Sunday, September 20, 2009

Metacognition

Growing up I had a good experience with reading. I loved being able to learn about new things through various books and magazines. Since I enjoyed doing this comprehending what I was reading came easy to me because I wanted to remember and take in what I was learning about.

When the reading became more of a challenge in high school I had to come up with different ways to help remember what I was reading about. I started taking notes on the readings I was assigned so that afterwards I could go back and look at my notes and reflect on what I just read. This helped me see the main idea in a lot of the harder readings I was assigned. It also helped me be organized for when I was studying for tests.

In college it became more of a chore to read. Half the time I wasn’t interested in what I was reading so it was harder for me to focus on what the paragraph was trying to get across. I started off taking notes on what I was reading, but when you are assigned 50+ pages a night that gets to be way too much work. The next thing I tried was reading the paragraph under the first header in the chapter. I would then stop to reflect on any key terms or ideas that may be important to me later on. I would then underline or star these things so I could come back to them later. This helped me to reflect on concepts that I needed to know in the chapter. It also helps me reflect on concepts by relating what I am reading to personal experiences or to other topics I have learned in classes in college.

I know going into teaching that I am going to have a variety of students that will each take different approaches to how they are going to organize their thinking. I will need to make sure that I teach them all the different ways so that they all have a chance to try each way out and see which one helps them best so they can use it in the future to help guide their reading and writing.

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