Metacognition TIPR

Current Teacher Behaviors
My cooperating teacher is a great planner and gives the students clear instructions and strategies on how to complete the task at hand. When presenting students with their summative assessment (writing a short personal narrative), he provided them with a list of 40 possible prompts they could draw from for ideas and then told them he wanted to see how they could present the situation in their own unique way through writing. In teaching things like action verbs and sensory details in micro-lessons, he's giving them the chance to monitor and evaluate for themselves how the story is taking shape and if their personal take on the story is coming through. By making the assignment about a personal story (fiction or non-fiction), he's making the foundation of the assignment declarative (something they already know a lot about) and is using the micro-lessons to build up their procedural and conditional knowledge.

Student Needs
The planning stage is something these students need some help with, as they are often unsure of what the final outcome of the assignment is other than just having something written on paper to turn in. Instructions are fairly clear and succinct on the handouts they're given, but few seem to read them and prefer to be on their phones or talk with their friends until myself or the teacher comes around to help them get on track, at which point they ask us to explain the assignment. I wonder if our willingness to do this is enabling the behavior, and if we should be explaining how they can use the instruction sentence on the handout to get a start/begin a draft that we can workshop with them when we come around. 
Currently students aren't expected to have any sort of evaluation/revision period during these assignments, which could be on purpose since they're meant to teach students the definition and purpose of concepts such as sensory details as they will relate to their larger assessment later. But the students are focused so much on just having writing on the paper to turn in that they don't seem to consider if they're grasping the concept or if it's working for what they've put down. They'll only find that out once the assignment is graded, which might be in time to help them on their summative. It still seems to me if the teacher and I could help them workshop the details as we come around the classroom during working time that it could teach them that this is a good time to assess their work so they have the experience and practice built up for the final paper.
Plans for your Lesson
I've been told by the teacher that my mini-lesson will be another one of the concepts that will go into building the students' final personal narrative (unsure which one it will be at this moment). Following the pattern set by the ones I've observed this week, I would like to make it explicit in my mini-lesson that the activity/assignment is a good place to review and revise their work to see where they understand the concept best and if they struggle with it. I'd like to explain this is the time to practice, rather than feel it out once they're trying to finish their paper at the 11th hour. The teacher has done a great job so far of bringing in tactile activities such as giving students a bag of chips for the sensory details lesson and having something for them to actually experience before they describe it. I'd like to do that as well to engage different regions of the brain and simultaneously differentiate the learning strategies that students can draw on to grasp the material.

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