the term but for them to be introduced to the concepts and start forming the habits of mind involved in this kind of learning. I believe that modeling related habits of mind and ways of being a learner are a great support to student success. For example, "students fail to use resources available to them to improve their skills because they lack models of how to tap into those resources (Collins, Brown and Hollum, p. 8). Through modeling it is my goal to demonstrate for them how these habits can help them and hopefully it will motivate them to start trying them out on their own.
I was working with six year-olds who had not yet had much expectation or instruction regarding metacognition, if any. So I knew that one of the best ways I could encourage and introduce metacognition was through teacher modeling, making my personal metacognition visible and highlighting their own moments of metacognition. I chose not to introduce them to the term "Metacognition" itself although I have read about teachers that have successfully. My objective though was not to have them learn the term but for them to be introduced to the concepts and start forming the habits of mind involved in this kind of learning. I believe that modeling related habits of mind and ways of being a learner are a great support to student success. For example, "students fail to use resources available to them to improve their skills because they lack models of how to tap into those resources (Collins, Brown and Hollum, p. 8). Through modeling it is my goal to demonstrate for them how these habits can help them and hopefully it will motivate them to start trying them out on their own.
Explicit Instruction in Choosing Strategies
In my math lesson, I created an anchor chart for problem solving strategies (see image below). We discussed how in math we all might use different strategies for helping us think about and solve a problem. By making this part of my direct instruction and being clear and explicit, my students were forced to reflect on those strategies and think about their math learning in a way that was broader than the specifics of completing any one worksheet or problem. Although it was a small step, my students were then able to participate in metacognition by actively planning and self regulating/monitoring when we starting work on a problem. "Planning involves identification and selection of appropriate strategies and allocation of resources, and can include goal setting, activating background knowledge, and budgeting time" (Lai, 2011, pg 9). We moved quickly into a problem exploration, before any direct instruction on the math topic just to get them invested and thinking about the concept of balancing inequality. As they were working through how to solve it and make sense of it on their own before we began direct instruction, I heard students making exclamations that sounded a lot like metacognitive thinking. Examples include, "I didn't even need to use the blocks!", "I'm going to draw it like this so I can show you", and even one girl who was confident enough to tell me she didn't understand the problem which involved different quantities of apples in two bags. So I told she could imagine the problem differently if that was better for her and she then went on to solve the problem correctly substituting "cute shirts" for the apples in the bags. I was so glad to see students actively making decisions about and recognizing what works best for them as math students.
In my math lesson, I created an anchor chart for problem solving strategies (see image below). We discussed how in math we all might use different strategies for helping us think about and solve a problem. By making this part of my direct instruction and being clear and explicit, my students were forced to reflect on those strategies and think about their math learning in a way that was broader than the specifics of completing any one worksheet or problem. Although it was a small step, my students were then able to participate in metacognition by actively planning and self regulating/monitoring when we starting work on a problem. "Planning involves identification and selection of appropriate strategies and allocation of resources, and can include goal setting, activating background knowledge, and budgeting time" (Lai, 2011, pg 9). We moved quickly into a problem exploration, before any direct instruction on the math topic just to get them invested and thinking about the concept of balancing inequality. As they were working through how to solve it and make sense of it on their own before we began direct instruction, I heard students making exclamations that sounded a lot like metacognitive thinking. Examples include, "I didn't even need to use the blocks!", "I'm going to draw it like this so I can show you", and even one girl who was confident enough to tell me she didn't understand the problem which involved different quantities of apples in two bags. So I told she could imagine the problem differently if that was better for her and she then went on to solve the problem correctly substituting "cute shirts" for the apples in the bags. I was so glad to see students actively making decisions about and recognizing what works best for them as math students.
Providing Students with Choices - Multiple Options for Materials or Learning Tools
I provided students with a choice during the math lesson about what strategies they might want to use to problem solve during our initial problem exploration. I also provided them with various materials. They had manipulative blocks, pencils, markers, crayons, blank drawing paper and lined writing paper, and number lines. I think the availability of multiple materials forced students to take a step back and think about which materials to try and it also allowed them to switch to something different if it wasn't what they needed or they wanted to try something else.
