Module Response: Metacognition & Self-Regulation

Metacognition, the process of thinking about thinking, sounds like something impractical that belongs solely in the realm of theory at first, but it’s actually very relevant to the means of teaching and learning. Students who have trouble solving problems in a cumulative assessment probably lacked the mastery of various skills that were introduced and thus a conscious learning process must take place in order to be better prepared. According to the “Metacognition” article written by Halter, there are two types of learners – novice and expert. A novice learner goes through the motions of learning and leave retention of the information to chance. On the other hand, an expert learner takes the time to think about the process of learning, evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and make appropriate adjustments to behavior based on reflection. The difference between these two methods of learning can be seen in the result – although the ways of an expert learner might seem time consuming at first, but after metacognition becomes an automatic approach to learning anything new, it will prove to be more efficient

Similar to metacognition, self-regulation requires students to be actively aware of their learning and be intrinsically driven to reach specific goals. According to Woolfolk and Schunk, having a reachable and challenging goal will increase self-control because students will strive to narrow the gap between their current understanding of a topic and the stated goal. Having a clear goal causes learners to identify factors that contribute to reaching that goal, which is directly related to being aware of his/her thinking (metacognition)! Not only do learners seek knowledge about themselves, they analyze other aspects of reaching their goal such as the subject of study, the tasks at hand and how to maximize the time allotted for these tasks, etc.

There are many strategies that educators can use to help students develop metacognition and self-regulation so that they not only become more efficient when learning new information, they will be able to apply their knowledge appropriately. For example, when students learn to conjugate a verb in different tenses (either in English or in a foreign language), the teacher usually focus on one verb tense at a time – starting with repeated practice of different verbs in the present tense then moving on to the past tense, etc. By the end of the unit on conjugation, many students will confuse the usage of different tenses on a cumulative test although they’ve mastered the assessment at the end of each section within the unit. One way to improve this scenario is for teachers to steer clear of merely teaching a behavior – for example: “students, for past tense, just add ‘-ed’ at the end of every verb”. Instead, after teaching the past tense, teachers should ask students to record how they’ve associated the verb tense with the new information about conjugation. If the students keep an organized record of how they individually learned new material, they will soon see a pattern of their strengths and weaknesses. This knowledge becomes a guide to how the student should face new information, which allows monitoring, reflection and adjustment of behavior and approach. Knowing what works and what doesn’t gives students ownership of their learning and teach them how to cope with future unfamiliar circumstances.

Technology can prove to be extremely useful in gathering students analysis of their own learning process, creating an organized archive of past experiences and most importantly, helping students make sense of their thinking patterns. For example, at the end of the unit on conjugating verbs in the past tense, students can fill out an online survey (e.g. surveymonkey) created by the teacher. While questions about the content will evaluate WHAT the students have learned, the metacognition survey will require students to think about HOW they were able to master the information. The survey will facilitate students’ consideration of their goals, their level of motivation, their time management and what worked vs. what didn’t. After filling out a survey, students would be asked to make any conclusions they’ve reached after being “forced” (by the survey) to consider all the different factors that contribute to learning. I truly believe that students might come up with shockingly revealing insight about their own learning that will benefit them for the rest of their academic career and beyond!

Lastly, I was also very impressed with the description of “academic controversy” in the article written by David & Roger Johnson. It reminded me of a mock debate in my Social Studies classes, in which students become extremely motivated and want to be more than prepared to defend their point of view against the attacks of others. So many times, students are not given the chance to have a point of view because they’re simply told what to think. For example, while teaching the debate for the independence of the 13 American colonies – instead of putting up a “pros vs. cons” chart on the blackboard and giving students notes about the two sides of the debate, why not let the students take a side and really debate the issue? Knowing that there will be opponents next day in class, students will be self-regulated and a lot more motivated to research and refine their arguments. Technology can definitely facilitate this process because sometimes in a classroom of 30 students under the time pressure of a 42-minutes period simply isn’t enough to hear everyone’s point of view. So teachers can set up a forum online, such as a blogmeister or a quicktopic, in which students can continue to comment on each other’s arguments outside the classroom.

Greetings, Earthling...

To the amazing people who have the time, intellect and energy to think outside the box, to explore alternative usage of technology, to find humor in almost everything and be so willing to share it with the world - I thank you for keeping life fun!

check out the secret message the earth has for t.e.a.m.

(p.s. technology is amazing - thanks karen!)

Meeting Ann Rinaldi

The Independence Park Institute (IPI) held an Educators' Open House on Jan. 26th, 2008 at the Independence National Historical Park and invited author Ann Rinaldi as the keynote speaker. Ann Rinaldi is the author of many amazing historical fictions for young people. Rinaldi's books are based on key turning points in American History and characters depicted in the stories capture the powerful emotions, conflicts, perspectives of the time.

