Blog Post 1

Metacognition is basically thinking about our own thinking. The three categories of metacognition are person knowledge (understanding our capabilities), task knowledge (the difficulty we perceive the task), and strategy knowledge (how we use strategies to learn). The chapter goes on to discuss how we use metacognition every day. Such as when we think no one understands the way we feel or the situation we are in. Metacognition is effected by our beliefs, motivation, prior knowledge, and prior success. Critical thinking is how we evaluate how accurate the information presented is. We have a problem or information and we try to deconstruct it to its natural origins by thinking of everything that would make this idea true and thinking about how we can apply the information. Asking questions inspires critical thinking because we are able to think about the question in many different ways through spontaneous, exploratory, and issue-specific discussions.  

I would tell a practicing teacher to think of ways that students would think about information and try to relate it to them as much as possible and assure them that if they are having difficulties others students most likely ave the same problems that they do. Also, having class discussions would allow for more critical thinking. 

One question I had about the chapter was how would Piaget relate to this? He based everything off of students being in different stages of development and this is where their learning happened, so would he say that previous knowledge has nothing to do with this? Also, critical thinking can happen with any age students so would he say young students are not developmentally ready for this type of thinking?

Higher order type of thinking has to do more with self evaluation. You are able to understand why you got something wrong and how to correct it. You are also able to connect new information with previous knowledge and form new connections based on what you already know to be true and false. Lower order thinking is just being able to learn the information at hand and not connecting it to anything else.

The reading connects with what I know about development because I think that as we get older we are able to think about things more critically and evaluate the ways that we learn best. I think it is important for us to understand our own learning so that we can be successful. Development and learning are constantly happening and I think that being able to grow and make connections with previous topics and analyze them illustrates a lot of critical thinking and metacognition. 

In my future teaching I could incorporate critical thinking by presenting information to students and having them think about what it means and then having a class discussion. For instance if we were reading and we needed to understand the reading, students would have different ideas of what the reading meant, so by having class discussions we are able to analyze the information and think about the deeper meaning of it.