“Satisfactory Progress…”
I’ve been pleased with the impact that using OneNote has had on my teaching so far this year, but what is the next step?
Over the half term holiday, I’ve been reading about Metacognition. Specifically, I’ve read Thinking about Thinking by Stephen Lockyer and Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning ed. Kaplan et al.
My sense is that my students will benefit from using some of the strategies put forward in these books and I’d like to spend some of our time together working on how we think about our physics. I’d like my students to regularly ask themselves 3 questions:
- What did you do?
(Did you re-read your notes? How did you set up the problem? How did you present your work? Did you check your answers?)
- What difficulties did you have?
(Where did you lose marks? Setting up the problem? Arithmetic errors? Missing units? Inappropriate significant figures? Explaining your answers?)
- What would you do differently next time?
(What did other students do that you didn’t? What have you learnt about the process by doing this work?)
How am I going to do this?
My plan is to use the ‘Record Audio’ feature and enter into a dialogue with the students. When I mark their work, I’ll be recording my comments as I go. Very simply, I’ll just ask students to reflect on their marked work using the 3 questions above. Hopefully they will also do this by recording themselves, but I’d be happy with whatever method they choose.
Interestingly, one of the things that has frustrated me this term has been the lack of response from students to feedback. I have repeated myself many times regarding students adding units to answers and ensuring that they have put their answers to the correct number of significant figures, but mistakes continue to be made. My aim is to see if encouraging metacognition from my students will reduce the occurrence of such errors.
One Teacher and His Dog 