Metacognition TIPR

The teacher in the high school Life Skills class that I'm completing my field experience in helps his students to develop their self-regulatory or conditional metacognitive knowledge by putting them in charge of getting their own materials, figuring out where they are at in their workbooks and what they should do next, and by letting them be as independent as they can be before offering assistance to them. He helps them to monitor their learning by asking them, "What should you do next?" He also helps students to evaluate their own thinking by asking them, "Is there anything you don't understand?" By using metacognition techniques while teaching his students, the teacher is helping them to develop the parts of their brain that are in charge of those skills and they can benefit from them for the rest of their lives.

The students are all in great need of metacognitive skills because all of them have at least some significant deficits in their learning and processing skills. Several of the students have ADHD and so their biology is working against them. Teaching them to have and use metacognitive skills is a challenge because they don't naturally have the inclination to think that way. The procedural metacognitive knowledge is focused on the most often in the class because it is the most conducive to the class work they're required to complete. Declarative and conditional metacognitive knowledge are extremely important for the students to learn, so those skills taught are used as well.

When I taught my lesson, I was careful to help guide them through the procedural processes during my instruction and while they worked with their peer tutors to complete the worksheet I gave them. I asked them to read through the story I presented again and then answer the questions on the worksheet. They were encouraged to reread the story if they had questions they didn't know the answers to. Helping the students to develop their self-regulatory metacognitive knowledge is a goal that I plan to incorporate into my own instruction going forward.

Constructivism TIPR

The teacher in the high school Life Skills class that I'm completing my field experience in is very good at using different types of learning techniques to teach his students with disabilities. I believe that he has created a classroom using constructivism because most of the lessons he teaches are interactive with students coming up to the board to make choices, students use manipulatives, and the teacher is using dialogue with the students to help them make connections.

One example of the teacher using a constructivist classroom is that on Friday, we went to Cabela's and The Outlets in Lehi on a field trip. The purpose was to help the students to enhance their transition goals. At Cabela's the students worked in groups of four to complete a scavenger hunt about how to locate different places prices, and items in the store. They compared prices and selected preferred items. At The Outlets students went to a retail store and asked the staff there several questions regarding working at the store in preparation for getting a job in the future. After we got back to school, the students wrote a reflection about their experiences on the field trip.

Every student in the class has significant needs in most of the academic areas they're taught. Interactive, dynamic, negotiable, valued learning approaches are definitely what is needed in order for these students to learn and to learn well. Most of the students learn best with engaging, interactive lessons that keep their attention throughout the whole lesson because their attention spans aren't very long.

I incorporated a constructivist approach into the lesson that I taught to the students. I presented the material on the Smartboard and I asked students to come up to the board and choose the appropriate answer and then we discussed each scenario as a class. I gave each of the students a copy of the story we'd gone through on the Smartboard so they could review it with their peer tutors a second time, and a worksheet with questions for them to answer about what they had read.