At the seminar, Rinaldi describe the research that was involved with every project - since all her books are based on historical events or historical figures, Rinaldi is careful not to recreate or misrepresent history. Rinaldi expressed that in her writing, she refuse to put words into historical characters' mouths without proofs from historical documents. I was extremely impressed by her knowledge and dedication to historical authenticity - I'm sure being someone as creative as she is, it is so much easier to make things up! At the same time, I cannot imagine the catastrophic impact it will have in her young readers if the history behind Rinaldi's stories are inaccurate or poorly researched. Young people are drawn to stories and they remember story plots much better than textbooks - sometimes, in attempt to understand the background of a story, students are intrinsically motivated to do research on their own hoping to find the truth.

Some books tell the stories of famous American characters:
"Or Give Me Death" - A Novel of Patrick Henry's Family
"Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons" - The Story of Phillis Wheatley
"Finishing Becca" - A Story about Peggy Shippen and Benedict Arnold

Some books are based on important events in American History:
"A Break With Charity" - A Story about the Salem Witch Trials
"The Fifth of March" - The Story of the Boston Massacre
"Cast Two Shadows" - The American Revolution in the South

Secretly, I've always loved literature and felt strongly about using historical fiction as a enrichment tool to teaching history to young people. I am inspired by Ann Rinaldi's passion for American History, her courage to discuss controversy, and her creativity through storytelling.

Many times, I hear students complain about how disconnected their classes are, how they have to change gears every 40 minutes throughout a school day walking from English to Math to Spanish, etc. I am hoping to collaborate with the English teacher of my students and design a curriculum that incorporates English and Social Studies. Perhaps this could be a good start to true interdisciplinary collaboration at Herricks Middle School!

Chipmunk Fever... Catch It!

The Chipmunks are back!
They're cuter than ever...
Take the Poll!

Module Response: Cognitivism

Question: How could software applications and/or other technologies help you provide opportunities for your students to access their prior knowledge and better organize new information? That is, describe a lesson for which you might use technology to help with organization and describe the technology(ies) you might use.

Response: According to the cognitive views of learning, the learners learn best when new information is linked to prior knowledge and put into an organized storage in the long-term memory for future revival. In social studies, there is a lot of information that seems abstract to students because its difficult for young people to truly imagine life, situations, decisions, debates, reasonings and circumstances outside of their own world - heck, I don't even think they fully understand even that! For example, its hard for the students to imagine why colonial women would wear uncomfortable corsets and burdensome wigs as symbols of wealth - no matter how many times I explained that it was a sign of beauty and indication of socio-economic class, they respond with: "... but that's just ugly and its so stupid to put yourself in so much pain!" Fortunately, history is filled with predicable patterns and themes! Therefore, its easy to find present day scenarios that are already in the students' prior knowledge and make the connection to historical concepts - thus providing a better system of organization for future retrieval of information.

Technology can definitely help learners organize new information by tapping into familiar prior knowledge. Referring back to the colonial gentry wardrobe example - a software can be designed to ask modern & age-specific questions that would trigger a natural response... like "what clothings are uncomfortable?" - this question is easy for students of all ages to answer. The follow-up question on the next screen could be "why do people wear them?" - which should also be easily answered. These two trigger questions will help the students understand the seemingly unreasonable choice of clothing for colonial women would be less foreign. Where does technology come in? Well, students would probably respond well to games - so if a software program organize information thematically into parallel flow charts and invite students to try the modern scenario first (high heels --> uncomfortable --> but it looks good) and right under this chart students can organize the new information in familiar flow chart (corset --> uncomfortable --> but it shows off wealth). This flow chart can link so many repeated themes throughout so many different time periods in history - matching cause and effect, action and reaction, long-term cause and short term cause/effects, conflict and resolution, etc. History often seems daunting to young people because they think it has nothing to do with them today... but software programs can teach them how to learn and organize historical information in the same format as their understanding of their own world.

Module Response: Constructivism

QUESTION: Constructivist learning environments focus on giving students authentic, real-world, ill-structured problems to solve. What methods (based on your readings) could you as a teacher use (with or without technology to support you) to facilitate this process? That is, how would you provide scaffolding for students in a given environment (you might want to use a specific lesson/learning environment as a way to discuss scaffolds).

