Student voice through reflection

Student Voice – Becoming a metacognitive thinker

Metacognition in school context is thinking about one’s thinking.  More precisely it refers to the processes we use to plan, monitor, and assess our own understanding, learning, and performance.

To be able to teach students to think about their thinking we need to understand that metacognition can be practiced by having a critical awareness of

• one’s thinking and learning
• oneself as a thinker and learner

Metacognition literally means “big thinking.” You are thinking about thinking. During this process you are examining your brain’s processing. Teachers work to guide students to become more strategic thinkers by helping them understand the way they are processing information. Questioning, visualizing, and synthesizing information are all ways that readers can examine their thinking process. Through scaffolding and reciprocal teaching, students are able to practice the skills that lead to these overt acts becoming automatic.

— Fountas and Pinnell, 2000

In our digital world we are capable of creating, capturing, curating, and connecting our learning process through various media, devices and apps. We need to empower our students to independently document their learning process as it happens, regardless of time and/or space. With digital tools we can Redefine this action to be harnessed and used by us in order to practice thinking of our own thinking.

We at KIS are collecting this with an app called Seesaw.

Peer and Self assessment

Reflection

After our pilot project I can confidently state that student are now constantly encouraged to reflect upon their learning and deepen their understandings. Technology has helped us to redefine our practice, it has enabled as to capture and curate the learning process, not just the end result. The tools in the app allows students to create reflection pieces that they could not do by themselves independently.

References and suggested readings:

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366894/
• http://www.benchmarkeducation.com/best-practices-library/metacognitive-strategies.html
• http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098655.2016.1170450
• http://www.lifescied.org/content/11/2/113.full
• http://www.techlearning.com/blogentry/11061
• http://blog.tesol.org/seesaw-student-driven-digital-portfolios/
• https://www.commonsense.org/education/app/seesaw-the-learning-journal