METACOGNITION

8/29/2013

To view the lesson on Metacognition, follow this link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0xRdYV22AFmRXB6TF9XSk1sWmc

Please feel free to leave any questions or comments. We ask that you do not identify any school, classroom, or student. Thank you.

3 Comments

Tim

12/5/2013 08:26:46

The metacognition lesson went well. The video was humorous and the students seemed to both enjoy it and get the idea. Based upon the discussion, I think they were not perfectly clear on what the term meant. One student asked, "do you mean the conscience"? One student ask, "how do you know when you are doing it"? I have to admit, this stumped me, and I did not give a very good answer. If I remember correctly, I think I reflected the question back and asked how she would know if she were being metacognitive. I will have to follow up on this during the week.

When they started making comments about how much energy it would take to monitor their own thinking, I got the impression we were getting closer to a clear understanding. Some students, I think, were not aware that such a thing can even be done--which is the point of all these lessons: teach the capabilities of the frontal lobe. I think they don't use this skill as much as they should, but probably more often than they think. I will look for times during the week that they are monitoring their own thinking and point it out and see how that goes.

Jeff

12/5/2013 09:38:41

The lesson went really well for my classes. The video was engaging and the students were easily able to identify actions of the students in the video that showed a lack of some EF skill. The independently mentioned things like the 3-second rule we used for response inhibition or getting off the escalator for flexibility. I took it as evidence that students are definitely more aware of some of these skills, even if not by name but by the strategy we used to practice/illuminate the skill. The students also immediately saw the value in this week's exercise of having to explain how they got to the point they were stuck. They commented that they could probably figure it out for themselves if they did this. After a few days I would say that classes have definitely been less demanding of me in terms of the amount of students needing procedural assistance.

Jeff

12/6/2013 08:42:39

Today I received the best evidence yet that these lessons have an impact on students understanding of their own thinking. As part of my regular class structure I have a final reflection in place that asks students to focus not on what they learned but what they learned about themselves and how they learn. This reflection and the prompts used have been in place long before I began these EF lessons and don't specifically mention EF or Thinksmart. Today in a final reflection a student wrote "The think smart lessons kept me on my feet and kept me asking questions on everything to make sure I remembered everything, and it's been moving to my life outside of school as well." I hope to hear more of this in student reflections as more finish the class in the coming months.

METACOGNITION

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