Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Students on thinking


I have come to appreciate “meta-cognitive’ thinking.  If we are a full participant in our own learning, we cannot but learn something. 
I took this idea to my class room.  Specifically, my reading classroom.  I haven’t taught reading for a long time, so I needed a refresher course.  I stumbled upon “clicking, and clunking.”  To some, this may be very old, but for me, it was new. 
I have a class of mixed – some coming from level 2 to level 3, and some repeating level 3.  For the new ones, the material will be new.  For the old ones, the material will have already been done, and done poorly.  I needed something that was interesting, but easy.  Something they could get their head around, but useful.
I put the students into groups after giving a brief explanation of what they were to do.  This was after a class in which I had explained clicking and clunking. 
To me, this was magic.  I had groups actually talking about the reading with understanding.  They were helping each other, but not in a bad way – just giving the answers.  They were helping their fellow student to understand! 
 This was a very small group, and they were higher level than before, but it was a 'teaching' moment. 

1 comment:

  1. Hi Adria! I've been reading PGCTHE participants' blogs and seeing interesting reasonings and sharing of experience. I think this greatly supplements my personal learning to be part of this all - I'm currently doing my Master's in Instructional Design & Technology with the Open University of Malaysia.

    "If we are a full participant in our own learning, we cannot but learn something." I find this sentence from your blog an inspiring one. I guess metacognition and learning to learn is a very important skill in today's knowledge society where you never know what job(s) you might end to (as the are nowadays jobs that didn't even exist 6 years ago!).

    I earlier commented Bara'a's blog post about Pesonal Learning Network (PLN) (http://baraayousuf.blogspot.com/2012/03/pln-network-that-works-for-you.html). What do you think: might the things that you write about the skill of metacognition also relate to PLN? Understanding what to learn on a certain moment the most efficiently? Just a thought that came to mind while reading your post. :) Many researchers say it is an important skill for contemporary people, but the question is how to 'teach' that in the classroom, as some research also argues that you can't teach it directly.

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