•Discuss one or more questions or confusions that you have from reading the module (on social cognitive theory). You should comment on these within others' posts.
-Describe in detail how you could involve metacognitive knowledge and regulation (such as self interrogation or theory of mind) while teaching within your content area. Metacognition in music and art education, for example, should look very different from reading comprehension strategies.
Since I’m a Spanish Education major, I feel like the way I could use metacognition is by having my providing some kind of outline for my students. That way my students can learn as we go in the classroom, this will also help them review for the test so that they can also be more likely to get better scores in their tests. One thing that I think can help them a lot in my classroom will be the use of post it notes or note cards especially while learning vocabulary words. On one side they can write the English equivalent to the Spanish word or they can even draw a picture of what it might mean to them. The idea here is to give students the freedom to choose things that they can relate to the Spanish vocabulary so that their learning experience is easier and more beneficial to them. Like mentioned in the module these strategies increase the academic achievement.
•Critical thinking involves primarily the control of information, the ‘analysis, synthesis, and evaluation’ of information to solve a problem or reach a goal. Metacognition involves the control of thinking, or monitoring and evaluation of thinking and learning strategies. Which do you feel is more relevant to your content area? Why? Give an example if possible.
I feel like critical thinking would be more ideal for my classroom since I’m going to be teaching a foreign language and I feel like understanding the content, synthesizing it and then evaluating the material would be more effective. If I teach my students how to conjugate Spanish verbs in the past or something similar to that first I would have to first give them an example so that they can become familiar to the content. The students then will analyze the conjugations and understand the rules behind them. By practicing them and having some kind of connection to the conjugation then they can synthesize the material and process it. Once the material is processed they can keep on practicing so that they master the material and then it can be stores in the long-term memory. At the end of the process the student will then be given an assessment or activity so that they can demonstrate how much they learned.
After watching the video I realized that most of the stuff Jenna demonstrated I had previously attempted. One of my favorite teachers in high school was the one that told me the importance about writing notes in the margins of the books. He taught me to highlight only lines that I felt I had a connection with or that helped me understand the material better. After highlighting the desired lines he told me to write in red ink thoughts that would come up on my mind as I was reading the material. This helped me a lot after I re-read the chapters because I could see my original thoughts in ink and this helped develop a stronger connection with the reading. I feel like this was one of the best things I’ve ever learned and I still use it up to this point. In the module it talked about how students that take notes in class are more likely to get better grades in class and that kids that review their notes are more likely to get better scores than those that don’t. I feel like the highlighting and writing notes on the margins does the same thing for me and it ahs helped me succeed in school.
I am a Spanish Education major as well, and I really like your idea of creating an outline throughout the class that students can use to review and study for tests. Also good point about critical thinking for a Spanish class. I like your example of conjugating a verb. I agree that critical thinking is ideal in beginning levels of Spanish classes, but I think once a student gets to the third, fourth and college level Spanish classes, they have to use critical thinking in writing papers in Spanish.
ReplyDeleteI think critical thinking is most important in any class, but especially language. I know that I wasted years in spanish class because I wasn't given a specific direction, and that led to a lot of memorization. The best Spanish teacher I had was my middle school teacher. He was better than my high school, and even college, spanish teachers for a number of reasons, the most prominent being that he let us know that his goal for us was fluency, not high grades on a test. He always had us do skits in class about a subject, but he made sure that we never came in with a memorized script. If one of us did, he would be very hard on us and give us a bad grade. But if someone came in and made an honest effort to think on their feet, he would always be reasonable. I found this to be very effective, and I know that my solid Spanish skills all stem from my three years with my middle school teacher.
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