Students had choices as well in the science and literacy lessons. In those instances it was not as explicit. In the science lesson they received a clipboard that had a smaller copy of the large scale scene that were working from as a group, underneath that was a full page of lined paper, and on the bottom was a blank piece of paper. The task was to identify the evidence or "clues" of animal presence in the scene. So students started working on it and most of them intuitively were circling what they found. Then this one students asks me, "Can I write stuff down?". I was thrilled. She was recognizing that circling the clues just didn't feel like enough to her, she wanted to take notes and that's exactly why I had given them the extra papers. Of course I shared her question and my admiration of her thinking about the best way to dig into this task with the rest of the group and they all starting thinking about how they wanted to share what they had found beyond circling things in the picture. These students started to show signs of metacognition. For example, one student asked if he could go look up the spelling of one of the animals that he thinks might have been in the scene, another student says to me, "I'm going to make a list" and another student decides that he dislikes writing but will use the blank paper to draw pictures of the animals he thinks were there. I was impressed by how well students advocated for what they thought they might want/need to get the most out of the activity and then decided on their own how to organize and communicate that information. They went so far beyond the specific task I had instructed them to do. I credit the fact that they had the multiple papers and freedom to make choices about how to engage in the task.
In the literacy lesson something similar happened. We were doing a matching activity with a deck of index cards that had rhyming words on them. I provided the students with the deck of cards, a sheet to record their matches and what I called a "cheat sheet", which was a random list of all the words in the deck. I had left both of these sheets ambiguous and was pleasantly surprised when students started thinking about how to best use them in the activity. For example, one student started using the "cheat sheet" as a way to monitor how many and which word pairs they had left to find. She came up with her own method of circling the words and connecting them with a line. This may be reminiscent of other matching activities she has done previously that she was using to help her engage with this experience.
The following are examples of student work (from all three lessons) that shows the effect of having these extra materials available and how diversely the students used them:
I provided students with a choice during the math lesson about what strategies they might want to use to problem solve during our initial problem exploration. I also provided them with various materials. They had manipulative blocks, pencils, markers, crayons, blank drawing paper and lined writing paper, and number lines. I think the availability of multiple materials forced students to take a step back and think about which materials to try and it also allowed them to switch to something different if it wasn't what they needed or they wanted to try something else.
Students had choices as well in the science and literacy lessons. In those instances it was not as explicit. In the science lesson they received a clipboard that had a smaller copy of the large scale scene that were working from as a group, underneath that was a full page of lined paper, and on the bottom was a blank piece of paper. The task was to identify the evidence or "clues" of animal presence in the scene. So students started working on it and most of them intuitively were circling what they found. Then this one students asks me, "Can I write stuff down?". I was thrilled. She was recognizing that circling the clues just didn't feel like enough to her, she wanted to take notes and that's exactly why I had given them the extra papers. Of course I shared her question and my admiration of her thinking about the best way to dig into this task with the rest of the group and they all starting thinking about how they wanted to share what they had found beyond circling things in the picture. These students started to show signs of metacognition. For example, one student asked if he could go look up the spelling of one of the animals that he thinks might have been in the scene, another student says to me, "I'm going to make a list" and another student decides that he dislikes writing but will use the blank paper to draw pictures of the animals he thinks were there. I was impressed by how well students advocated for what they thought they might want/need to get the most out of the activity and then decided on their own how to organize and communicate that information. They went so far beyond the specific task I had instructed them to do. I credit the fact that they had the multiple papers and freedom to make choices about how to engage in the task.
In the literacy lesson something similar happened. We were doing a matching activity with a deck of index cards that had rhyming words on them. I provided the students with the deck of cards, a sheet to record their matches and what I called a "cheat sheet", which was a random list of all the words in the deck. I had left both of these sheets ambiguous and was pleasantly surprised when students started thinking about how to best use them in the activity. For example, one student started using the "cheat sheet" as a way to monitor how many and which word pairs they had left to find. She came up with her own method of circling the words and connecting them with a line. This may be reminiscent of other matching activities she has done previously that she was using to help her engage with this experience.
