Metacognition and STEM LiteracyMaking the Invisible Visible to our students

Lilit Haroyan

I am the one who…

Evidence Interpretation

I am the one who listens to a book called “The Future of the Mind” by Michio Kaku who is a Theoretical Physicists and co-founder of String Theory.

I am the one who…

Evidence Interpretation

I am the one who listens to a book called “The Future of the Mind” by Michio Kaku who is a Theoretical Physicists and co-founder of String Theory.

• She doesn’t have time to read so she listens them in car•Probably long drive•Interested inMind•Physicist•Knows about String Theory

Metacognitive Reading Log

• Reading Logs in RA infused classroom are employed as a tool for ground thinking in the text, and sometimes as a metacognitive conversation routine to alert students to how the text is causing then to respond to it

• The Logs supports not only metacognition and learning but also provides a record of student work that increases accountability for reading and allows the instructor to gauge students’ progress

Debrief: Reading Logs

• Share some highlights about your or your partner’s experiences about this activity

• What are some of the benefits and challenges of doing MRL with your students?

WestEd’sStrategic Literacy Initiative (SLI)

• A professional development and research

organization focusing on improving academic

literacy in diverse populations of adolescents

and post-secondary students using Reading

Apprenticeship, a research-based

instructional framework.

Reading Apprenticeship

• A partnership of expertise between the

teacher and students, drawing on what

content area teachers know and do as skilled

discipline-based readers and on learners’

unique and often underestimated strengths

Dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship

Community College Physics Classroom

Apply Kirchhoff’s Rules

Oh, shall I explain it again?

Capturing your Reading Process

• Read the text silently as you normally would when you want to understand something.

• You’ll have about five minutes to read, and we’ll do a short writing piece afterward.

• Please reread if you finish early.

Capturing your Reading Process

• What strategies did you use to make sense of the text?

• What got in the way of your reading?

• What, if any, comprehension problems did you solve?

• Which, if any, problems still remain?

Opening a window into our thinking:

• What did I do?

• Where did I do it?

• How did that affect my reading and understanding?

Debrief: Reading Process Analysis

• What did you notice about your or someone else’s reading that is new or surprising?

• What are some of the benefits and challenges of doing RPA with your students?

Community College Math Classroom

Think Aloud

• Helps students to notice and say when they are confused, and use each other as resources for making meaning

• Helps you to practice making your thinking visible, so you can model effective ways of reading texts in your discipline for students

• Helps to give names to the cognitive strategies that we use to comprehend text

• Helps to notice text structures and how we navigate various genres to build confidence, range, and stamina

Talking To the Text

• This strategy is basically a think aloud on paper. It differs from think aloud in two key ways:• the individual reflection on the reading process is

written, not spoken

• the metacognitive conversation is delayed until after the individual reading and reflecting.

TttT with Math Problem

You are planning a driving vacation, and you want to estimate the cost of the gas. While on vacation, you are planning to drive 3000 miles. Your car gets about 30 miles per gallon, and you estimate that the cost of gas is $4 per gallon. What is your estimate for the cost of the gasoline for the vacation?”

Talk to the Text

• Take a fiew minutes to try “Talking to the Text” with problem number 2 on the handout

Problem # 2

You are invited to your boss’s house at 8:00 pm. At 6:30 pm you have just left the candy shop in your neighborhood where you picked up a box of candy for a hostess gift. You notice that your favorite store is having a sale. You have had your eye on a designer leather jacket for a while now. There is a line outside the store and the manager says there cannot be more than 10 people in the store at any time. You decide to wait in the line. There are 22 people ahead of you. People are leaving the store at a rate of 2 people every 5 minutes and once you get in the store, it takes you 10 minutes to find the jacket in the right size and 15 minutes to pay for it. Will you make it to your boss’s house on time? Don’t forget you have a 12-minute drive from the shopping center to her house.

Think-Pair-Share

• What roadblocks did you face?

• How did you work through them?

Debrief Talking to the Text

• What did you mark?

• How did that help you gain access into the problem?

• How did talking to your partner help?

Debrief Metacognitive Routines

Our Goals with Reading Apprenticeship:

• Help students learn to read and think like insiders (experts) in a subject area

• Overcome our own expert blind spot – blending subject-area knowledge with important understandings of how novices acquire the conventions, rituals, and expectations of discourse in that field

In a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom, one will notice:

• The teacher briefly modeling to make his or her thinking visible

• The students engaging in guided practice of what the teacher has modeled

• Students talking with one another about their experiences with the reading

In Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, Teachers

• Focus on comprehension and

metacognitive conversation

• Create a climate of collaboration

• Provide appropriate support while

emphasizing student

independence

This conversation is a critical dynamic in the classroom:

• Students learn from the teacher and from each other new ways to engage with and comprehend academic text.

• Teachers learn from students what they are currently doing to make sense of a text, what knowledge they bring to the text, and what difficulties they are having.

The metacognitive conversation provides a

powerful and productive window:

• For students, into the teacher’s and other students’ reading processes, so they can broaden their repertoire of strategies and deepen their subject area knowledge.

• For teachers into students’ reading processes, so they can plan instruction to focus on students’ actual learning needs.

Q+A

Lilit Haroyan,

haroyal@lamission.edu