Metacognition

The article, “Metacognition”, stresses the importance of metacognitive practices. Metacognitive thinking is an awareness of the material you are learning and the strategies that you are using to learn and obtain the knowledge. By using metacognitive practices in your classroom, it increases your student’s ability to apply their knowledge and the strategies they are using to learn to other higher-level contexts. Students who learn strategies and actually “know” them are much more likely to then put those strategies to use. Metacognitive practices also increase a student’s self-awareness of their strengths and weakness as a learning. When a student is aware of their strengths and weaknesses they are then more likely to work to actively monitor their learning and assess their ability to succeed and improve.

To promote student metacognition in the classroom it is important for a teacher to practice explicit instruction. Some tools for explicit instruction are pre-assessments, the muddiest point, retrospective post assessments, and reflective journals. It is also important to develop a classroom that is grounded in metacognition. This goal can be obtained by allowing students to identify confusions in their learning, integrating reflection into classwork, and metacognitive modeling by the teacher. Another useful strategy is using cognitively passive study strategy and cognitively active study behavior. Being cognitively actives means the student is being present and aware of what they are learning and being cognitively active refers to questioning and being aware of how and why they are learning the present material.

I can incorporate metacognitive learning in my classroom be asking more questions. I can have my students answer questions such as, “What are we learning?”, “How are we learning?”, and “What is difficult or confusing about what we are learning?”. It would be beneficial to discuss these questions not only with myself but also with their classmates. I could also incorporate metacognitive learning into my classroom my having a reflective journal where my students could answer given questions and prompts regarding their learning process.