This week's readings focus on metacognition, as well as The Reading Apprenticeship Framework. What content from the readings has your mind blown (good, bad, confused, indifferent, etc)? This is a space for you to discuss any aspect of the reading you wish.
Note: If you've responded to the post below, you are not required to post here.
Uriel Rosales
ReplyDeleteMartinez's article on Metacognition blew my mind for a couple of reasons. I've always labeled myself as an "overanalyze", from before the time I could read, I was asking the 5 W's every time I would learn a new piece of information. Once I began to read short passages, my thinking became oriented not just on what I was reading, but the environment I was reading in, and the people I was reading with. I suppose that without even knowing of the word metacognition, I was utilizing it in my own life in order to understand more than the surface of literature. While "thinking about what you're thinking" may be a basic definition for a complex idea, it does exemplify how humans can expand on a simple idea, and also condense a vivid notion into a simple yet fluid thought.
You may not have known about metacognition before, but now you are thinking about what we think about when we think about thinking ...
Delete!!!
I'm just going to call that 4th level meta. Coin it.
What Martinez said at the end of his article has surprised me because it reminded me of myself as a student in the middle and high school. Martinez stated that although the term metacognition is relatively a new term, people had practice it implicitly for a long time ago. He also pointed that giving this practice a name and definition is essential and useful these days. He also pointed out the importance of teaching students the metacognitive skills in school to meet the demand of our changing world. After reading this article, I have realized that I have been practicing metacognition implicitly without knowing that and without being aware that what I have done to excel as student really has a name, and without being aware of the importance of developing these skills in classroom for all ages. Therefore, I ‘d like to share my experience in developing metacognitive skills by myself as a student during my middle and high school years.
ReplyDeleteI received my education from elementary to secondary in Jordan. According to my experience there, I believe that teachers in Jordan didn’t receive sufficient training to become professional teachers. They lack the knowledge of some important teaching techniques and strategies. For example, I had taken some classes with teachers who actually just read the text book and copied parts of it on the board. They even didn’t have the skills and strategies to motivate students and engage them in the content they were teaching. Since I was not engaged in most of my classes, I was a day-dreamer student. I used to set in the back of the class wandering in my own world of thoughts and not paying attention to the teachers. I was aware that I didn’t understand the content of the subject in class, and this surprised me after reading Martinez’s article because I realized that this understanding of my knowledge status is called metacomprehension which is one of the metacognition categories (Martinez, 2006). Again, I was practicing metacognition without being aware of that.
There was homework, quizzes, midterm and final test for each subject area, so how I would excel in all my classes if I didn’t really understand anything in class. Moreover, I had to get high grades to please my parents and satisfy their wish to be an outstanding student. Therefore, I ought to find a way to excel the classes and teach myself the content relying only on the text book. The first thing I did was to read the text book and comprehend it by myself. It was like teaching myself how to read a text book and try to make sense of it. In the beginning, I thought aloud while I was reading the text like I was explaining the materials to someone, or simply I was just talking with text. While I was reading, I started questioning the thing I didn’t understand and at the same time monitor and evaluate my comprehension of the materials. Then I started to discuss the text in response to my questions. Sometimes, I used visualization to help me comprehend the text or connection to prior knowledge from other classes. This strategy that I had used to comprehend the text reminded me of the reading apprenticeship framework, the cognitive dimension. According to this framework, the cognitive demission helps student to build a repertory of comprehension strategies (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003). As a result of the strategies I had used to teach myself, I built knowledge of the content while building reading strategies that I can use for all subject areas, and I became aware of my own thinking processes.
Moreover, I had a peer who lived next to my home who used to come to study with me. I used to discuss to her the cognitive strategies that helped me to comprehend the text and the part of knowledge I used to help me make sense of the text. I used to share with her my comprehension difficulties and my ways of solving the problems, so we both understand the content and learn new reading skills. This type of interaction with my peer reminded me of the metacognitive conversation strategy. In metacognitive conversation, students and teacher discuss their personal cognitive strategies, comprehension difficulties, and kind of language needed to comprehend the text (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003). This is what I really had done with my peer without being aware of the name of this strategy. The interaction with my peer also reminded me of Vygotsky theory which says that students’ interaction can lead to higher-order thinking and more critical thinking (Martinez, 2006). This is what I really had cultivated from the interaction with my peer without being aware of it.
ReplyDeleteTeaching myself how to read a text and make sense of it was a real struggle for me in the beginning, but with practice I developed the reading strategies necessary to comprehend the text, and they became automated skills by time. Moreover, these reading strategies that I have developed by myself really helped me to comprehend any type of text in any subject areas such as science, math and social studies. Finally, based on my experience and the struggle I had been through to figure out these important metacognitive skills and learn them by myself without being aware of them, I agree with Martinez that metacognitive skills are very important, and they should be implemented in classroom. I wish that time if the teacher instead of just reading the book to the class, they thought aloud as they reading to teach us how to comprehend the text instead of just teaching us the content. I wish that if my teachers had emphasized group discussion of cognitive strategies in class more. If so, they would have eased some of the struggle I have faced trying to comprehend the text by myself.