The following are examples of student work (from all three lessons) that shows the effect of having these extra materials available and how diversely the students used them:
Assigning Tasks That Demand Students to be Active and Reflective Learners
In literacy I decided that one of the best ways I could promote active learning and invite students to be more metacognitive about a read aloud is by assigning a specific task for them to do while they listen to the book. They were told to pay attention to rhyme and when they heard it they should put a finger on their nose. This allowed the students to then reflect and think about how much rhyme was in the book and then helped them to successfully recall the rhymes they heard. If they had been more passive listeners during the read aloud activity, I think it would have been more difficult for them to reflect on their experience.
In literacy I decided that one of the best ways I could promote active learning and invite students to be more metacognitive about a read aloud is by assigning a specific task for them to do while they listen to the book. They were told to pay attention to rhyme and when they heard it they should put a finger on their nose. This allowed the students to then reflect and think about how much rhyme was in the book and then helped them to successfully recall the rhymes they heard. If they had been more passive listeners during the read aloud activity, I think it would have been more difficult for them to reflect on their experience.
Encouraging Metacognition Through Shared Language and Discourse
Students were encouraged throughout all my lessons to share their thinking. Student voices were just as important as my own in the learning that took place. They talked about what they noticed, what they were trying and how they were choosing to complete or engage in tasks. I believe this understanding students had that they could share ideas and try different things made them more personally invested in the task and more motivated to stick with it. Also, as students were working I would make sure to highlight and emphasize metacognitive moments or thinking by asking targeted questions, sharing my own observations of their work or thinking and purposefully using phrases to encourage them to step back and think about processing like, "your thinking", "your strategy", "your next step", "how would you communicate that" and others. I tried to always celebrate and encourage moments when students could take a step back from the task at hand. I wanted them to think about their own processing, identify and reflect on the choices made, and think about how their actions were meaningful in a way that's beyond the specific activity. See some examples in the video below.
Students were encouraged throughout all my lessons to share their thinking. Student voices were just as important as my own in the learning that took place. They talked about what they noticed, what they were trying and how they were choosing to complete or engage in tasks. I believe this understanding students had that they could share ideas and try different things made them more personally invested in the task and more motivated to stick with it. Also, as students were working I would make sure to highlight and emphasize metacognitive moments or thinking by asking targeted questions, sharing my own observations of their work or thinking and purposefully using phrases to encourage them to step back and think about processing like, "your thinking", "your strategy", "your next step", "how would you communicate that" and others. I tried to always celebrate and encourage moments when students could take a step back from the task at hand. I wanted them to think about their own processing, identify and reflect on the choices made, and think about how their actions were meaningful in a way that's beyond the specific activity. See some examples in the video below.
Celebrating Student Connections Between the Current Learning Experience and Previous Experiences
During all the lessons activating prior knowledge and making meaningful connections was encouraged and celebrated. One student, during the math lesson immediately made connections between their previous use of a scale balance in science activities and our use of it in that lesson. It provided an opportunity for us all to think about how tools can be used for multiple purposes and in multiple situations. It was enlightening for some of them that a scale could help us understand our math as well as be a useful tool in science. In my science lesson, students were making connections that led to critical thinking and questions. For example, one student asked if we have any evidence of dinosaurs during our investigation into evidence of animals in our own neighborhoods. In that same lesson, another student suggested that we see horses in the city which was contested by some students until they all came to realize they had seen horses pulling the carriages. This then got them thinking about the difference between wild and domesticated animals and that changed how some students interpreted the lesson activity and greater objectives. By giving space for students to make these critical connections, they were able to step outside the task at hand and really think about what it makes them think about, and why it's meaningful. This allows their experiences to be more memorable and their learning to be flexible. Being metacognitive about the connections they make during a learning experience gives them “opportunities to relate what they are learning to their existing knowledge in ways that support the extension and application of that knowledge” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p.26). This type of metacognition also made the students much more invested in the task because it was personal to them after making their own connections to it and having those validated by the teacher.
