Tuesday, July 23, 2019

High-Leverage Practice 14: Instruction


I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

HLP14 Teach cognitive and metacognitive strategies to support learning and independence.

Cognitive strategies involve using the mind to solve problems.

Problem-solving is important and we use these skills on a daily basis. Children are not born knowing how to solve their problems. As children grow up, their problems become more complex and they learn ways to solve their problems.

I like to teach my students the steps to help them learn how to solve their problems. As they grow older, they won’t have to consciously think about each step and the steps become more intuitive.

The steps that I teach them are:
State the problem.
List possible ways to solve the problem.
Seek help and resources if needed.
Choose a solution.
Solve the problem.
Evaluate the solution. Did it work? If not, try another solution.

I like to role-play a situation and have the students practice following these steps to solve the problem. Then we discuss how they solved it. Students can discuss how they may have solved it differently. I sometimes start out practicing this once a week and usually halfway through the year, we practice this once a month.

Metacognitive strategies help students understand the way they learn.  This is so important for students to learn in order to be self-advocates. Students are sometimes not aware that they learn easier one way instead of another. I like for students to take an inventory to become more aware of the ways that learning is easier for them. This introduces different learning styles to them and they learn that is okay if they learn differently from others. Everyone has their own learning style.

I notice that when teachers teach according to their own learning style instead of to the student’s learning style, learning is much slower. When the teacher can teach according to the student’s learning style, learning faster and there is a higher retention rate of information.

How do you teach cognitive and metacognitive strategies? Please share.

Photo by Chinh Le Duc on Unsplash




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