Modules 12 & 14 focus on metacognition and critical thinking. The big ideas focus around these two topics. These chapters focus on thinking about thinking and how to advance one's thinking to higher order thinking. Children with higher order thinking are able to think about others and assess their own thinking and understanding. Metacognition can be thought of as knowledge and regulation. Metacognition knowledge is knowledge of the thinking processes one uses. Metacognition regulation is assessing one's self to see how effective these thinking processes are. Critical thinking is being able to retain knowledge and make connections based on things that have been previously learned. Higher order thinking is being able to retain new information, understand it, as well as, make connections to previously learned things, and in turn create new ideas. Lower order thinking is being able to recall and recount information but not being able to make connections to previously learned things. Young children are not able to think at a higher level. To a classroom teacher, I would suggest putting students in heterogeneous groups in order to allow higher achieving students the opportunity to teach lower achieving students, signifying complete understanding. It also allows lower achieving students to see how some connections were made, that they wouldn't previously have understood.
One question I had concerning critical thinking and metacognition is: can working in homogeneous groups of all students of higher order thinking still be beneficial to said students?
The difference between higher and lower levels of thinking is children who have a higher level of thinking are able to think about their own thinking processes and are able to assess how well their understanding is. They are also able to make connections with what they have just learned to things they have learned previously. Lower level thinking does not allow the thinker to be able to assess him/herself, as well as, the thinking of those around them. They are also not able to make connections to things that have been previously learned.
This reading connects with what I have previously learned about development by showing how aging moves you from one developmental stage to the other. This connects to Piaget because one has to be of a certain age in order to reach a developmental stage.
In my future classroom, I would facilitate this type of higher thinking by asking open ended questions, as well as, questions that would allow the students to make connections with previous topics. I would also assign heterogeneous group projects, in order to allow the students to assess themselves by teaching a topic to another student, if they successfully teach the topic, they are sure they understand it fully.
Interesting question: If the homogeneous group consists of low-achieving students, are they going to be capable of higher level thinking? I think heterogeneous grouping helps better to foster higher order thinking because the more advanced students can encourage the other students to think critically.
ReplyDeleteI think that any kind of group situation can teach students things that they would not have learned on their own. That being said, research has shown time and time again that heterogeneous groups are most effective.
ReplyDeleteI like that you suggest heterogeneous grouping to foster higher order thinking for the students who are teaching others. What sort of things do you expect? Comparing, explaining, analyzing, synthesizing? I think these things would be required to explain a concept to another student.
ReplyDeleteYou can teach all students metacognitive or critical thinking (they're different things) individually. In that way, there's no reason homogeneous groups couldn't have everyone trying metacognitive strategies.
I want you to be careful in thinking that higher order thinking just develops as you age. Though children aren't capable of things like theory of mind before about 4, it's not true that it spontaneously improves over time. Those sort of practices need to be taught, modeled, and practiced. Many times this isn't done, and then students heading to college have no idea how to judge their own thinking or study strategies. It's important to make this a comfortable practice at younger ages!