During all the lessons activating prior knowledge and making meaningful connections was encouraged and celebrated. One student, during the math lesson immediately made connections between their previous use of a scale balance in science activities and our use of it in that lesson. It provided an opportunity for us all to think about how tools can be used for multiple purposes and in multiple situations. It was enlightening for some of them that a scale could help us understand our math as well as be a useful tool in science. In my science lesson, students were making connections that led to critical thinking and questions. For example, one student asked if we have any evidence of dinosaurs during our investigation into evidence of animals in our own neighborhoods. In that same lesson, another student suggested that we see horses in the city which was contested by some students until they all came to realize they had seen horses pulling the carriages. This then got them thinking about the difference between wild and domesticated animals and that changed how some students interpreted the lesson activity and greater objectives. By giving space for students to make these critical connections, they were able to step outside the task at hand and really think about what it makes them think about, and why it's meaningful. This allows their experiences to be more memorable and their learning to be flexible. Being metacognitive about the connections they make during a learning experience gives them “opportunities to relate what they are learning to their existing knowledge in ways that support the extension and application of that knowledge” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p.26). This type of metacognition also made the students much more invested in the task because it was personal to them after making their own connections to it and having those validated by the teacher.
How have my teaching experiences affected my original beliefs?
Young students are capable of participating in metacognition but need a lot of teacher support to reflect and articulate it well.
What I realized while teaching my lessons was that although my students could be introduced to metacognition and start participating in the practice of certain metacognitive strategies, they often struggled to articulate what they were thinking while engaged in metacogntion and did not recognize it in themselves. Since they are not actively choosing to engage in metacognition, the way in which they participate in metacognitive thinking is through the teacher's modeling, prompting, and structured guidance with regards to reflection and articulation of ideas. In my lessons, I provided students with activities that would allow for them to practice articulating their ideas in multiple ways. They were able to both draw and take notes in the math and science lessons and there was an emphasis in all three lessons of making sure to think about how they would communicate what they did to someone.“The ability to communicate or articulate ones ideas is an important goal of education and it also is a benchmark of understanding. Articulation involves the communication of one's knowledge, either verbally, in writing, or through some other means like pictures, diagrams, or models. Articulation requires reflection, in that it involves lifting out the critical ideas of an activity so that the essence of that activity can be communicated. In the process, the activity becomes an object of thought. In other words, in order to articulate our ideas, we must reflect on them in order to identify and describe critical elements” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 22).
In terms of reflection, I did this with teacher modeling of the types of questions we could ask ourselves by asking them of the group. I also used guiding and prompting questions to attempt (with some success) to pull out the metacognitive thought that I believed had taken place but was not explicitly identified or shared. “Reflection on the task while carrying it out can also be encouraged directly by asking students to articulate what they are doing during the process of solving a problem. One possibility is for teachers to talk to students as they are solving a problem, asking students to explain assumptions and why they are pursuing the strategy they have chosen...being asked such questions on a regular basis help students internalize them, so that they will ask themselves the same questions as they think about a given task” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 26). Something important that I realized is that although students this young (age six) are capable of metacognition, making it a useful classroom norm and tool for learning takes an incredible amount of time allotted to specific/explicit instruction, dialogue and additional guidance. I can understand how some teachers may feel that there just isn't enough time to also include this metacognitive practice. I still believe that it is an important skill we should be explicitly teaching but I realize that we may need to pick and choose when it is taught (it can't be emphasized in every lesson). I like the anchor chart tool for this reason. That if we have it up in the room somewhere, after explicitly instructing on it, we can just quickly reference it or remind students with it and then get back to our other objectives during lessons that follow.
In order to encourage student success with metacognition, teachers should utilize the funds of knowledge in the classroom community and be more like coaches.
Something I have wrestled with often is making sense of the various roles the teacher plays in the classroom and within the relationships with their students. One aspect of this that I am decided about though is that the teacher should not be positioned as the source of all knowledge and I disagree wholeheartedly with the now antiquated notion that students are empty vessels waiting to be filled up with what we have to offer them. “No liberal education worth of the name can content itself simply with the transmission of information from teachers to students. It demands a pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students rather than at them”(Osborne, p. 33). True education in my mind comes from the collaboration between teachers, parents, the students themselves and their classmates. I think that as a teacher my job is to show students how they can not only learn from me but also to learn from another and be able to teach themselves. Metacognition can help students navigate and identify what they can learn from who and be open/receptive to accessing as well as adding to their classroom community fund of knowledge.
