Wow! This is another filling feast for me to digest! First, I would like to communicate that these are hard concepts for me to wrap my brain around. I am processing the information and attempting to make connections with my own experiences as they apply to addressing the questions for this assignment. The beginning of this article was basically asking the question how classroom teachers around the world know when their students need help learning how to think. The answers that were listed in the article are the very ones that I myself have witnessed from my students over the years. The list included the following: blurting out answers, relying on me to answer, giving up easily, inability to work in groups, inability to apply knowledge, and fear of taking risks. When I read about being afraid to take risks, it immediately reminded me of the the book Mastery, as this book is still fresh in my mind, and learning to surrender and take risks to stay on the path. Teaching students to surrender and take risks is a monumental challenge. I just wanted to include this connection here because I think it is an important one.
The five themes to shape curriculum that were presented in this article are excellent guides. The quotes that were given in each of the themes were very powerful for me personally because they initiated deep thinking about that particular point. The quotes also made it easier for me to understand the article. Let me begin with the first quote which was given under learning to think. "Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold water becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." - Leonardo da Vinci. After pausing a few minutes, I thought of the quote in George Leonard's book in which he said that human beings might become worn out from a lack of use. Clearly, my students have the capacity to think; however, the key is to get them to think as Costa states on p. 2 "critically, skillfully, and creatively." Furthermore, it is not enough to have this only confined to the walls of my classroom. I want my first graders to apply this skill independently outside the walls of my classroom.
The second quote that produced a valuable connection for me was, "friendship is one mind in two bodies." This concept of learning being a reciprocal process had me thinking about implementing more instructional strategies centered around more group activities. Last year, I did not take advantage of opportunites to implement lessons structured around more group activities. I would like to be able to structure and put into place more math lessons where my students could engage in different ways they found to view and solve a math problem and share those with one another. I was fortunate enough to witness in an intervention a stronger student whom I decided to utilize as a tool to help me teach the concept of counting money to one of my struggling students whom Leonard identifies as "slowest on the mat." He had a different process for counting the different combinations of coins that made sense to the other student. There is definately power in understanding that children (learners/students of any age too) do learn from each other. Doors open into different levels of thinking.
Next, in terms of metacognition, I am inspired to ask the following: how will I get my first graders to develop the skill of metacognition as it applies to first grade math? The author of this article suggests that there are important self-reflective questions that can help pave the way. He states that through verbalizing plans and sharing their thinking students can get on the path to developing metacognition. I would like to explore this further and find practical ways to make this age level appropriate.
The last piece that spawned a response from me was the idea of thinking big. This part of the article brought me back full circle to the reason why I am in education in the first place...to inspire effective change in the world. I have an undeniable role to play in encouraging my students to think big and ultimately change the future. Can the seeds be planted at such a young age? Yes, I think so.
1 comment:
This article is dense, and so is your answer. I'm so pleased you are thinking deeply about your teaching and your students... It would be easy to think that some of these things, such as metacognition, are not for youngsters... However, the research on the achievement gap suggests that one of the main reasons that the gap increases as students get older is because low income students of color are far less likely to get instruction for meta-cognition, higher order thinking, etc. so thinking through how you can teach skills and knowledge while ALSO teaching deep thinking is so important (much more to come on this in the Understanding By Design topics ahead).
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