Chapter 8

Consider a lesson plan you might use. Which metacognitive skills/abilities are involved as students gain facility/knowledge in this domain?

The lesson plan could be to have my 2nd or 3rd grade class do a reading assignment where we read a book and picked out new words they weren't familiar with and had them talk about the main idea of the story and the main characters. The main metacognitive skill needed for this type of lesson plan is transfer (261). First, the children need to be able to use transfer to use their prior knowledge of how to read to be able to read the story. They would use transfer to read the story and then pick out the words they aren't familiar with. Also they have to use transfer to be able to remember what the main idea of a story means and what main characters are. Hopefully they would be able to use positive transfer to allow them to understand the material. I also think at this younger age that convergent thinking is the main type of thinking, although I would hope for my class we could strive to do more divergent thinking and become more creative. For this lesson plan I could have the children come up with their own stories similar to the story we have just read to try and enhance their creativity and help them to start think more divergent.

Think of an activity or lesson component that explicitly teaches one or more metacognitive and one or more problem solving skills.

For my elementary class, I could have them do an obstacle course. One child directs and gives the instructions and the other is blindfolded and goes through the course. This will teach children how to work with others and how to pay attention and follow directions. They would have needed to understand how to follow directions and how to work well with others before to achieve this. That is using problem solving skills and their transfer.The other metacognitive skill needed could be convergent thinking. The child who is helping the other child get through the course would have to think of the best way to get them to the end. This would mean they would have to think about the many different ways to get to the finish line and pick the best one to get the other student to the end. This is using their convergent thinking to have many options and end on picking the best one needed to achieve the goal.