Another goal in the introduction and facilitation of metacognitive strategies is to teach students habits and skills that will help them to be more successful in their increasingly independent work and life. In order to promote a sense of gradual release of control and management, I now believe that teachers should not only teach with their students but also should become more like coaches. “The master coaches the apprentice through a wide range of activities: choosing tasks, providing hints and scaffolding, evaluating the activities of apprentices, and diagnosing the kinds of problems they are having, challenging them and offering encouragement, giving feedback, structuring the ways to do things, working on particular weaknesses. In short, coaching is the process of overseeing a student's learning” (Collins, Brown, and Hollum, p. 9). I want my students to use metacognitive thinking to be more open to where or who that learning can come from and how it can contribute to their greater understanding and success.
In my lessons I came to this understanding by watching how my students were able to help each other learn by sharing their thoughts, strategies, motivations and connections. I also saw the benefit of letting go of the typical teacher authority of all knowledge position by trying the problem based learning or problem centered classroom approach in my math lesson. By waiting to do direct instruction until after some initial problem exploration, students had a chance to learn from their own struggle, teaching themselves without realizing it or learning from one another when they needed help. I was amazed at how capable they were at diving in and taking the lead. It was amazing how after that initial problem exploration, I was less of a top-down teacher giving them knowledge and more of a coach who helped them make sense of and make the most of the experiential knowledge they just gained. Most of what I did at that point was help them reflect on their experiences and manage the sharing out of solutions. This pedagogical choice allowed for students to see how struggling through a problem and being metacognitive to help them work through it gave them the power to learn from themselves. I believe this was a great confidence boost for a lot of my students who may not be used to feeling that type of empowerment.
Students must be active participants in their learning to engage effectively and meaningfully in metacognition.
Going back to the ideal of teaching with students and not at them, just as the teacher should be accountable for this kind of pedagogical relationship, so should the students. Even though I believe that students are not "empty vessels" without proper engagement supported by the right kind of pedagogy and experiences, many students can still behave that way and interact with the classroom and their own learning in very passive ways. However, it is important to note that I am not blaming the student for this. As a teacher I think we have a responsibility to both provide engaging learning experiences and have explicit expectations regarding students being active participants in their own learning process. One of the misconceptions about learning that we are fighting here is that students may
“see it as someone else's knowledge, which they simply assimilate through listening, watching and practicing”(Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 23). Another problem is that our tasks may not seem authentic and meaningful to students. We want to avoid the example provided by Ken Osborne about one student, “learning to perform a task in which he saw little point and did not enjoy, and to do so competently and without overt complaint...What should have been an educational experience...was reduced to an exercise in socialization and training” (Osborne, p. 34). This type of passive absorption of knowledge is not lasting, it isn't memorable or internalized in any way, and often isn't transferable to new, authentic situations.
Active learning allows for greater metacognition but metacognition can also be a strategy and tool to promote more active participation learning experiences. In this way “student's author their own learning...they develop their own stances on different forms and practices” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 23). I tried to promote this active learning in my lessons by allowing students to make connections, encouraging them to ask questions, changing the details of the context of the math problem so it was something a student could relate more to. I also believe I saw the effect of how incorporating motor skills and kinesthetics can promote active learning and additional metacognition. In my literacy lesson, I had students use a physical signal to show they heard a rhyme in the read aloud and in the math lesson I had students get out of their chairs and use like body like scale balances to model inequality problems. Not only were student engaged enough to be active participants in their learning but they were engaged in a way that allowed them to reflect on their learning throughout the rest of the lesson. For example, my literacy students remembered an amazing amount of examples of rhyme from the book and the students in the math class could be seen putting out their arms and using their "body scale" as a strategy for making sense of problems during the independent practice.
