Metacognition: Supporting a Thinking Classroom

1. Metacognition: Supporting a Thinking Classroom Connie Wehmeyer, Ph.D.

3. 24 + 43 Cognition- knowledge or skill to carry out a task.

4. Objectives: 1. What is metacognition? 2. How do I teach my students about metacognition? 3. What metacognitive strategies should I use?

5. Student Metacognitive Strategies Which statement best describes you? Assess yourself. I am a Novice • I am just starting to learn this and I don’t really understand it yet. I am an Apprentice • I am starting to get it, but I still need someone to coach me through it. I am a Practitioner • I can mostly do it myself, but I sometime mess up or get stuck. I am an Expert • I understand it well and I could thoroughly teach it to someone else.

6. Learners can think before they enter a classroom. Educator’s role is to teach them to think in different ways and to think more effectively.

7. Under NCLB • Teachers and students approached content, not as a mode of thinking, not as a system for thought, or even as a system of thought, but rather as a sequence of stuff to be routinely "covered" and committed to memory. • Consequences: no basis for intellectual growth, no deep structures of knowledge formed, no basis for long term grasp and control.

8. Common Core Standards The Common Core Standards require students to think and communicate their thinking in order to demonstrate understanding of complex text, and conceptual mathematics.

9. Why: Confronted with Real World Problems

10. So, what can teachers do to support student thinking? Problem Solvers Critical Thinkers Precise Persevere Think with others Utilize limited resources

12. Embed within our Instructional Model? Target Data Analysis Teach all students Metacognitive Strategies Collaboration Management Learning Strategies Engaging Thinking For All Students Tezella G. Cline, 2006

13. What is Metacognition? • http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mVE21QhY-lI

14. What is Metacognition? “thinking about your thinking” Our ability to know what we know and what we do not know; how I think; and what helps me learn. • Person variables: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information. • Task variables: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task. • Strategy variables: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task; For example: “I know that I (person variable) have difficulty with word problems (task variable), so I will answer the computational problems first and save the word problems for last (strategy variable).”

15. What is Metacognition? “how to regulate your thinking” What I do to help me think and learn: • plan a strategy for producing what information is needed • monitor the steps and strategies during the action of problem solving; and • reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking. (Dirkes,1985)

16. Who practices Metacognition? • Plan the lesson (content, instructional strategy, checking for understanding) to keep you on track. • Monitoring the plan over a period of time –to make adjustments. • Reflectback to make judgments • Evaluatethe plan upon its completion to determine future changes.

17. Who else?

18. Not everyone • 50% to 66% of the world’s population engage in metacognition John Flavell, 1979 • Some children have no ideas of what they should do when they confront a problem and are often unable to explain their strategies of decision making Sternberg and Wagner, 1982

19. The result of not thinking before we attempt to solve real world problems

20. Not everyone Teacher asks “How did you solve that problem? “ What strategies did you have in mind? “Tell us what went on in your head to come up with that conclusion? “What part do you not understand? Student response “I don’t know, I just did it.”

21. “ Students without metacognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction or opportunity to review their progress, accomplishments, and future directions.” O’Mally, Chamot, Stewner-Mazanaares, Russo, & Kupper, 1985, p.56

22. Benefits to Students with Learning Disabilities • When metacognitive strategies are explicitly taught they can support students information retrieval. (Lenz, Ellis, & Scanlon, 1996). • Moreover, students possess a powerful learning tool that builds learning independence. Confronted with a problem-solving situation, students can implement metacognitive strategies when they have difficulty remembering how to solve a particular problem. • As students learn, practice, and independently use metacognitive strategies, these strategies often become integrated into these students’ learning repertoires. (Mercer & Mercer, 1993

23. Reading Comprehension and Metacognition Awareness and monitoring are in itself what it means to be metacognitive during the process of reading.

25. Reading Task Reading a passage and our minds wander from the pages. We see the words but no meaning is being produced. Suddenly we realize that we are not concentrating and that we've lost contact with the meaning of the text. How do we recover? The inner awareness and the strategy of recovery are components of metacognition. What do you do? Who taught you to do those things?

26. Capacities of a Literate Individual • They demonstrate independence. • They build strong content knowledge. • They respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline. • They comprehend as well as critique. • They valueevidence. • They use technology and digital media strategically and capably. • They come to understandother perspectives and cultures.

27. The National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), • Effectiveness of systematic direct instruction of multiple metacognitive strategies designed to assist students in comprehending of expository text and vocabulary. • Binomial Effect Size Display 40% difference in gains in vocabulary between the two groups and a 20% difference in gains in reading comprehension in just five weeks.

28. Visible Learning For Teaching John Hattie rank orders factors that have the greatest effect size in student achievement. Meta-cognitive strategies taught and used have an effect size of .69

29. How do we teach students to use metacognition? Teach the Metacognitive Process: Plan for thinking • Clear about the task • Determine strategies: graphic organizer, take notes, draw a picture or diagram, identify what you already know • Set goals • Determine a sequence • Set deadlines • Identify possible distract actions • Determine how to overcome distractions

30. Metacognitive Process: Monitor and adjust plan: Am I • making progress on the task • thinking about the learning and identify the problem • comprehending what I read or is said and identify the problem if you are not • making adjusts to help me

31. Metacognitive Process: Self Reflect and Evaluate : How well did I • accomplish my task • manage my time • stay on task • use strategies to help me

32. Behaviors and Disposition of Successful Students: Using Metacognitive Strategies

33. College and Career Anchor Standard for Reading 1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

34. Process Steps support Metacognition

39. Preparing for an exam

41. Post- Exam Reflection of Exam Preparation

42. Direct Instruction of Strategies Many researchers have tried to foster better metacognition and comprehension through direct instruction of strategies(Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991). What can teachers do?

44. Metacognitive strategies Teacher action that prepares students for learning or elaboration through self-reflection regarding what was learned. • Teacher modeling of problem solving steps • Think-pair-share • Goal setting • Journal Writing • Activation of Prior Knowledge • Cues and Questions Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.

45. Metacognitive Strategies • Brainstorming • Webbing • Task-specific graphic organizers • Think Aloud Problem Solving-- Self-questioning • Debate • Role Play • Story map • Story retelling • Story frame • Semantic mapping

46. Graphic Organizers A graphic organizer for students to use as they are doing a project (KWL)

47. Student Metacognitive Strategies Which statement best describes you? Assess yourself. I am a Novice • I am just starting to learn this and I don’t really understand it yet. I am an Apprentice • I am starting to get it, but I still need someone to coach me through it. I am a Practitioner • I can mostly do it myself, but I sometime mess up or get stuck. I am an Expert • I understand it well and I could thoroughly teach it to someone else.

48. Thinking Maps

49. Tree Map