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Mixing
the cognitive and metacognitive: ADDED SIDE NOTE --
SEE Carrie Holmberg’s wonderful article “What’s to be learned from an
active listening Lesson gone awry? (recent CATE JOURNAL) In
this article, Carrie Holmberg describes how she designed a Lesson with
a mix of straight-forward participation in a discussion of a piece of
literature and, at the same time, an analysis of the number of times
a metacognitive category was invoked by a phrase or question. First she asked the students to come up with
examples of phrases that introduced (1) summarizing/restating (In summary,
I think…In other words…), (2) Asking, Clarifying Questions (Did you
mean to say…I think your comment raises another question), and (3) Taking
the idea a step further (But if we applied that thinking to…Another
example might be ...A counter example, of course, is….).
Learning this kind of disciplinary talk or disciplinary literacy
is a way of beginning to use various metacognitive strategies in one’s
analysis of problems in English. Carrie Holmberg reports a very interesting
finding: the students, who were trying this kind of
talk for the first time, found it difficult to participate in discussion
and analyze at the same time. She suggested a Lesson revision in which
one group engaged in participation and another group watched and analyzed.
Underlying the Lesson is the interesting idea that just trying out the
language helps students grow the concept.
NOTE: Here is an example of classroom teacher research.
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