Do we want students to take ownership of their learning, to become more confident and self-directed, to become life-long learners? A way to encourage and support them in this endeavor is to engage them in meta learning. Meta Learning: understanding, directing, and assessing your learning. Here are some suggestions:
- Make “learning about learning” a daily part of classroom conversation.
- Include students in lesson planning.
- Teach “reflection tools” and use them regularly in the classroom.
- Given your model for lesson planning/teaching, introduce specific learning strategies. In our case, there will be strategies for Purpose, Operations, Remembering, Teamwork, Action, Laying a Foundation, and Self-management.
- Initiate, encourage, and support the use of student designed and used assessment tools.
Today we will write about two of these suggestions.
- Make “learning about learning” a daily part of classroom conversation. Recently I found a wonderful paper by Chris Watkins titled “Learning about Learning” that goes into an excellent level of detail about how to make learning a part of classroom discussion. https://www.um.edu.mt/educ/about/publications/mrer/files/JMERN5I2P3.pdf
He suggests 4 practices taught over time:
*noticing things about learning (in real time)
*talking about learning (retell learning stories)
*reflecting on learning (writing in a learning journal)
*making learning an object of learning (focusing on the process)
- Including students in lesson planning. Do students know that teachers make/write
some sort of lesson plan? What if they understood the parts of a lesson plan?
Would they be able to assess their strengths and challenges before the lesson
began and evaluate their learning after the lesson? I think so!
If that’s the case, can we teach students to understand and rewrite plans to
meet their own needs? I say Yes!
We have created a mini text (20 slides) to explain the process of Meta
Lesson Planning. It is available on Google Docs:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VMJFwScnC7Tl7yEiTh_anASgze9YANJKshnZKuCnwo4/edit#slide=id.p4
In subsequent blogs we will describe and link other tools for teaching students to be meta learners.
We’d love to have your feedback. This is a work in progress.
