Ideas and Resources for the Classroom |
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Resources to Develop Metacognition
Metacognition is thinking about thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. It helps students to understand how they learn best. It helps them to develop self-awareness.
Strategies to improve metacognition:
-Provide opportunities for reflection
-Use learning journals
-Teach students about how their brains are wired and about metacognition
-Set goals and monitor progress
-Encourage a growth mindset
-Embrace uncertainty. Provide students with a chance to identify what they don't understand or any points of confusion.
-Facilitate reflexive thinking
-Allow time for productive struggle
-Evaluate and revise work
-Discuss learning regularly
-Allow students to choose their own learning strategies
Strategies to improve metacognition:
-Provide opportunities for reflection
-Use learning journals
-Teach students about how their brains are wired and about metacognition
-Set goals and monitor progress
-Encourage a growth mindset
-Embrace uncertainty. Provide students with a chance to identify what they don't understand or any points of confusion.
-Facilitate reflexive thinking
-Allow time for productive struggle
-Evaluate and revise work
-Discuss learning regularly
-Allow students to choose their own learning strategies
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For students to track their learning and the factors which influence their performance. It may help them to see patterns in different factors.
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Students can use this to develop strategies for using resources effectively and knowing who from and when to seek help.
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Learning how to Learn
Addresses cognitive, metacognitive and affective elements of study skills |
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Checklist for study skills
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Growth Mindset
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Having a growth mindset means that you believe that you have some control in your own ability to learn and improve. This refers to intelligence, talents, and abilities.
Individuals with a growth mindset generally take more risks, set more challenging goals and are more motivated, The power of the word 'yet'. I can't calculate the volume of a cylinder yet. "Love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning" 
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Lesson Design
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Do you design your lessons in a way which allows for students to make some decisions about their own learning? Student agency is a great portal into personalised learning. By allowing students to make choices on what they learn (topic etc.), how they complete a task, or how they demonstrate their learning, you can support individualised learning. Student agency can be a motivating force. Allowing students to decide on different aspects of their learning experiences can increase levels of interest and engagement. One strategy you can use to incorporate student agency into your classroom is to provide a choice board. A choice board provides not only options for students to choose from, but by including hyperlinked documents, students can be supported and scaffolded through the learning process and can be in control of their own learning. When students are challenged to make decisions around what they do and how they do it, they need to actively engage in their own learning. Planning Lessons When planning your lessons, consider where you could incorporate student decision making into it. One approach is to consider the why, what and how (lesson intentions). Why? Challenge your students to articulate why the learning is valuable. Defining the purpose of the work and then allowing them to decide how they want to demonstrate their learning can be powerful. What? Is it practical for students to decide a topic or subject for the lesson? Or even an area of focus? When students are interested in a topic, they invest themselves in it. How? Can students decide how they will complete a task, or what task they will complete? Challenge your students to plan their own learning path. Student agency does not equate to loss of control. Students don’t make all the decisions but they are given the opportunity to make some. It is an avenue to engage all learners, including reluctant ones. |
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Questioning
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How can we access all of the voices in our classroom?
The use of questioning in the classroom can be incredibly powerful. How do you know what is happening with your students if you don’t ask them? Questioning can serve a number of different purposes. It can help to develop interest and motivate students, it can help students to develop critical thinking skills and it can be used as a prompt to get your students to think about their learning. Often when a teacher asks a question, the confident, articulate students respond. We often use questioning to gauge the learning progress of our students, but if only a minority of students are answering the questions, are we making decisions that are reflective of all learners?
What can we do to ensure that all students have the courage and confidence to speak up?
A strategy to experiment with:
Instead of asking ‘any questions?’ or ‘what questions do you have?’, replace it with ‘ask me 3 questions’.
You will be amazed at the difference.
Who is doing most of the thinking in your classroom? Is it you, or is it the students? How can you encourage students to think deeply in your classroom, and reconcile the different ideas/concepts presented to them?
The answer is through the use of questioning. Using open ended questions, and many of them. Quality questions promote curiosity and ultimately thinking. Quality questions can generate quality conversations. Quality questions can improve learner capacity.
The students should be working harder than the teacher in their own learning journey. They should experience productive struggle. They should feel like giving up. Let the students sit with their questions. Let them discover. Make them think. To encourage agency in your classroom probe the students, ask them to justify and elaborate. Don’t settle for poorly thought out responses. Provide sufficient wait time after asking a question. This is difficult for all teachers, but be patient. It’s a lot easier to be told what to do than to think for oneself. Don’t let your students take the easy path. We want our students to become self-directed learners, we want them to have agency. Ask open ended questions and follow student responses up with additional questions. Quality questioning is vital for boosting both learner confidence and student agency.
The following starters may be useful-
-explain and interpret
-make connections
-identify and analyse
-reflect upon
-observe and describe
-predict
-compare and contrast
-classify
Feedback
Use Circle Time
Circle time can be used in the classroom setting for a variety of purposes such as to help:
- Teach social skills and build relationships
- Facilitate dialogue and discussion about issues in the classroom and community
- Solve problems
- Review curriculum
- Reflect on learning
- Resolve a classroom issue
| Classroom Circles-Read About |