Questions On Teaching And Learning - 1631 Words

Teaching metacognitively 1. Teaching for metacognition To find out what are my pupils’ metacognitive behaviours when solving problem, I had to introduce them to the concept of metacognition and to model what it means to be metacognitively aware when solving mathematical problems. In order to show how metacognition works in problem solving, I found thinking aloud protocols very useful. Aimed to uncover thought process, they are one of the primary building blocks to students’ success at all levels of learning. According to Rosenshine (1985), teachers who spend more time demonstrating and explaining procedures and skills are more effective than teachers who spend less time doing so. Consistent with Silver, Strong Perini (2007), good†¦show more content†¦This proved to be a win-win course of action since, besides modelling how to be metacognitively aware in problem solving, it gave me the opportunity to identify the difficulties my pupils usually encounter during the process of problem solving. I made clear that understanding the problem is crucial and I put this into practice by following suggestions made by Polya in his book How to solve it. According to Polya, â€Å"it is foolish to answer a question you do not understand† (Polya, 1990:6). But Polya recognises (and so do I) that such foolish and sad things often happen and the teacher should prevent this from happening. He strongly maintains that the student should not only understand the problem, which implies cognitive behaviour, but he should â€Å"desire its solution†, which implies metacognitive behaviour. Polya suggests that the student’s understanding can be checked if the student is asked to repeat the problem in his own words. Understanding the problem involves reading and here it was interesting to see not only how differently my pupils understood the problems, but to identify that some of them showed inaccuracies in reading by misreading words or reading without concentrating strongly on the meaning of the problem. As a primary teacher, I know that comprehension is the process through which understanding is derived via the construction of an internal representation of the text. Comprehending the information in a problem involves making sense of the structure