What I realized while teaching my lessons was that although my students could be introduced to metacognition and start participating in the practice of certain metacognitive strategies, they often struggled to articulate what they were thinking while engaged in metacogntion and did not recognize it in themselves. Since they are not actively choosing to engage in metacognition, the way in which they participate in metacognitive thinking is through the teacher's modeling, prompting, and structured guidance with regards to reflection and articulation of ideas. In my lessons, I provided students with activities that would allow for them to practice articulating their ideas in multiple ways. They were able to both draw and take notes in the math and science lessons and there was an emphasis in all three lessons of making sure to think about how they would communicate what they did to someone.“The ability to communicate or articulate ones ideas is an important goal of education and it also is a benchmark of understanding. Articulation involves the communication of one's knowledge, either verbally, in writing, or through some other means like pictures, diagrams, or models. Articulation requires reflection, in that it involves lifting out the critical ideas of an activity so that the essence of that activity can be communicated. In the process, the activity becomes an object of thought. In other words, in order to articulate our ideas, we must reflect on them in order to identify and describe critical elements” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 22).
In terms of reflection, I did this with teacher modeling of the types of questions we could ask ourselves by asking them of the group. I also used guiding and prompting questions to attempt (with some success) to pull out the metacognitive thought that I believed had taken place but was not explicitly identified or shared. “Reflection on the task while carrying it out can also be encouraged directly by asking students to articulate what they are doing during the process of solving a problem. One possibility is for teachers to talk to students as they are solving a problem, asking students to explain assumptions and why they are pursuing the strategy they have chosen...being asked such questions on a regular basis help students internalize them, so that they will ask themselves the same questions as they think about a given task” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 26). Something important that I realized is that although students this young (age six) are capable of metacognition, making it a useful classroom norm and tool for learning takes an incredible amount of time allotted to specific/explicit instruction, dialogue and additional guidance. I can understand how some teachers may feel that there just isn't enough time to also include this metacognitive practice. I still believe that it is an important skill we should be explicitly teaching but I realize that we may need to pick and choose when it is taught (it can't be emphasized in every lesson). I like the anchor chart tool for this reason. That if we have it up in the room somewhere, after explicitly instructing on it, we can just quickly reference it or remind students with it and then get back to our other objectives during lessons that follow.
In order to encourage student success with metacognition, teachers should utilize the funds of knowledge in the classroom community and be more like coaches.
Something I have wrestled with often is making sense of the various roles the teacher plays in the classroom and within the relationships with their students. One aspect of this that I am decided about though is that the teacher should not be positioned as the source of all knowledge and I disagree wholeheartedly with the now antiquated notion that students are empty vessels waiting to be filled up with what we have to offer them. “No liberal education worth of the name can content itself simply with the transmission of information from teachers to students. It demands a pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students rather than at them”(Osborne, p. 33). True education in my mind comes from the collaboration between teachers, parents, the students themselves and their classmates. I think that as a teacher my job is to show students how they can not only learn from me but also to learn from another and be able to teach themselves. Metacognition can help students navigate and identify what they can learn from who and be open/receptive to accessing as well as adding to their classroom community fund of knowledge.
Another goal in the introduction and facilitation of metacognitive strategies is to teach students habits and skills that will help them to be more successful in their increasingly independent work and life. In order to promote a sense of gradual release of control and management, I now believe that teachers should not only teach with their students but also should become more like coaches. “The master coaches the apprentice through a wide range of activities: choosing tasks, providing hints and scaffolding, evaluating the activities of apprentices, and diagnosing the kinds of problems they are having, challenging them and offering encouragement, giving feedback, structuring the ways to do things, working on particular weaknesses. In short, coaching is the process of overseeing a student's learning” (Collins, Brown, and Hollum, p. 9). I want my students to use metacognitive thinking to be more open to where or who that learning can come from and how it can contribute to their greater understanding and success.