RESPONSE: In order to create a constructivist learning environment, students must have the prior knowledge to be able to approach an ill-structured problem. For instance, a broad 7th grade American History topic would be the American Revolution. If the students are expected to study the contribution of Revolutionary heroes, the ill-structured question would probably be - "Which Revolutionary figure do you think is the most under appreciated in American history?" Students in the class must first study the basic storyline of the American Revolution in order to scaffold their knowledge base. Perhaps a biographical research project would introduce the concept of different types of contribution of individuals to a specific cause such as independence. For example, Thomas Jefferson's eloquent composition skills used in the writing of the Declaration of Independence or Nathan Hale's risky spying on the British that resulted in the lose of his life, etc. From studying the renown historical characters, students will learn to identify various forms of contribution and its significance in the context of a historical event. In addition, to further scaffold students' prior knowledge, they can pick the top contributors into an imaginary Revolutionary Hall of Fame - this activity would give the students practice in evaluating different actions of historic figures and ranking their importance. Hopefully, these basic skills would provide enough building block and scaffolding when students approach the problem of finding an under-appreciated hero or heroine of the American Revolution. Lastly, it would be intrinsically motivated because in order to pick the best candidate, students will want to get as much information as possible on different characters in order to make a clever choice.

Global Community - The Show Me Campaign

John Legend is one of my favorite musicians - he's a talented pianist, songwriter, singer and so much more. John Legend, having been inpsired by Jeffrey D. Sach's book The End of Poverty, is launching the Show Me Campaign to "fight economic and spiritual poverty" around the world.

In a way, we all have been desensitized to the sufferings all around us - living in such the global community, somehow we have become extremely selfish and have chosen to turn our eyes and pretend that poverty doesn't exist. I appreciated John Legend's speech in the video clip below - many celebrities are using their fame to ignite awareness, which is the first step in bringing solution to global concerns. I respect John Legend and others like him who are committed to embark on this difficult but honorable journey - to make the world a better place.

Cynically Confused Constructivist

At the hearing of the word "constructivism", I cringed and began having nightmare flashbacks of educational theory classes back in graduate school. I have never been a fan of educational theory because every theory sounds too perfect – with captivating phrases like “authentic exploration”, “intrinsically motivating”, “dynamic collaboration” or “meaningful reflection”… what on earth does it all mean, realistically? And if it's so great, why didn't we make a nation wide announcement and get started on changing the system?

Ultimately, I became so confused from trying to remember which theory was based on exploration and which concept explored reflection and which model reflected on collaboration! So to be perfectly honest, I am mildly allergic to the scholarly-sounding lingo used by educational theorists and secretly looked for something that is both academic and realistic – a theory that takes into consideration the limited resources available in my classroom, the strengths and weaknesses of my students, the struggle for time to finish the curriculum, and the dreadful need to prepare students for standardized tests, etc.

However… putting aside all cynicism, I do recognize the need for educational theories (theorists). If we educators only focused on the problems we face from day to day in our classrooms, we will drown in despair and be consumed by the frog-in-the-well syndrome… no forward progress will ever be possible.

I’m not sure how I feel about the definition that knowledge is constructed and learning is created from experience from the overview reading. As much as we resist the concept, many things are black and white in school – the earth is slightly oval in shape, 2 + 2 = 4, George Washington was the first president of the United States, and libro means book in Spanish! These are the basic objective knowledge that a student would need in order for any sort of construction to begin – without the building blocks, how can there be any constructivism?

As I read on, I was very encouraged to see evidence to confirm my suspicion that "constructivism" is not the magic pill for learning - it cannot be used everywhere, every time. Being a 7th grade Social Studies teacher, I suddenly realized why I am having so much trouble accepting the whole concept of an ill-structured & open ended problem... "[Constructivist environment] is typically not very useful when learning introductory knowlege (facts, concepts) of a discipline. It is also not very useful in environments where learners are novices" - there lies my problem, my darling 7th graders are relatively clueless when it comes to basic facts and very few of them can be thrown into an ill-structured problem without sinking. This was a personal breakthrough, it shattered my incorrect assumption that constructivists expects me to teach every lesson with an open-ended question and let my students "construct" the answer for themselves regardless of its accuracy.

Last but not least, I enjoyed listening to Roger Shank's introduction to his book Engines for Education. In this short but energetic audio clip introduction, Roger Shank called for an Education Revolution - immediately my eyes rolled back and thought to myself... here we go again - another hot shot trying to "revolutionize" education by bringing back something that didn't work 30 years ago with a new package wrapper or a different slogan. Once again, I fought hard against the cynic in me and allowed myself to imagine a school system that dares to break the lock step curriculum, in which every child is doing the same thing on the same page in the same day - the possibility was surprisingly refreshing and would inspire even the most jaded educator amongst us.

Shank is right, it would be wonderful to create a fun and exciting learning environment in which students couldn't wait to go to school and learn for the sake of learning. On the other hand, all my previous mentors are right too... "not every day can be a song and a dance - sometimes the kids need to use the textbook and answer the questions on a worksheet" - can there be a balance between the two?