* Middle school teacher Julie Craven shows students how to use metacognition to deepen their understanding of a unit on China. One strategy is to have students mark up the text. Explain this technique. What is the difference between “marking up the text” and taking notes? What do you think of this technique?
Ms. Craven asks her students to mark up any text that is given to them instead of taking notes. Marking up text involves students writing questions, comments, or underlining unknown words within the margin of the paper. Ms. Craven describes marking up text, “As kids read, they …show more content…
This is not only beneficial for students so that can determine the types of questions they are asking or things that they notice, but also allows teachers to learn more about their student’s thinking. Teachers can discover misconceptions that students are having, things that are confusing them, or things that they find interesting. Students and teachers lose all of these benefits when they are restricted to note taking which only provides students with a reference of the same information that is being read or lectured.
* Julie leads students in figuring out the meanings of unfamiliar words. How can you use your associations to figure out the meaning of words such as liberation? What are some ways you might develop students’ metacognition when it comes to vocabulary words they don’t know?
As Ms. Craven stated that students can determine the meaning certain words by breaking up the words into known words, and using context clues to decipher the unknown word’s meaning. With “liberation” she broke the work into two parts: liberate, liberty, and -tion. She helped students determine that “liberation” is the act of brining liberty, or …show more content…
1. Think Aloud 2. Checklist, Rubrics, and Organizers 3. Explicit Teacher Modeling. “Thinking-alouds help students to consciously monitor and reflect what they are learning” (Metacognitive Strategies). This strategy can modeled by the teacher if they are reading aloud to the classroom. The teacher can stop in the middle of reading to verbalize his/her thoughts. Organizers are an important tool that can be used to help students organize their thoughts. “These organizational tools support students in the decision-making process because they serve as an aid for planning and self-evaluation” (Metacognitive Strategies). Explicit Teacher Modeling is a method in which the teacher models the desired action/behavior to the class during a specific lesson (e.g. how to use beakers during science) or on a daily basis (e.g. how to raise their hand). “When a teacher provides an easy to follow procedure for solving a problem, students have a memorable strategy to use for approaching a problem on their own” (Metacognitive