In my lessons I came to this understanding by watching how my students were able to help each other learn by sharing their thoughts, strategies, motivations and connections. I also saw the benefit of letting go of the typical teacher authority of all knowledge position by trying the problem based learning or problem centered classroom approach in my math lesson. By waiting to do direct instruction until after some initial problem exploration, students had a chance to learn from their own struggle, teaching themselves without realizing it or learning from one another when they needed help. I was amazed at how capable they were at diving in and taking the lead. It was amazing how after that initial problem exploration, I was less of a top-down teacher giving them knowledge and more of a coach who helped them make sense of and make the most of the experiential knowledge they just gained. Most of what I did at that point was help them reflect on their experiences and manage the sharing out of solutions. This pedagogical choice allowed for students to see how struggling through a problem and being metacognitive to help them work through it gave them the power to learn from themselves. I believe this was a great confidence boost for a lot of my students who may not be used to feeling that type of empowerment.
Students must be active participants in their learning to engage effectively and meaningfully in metacognition.
Going back to the ideal of teaching with students and not at them, just as the teacher should be accountable for this kind of pedagogical relationship, so should the students. Even though I believe that students are not "empty vessels" without proper engagement supported by the right kind of pedagogy and experiences, many students can still behave that way and interact with the classroom and their own learning in very passive ways. However, it is important to note that I am not blaming the student for this. As a teacher I think we have a responsibility to both provide engaging learning experiences and have explicit expectations regarding students being active participants in their own learning process. One of the misconceptions about learning that we are fighting here is that students may
“see it as someone else's knowledge, which they simply assimilate through listening, watching and practicing”(Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 23). Another problem is that our tasks may not seem authentic and meaningful to students. We want to avoid the example provided by Ken Osborne about one student, “learning to perform a task in which he saw little point and did not enjoy, and to do so competently and without overt complaint...What should have been an educational experience...was reduced to an exercise in socialization and training” (Osborne, p. 34). This type of passive absorption of knowledge is not lasting, it isn't memorable or internalized in any way, and often isn't transferable to new, authentic situations.
Active learning allows for greater metacognition but metacognition can also be a strategy and tool to promote more active participation learning experiences. In this way “student's author their own learning...they develop their own stances on different forms and practices” (Carpenter and Lehrer, p. 23). I tried to promote this active learning in my lessons by allowing students to make connections, encouraging them to ask questions, changing the details of the context of the math problem so it was something a student could relate more to. I also believe I saw the effect of how incorporating motor skills and kinesthetics can promote active learning and additional metacognition. In my literacy lesson, I had students use a physical signal to show they heard a rhyme in the read aloud and in the math lesson I had students get out of their chairs and use like body like scale balances to model inequality problems. Not only were student engaged enough to be active participants in their learning but they were engaged in a way that allowed them to reflect on their learning throughout the rest of the lesson. For example, my literacy students remembered an amazing amount of examples of rhyme from the book and the students in the math class could be seen putting out their arms and using their "body scale" as a strategy for making sense of problems during the independent practice.
What are Implications for Future Teaching?
- Students could have a behavioral task, instructional task and metacognitive (evaluative/reflective) task focus for almost every activity. These kind of explicit expectations that could be built into a routine would help students to recognize and identify when they are working on what part of their learning.
- I need to make sure to build in time for discussions, questions, and making connections, so that students can be active participants in their learning and make the content and new knowledge memorable and meaningful to them.This means taking a long hard look at my lesson planning and being more realistic with timing and pacing than I was with these three lessons.
- I want to design initial activities that encourage students to interact with the content on their own first before direct instruction. This way students can identify in themselves what they felt comfortable or confident with, what they struggled with, what connections they can make, and what questions are important for them to get answers to when we start working together on it.
- When students are working on their own I need to develop a good list of probing questions to have on hand to help students reflect on and articulate their own thinking so that they can start getting into good habits of mind and also start to ask themselves the same questions.
- I also want to look into what tools I can have on hand for making thinking visible, like the anchor chart that worked so well in my math lesson.
What Further Questions Do I Have?
- How can we accurately assess students' use of and participation in metacognition?
- What role can metacognition play in self regulating student behavior? How would that be taught and where is the room for that in an already overstuffed curriculum? Should it be explicitly taught or just part of the norms and expectations of the classroom set up in the very beginning of school?
- How can I take the time for explicit instruction in metacognition and strategies without sacrificing content instruction?
- How can I establish the appropriate classroom norms to facilitate and support metacognition in the classroom