Teach Kids to Think About Their Thinking — Metacognition « Imagination Soup | Fun Learning and Play Activities for Kids

Posted by Melissa Taylor on 16 Jan 2012
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FreeEBook Teach Kids to Think About Their Thinking Metacognition Teaching children to think about their thinking, or metacognition, is essential.

Confucius said, “A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.“

Or, as Dr. Phil asks his dysfunctional guests, “How’s that working for you?“

When learners become conscious of their thinking, they can become aware of their strengths and the strategies that are useful to their own learning.

thinking about my thinking 715x476 Teach Kids to Think About Their Thinking Metacognition

Thinking About My Thinking from One Extra Degree

Last week, I watched my nine-year old daughter AJ studying for her spelling test. Dad asked her the words and she spelled them — incorrectly. Over and over — wrong, wrong, wrong, again.

I’d finally interrupted and asked if we could stop. I asked what strategy was she using to spell the words.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I see that you’re rolling around the floor and it seems like you’re randomly guessing the words, do you think guessing is your strategy?”

“I don’t know.”

(The goal here is for AJ to know what strategy she is using AND to know if the strategy is working or needs to be reconsidered.)

“Did you know that good spellers see the word in their mind like it’s written on a chalkboard? That’s called visualizing. Before you answer daddy’s question the next time, I want you pause and not answer right away. Try to picture the word in your mind and then spell what you see.

Let me show you how I do it. I’m trying to think of spelling the word heart.” [I close my eyes.] “Okay, I see it. h – e – a – r – t. Heart.”

Sensory Interruption: Unfortunately, AJ didn’t change her strategy and got very frustrated. Watching her behavior I realized that I needed to do some OT to calm her down. I brushed her and gave her a tight bear hug for about ten minutes. This is how it goes for a child with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) – and when her senses calmed down we could always try again.

But, you get the point, right?

Like creativity, metacognition is not an add-on to a learning activity but embedded during the learning experience.

If we can help our children think about their strategies, we can help them become more skilled learners.

Metacognition in Three Areas

John Flavell, researcher of metacognition, believes kids need awareness in three areas:

1. An awareness of knowledge — understanding what they know

surveying, questioning, reading, reciting, and reviewing – SQ3R (Robinson)

2. An awareness of thinking — understanding cognitive tasks

selecting strategies for the task

3. An awareness of thinking strategies — understanding approaches to directing learning

self-assessing

self-questioning

revising

“Students learn to monitor and direct their own progress, asking questions such as ‘What am doing now?’, ‘Is it getting me anywhere?’. ‘What else could I be doing instead?’. This general metacognitive level helps students avoid persevering in unproductive approaches, to remember to check … and so on” (Perkins & Salomon, 1989)

Okay, but how do you teach kids to do this?

1. Model your own thinking

Kids learn by watching us so they need to see into our brains (scary!) Imagine your brain is printing out a ticker-tape of all your thoughts for you to read aloud. Saying your thoughts out loud shows kids what you’re thinking, or “thinking aloud.” See a video of a teacher thinking aloud.

2. Scaffold the thinking

In other words, don’t teach a baby to run before he can crawl. Step by step scaffold the learning. We start at the beginning of noticing the thinking strategies, noticing what we know, notice if our strategies worked. We don’t start trying to implement new strategies before we know what we’re currently using as a strategy.