PLE Post 7: Metacognitive Skills

Consider a lesson plan you might use.  Which metacognitive skills/abilities are involved as students gain facility/knowledge in this domain?

According to SpringerReference.com, "Metacognitive skills are strategies applied consciously or automatically during learning, cognitive activity, and communication to manipulate cognitive processes before, during, or after a cognitive activity.  Examples are executive function processes such as verbal mediation, self-regulation, planning, judgment, and self-monitoring." 


For this post, I will focus on a Read-Aloud lesson that focuses on developing students' comprehension skills by helping them develop and practice metacognitive strategies.  I actually observed one of my friends conduct this lesson in her first-grade classroom this past fall.  This lesson activity reflects the first grade reading standard, CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.1.3, "Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details."

For this Read-Aloud, the teacher selected the children's book, Officer Buckle and Gloria, by Peggy Rathmann.

In conducting the Read-Aloud, the teacher facilitated the utilization and development of the metacognitive skills necessary for comprehension in her students.  I will now list some of the techniques she used throughout the Read-Aloud to accomplish this facilitation. 

• Introduction:  The teacher introduced the book by relating the book to the theme of the week, "community."  She asked her students to think of some people they know who work for and within the community.  Students responded saying, "police officers," "teachers," "mailmen," "librarians," "firefighters," "the mayor," etc.  The teacher also asked students to predict what they thought the book would be about.  She communicated to her students that the connections they made to the book and their predictions would help them to better comprehend the content of the book.  Making connections and predictions are metacognitive skills that enhance comprehension. 
• Making Connections and Hand-Signaling:  Before I observed this lesson, the teacher had explicitly taught students to make connections while reading.  Throughout the Read-Aloud I observed, students continually made connections between the text and the illustrations and their real-life experiences.  Students indicated that they had made a connection, by forming the letter, "C," with their hands.  When the teacher realized, from the hand-signals, that several students had connections to share, she called on them individually and had them explain their connection.  The students were all so eager to form connections and share their connections with their classmates.  The ability to make connections to a text while reading is a crucial metacognitive skill.
• Visualizing and Hand-Signaling:  Prior to my observation, the teacher had explicitly taught her students to visualize or to make "mind-movies" while reading or listening to a text.  When students had a "mind-movie" to share, they held up one of their hands in the shape of a "V" (visualization).  Just as in the case of "connections," students could not wait to share their "mind movies."  The ability to visualize while reading a text is a metacognitive skill that greatly enhances comprehension.  It was so much fun to hear the creative, "out-there" mind-movies that some of the children came up with.  
• Questioning to Monitor:  Throughout the Read-Aloud, the teacher posed questions to her students to ensure that her students were listening to and understanding the story.  She continually explained to her students why she was asking these questions, "Asking questions helps us to make sure we understand the text.  We don't want to read the whole book and then realize we didn't comprehend anything!  We must ask questions throughout the reading to check or to monitor our comprehension."  In explicitly teaching questioning techniques to her students, this teacher is helping her students develop yet another important metacognitive skill relating to reading comprehension.  
• Reflection:  After finishing the story, the teacher initiated a class discussion about the characters, the setting, and the main events.  This reflection also included how the students felt about the story overall.  Did they enjoy the story?  How did they feel about the characters?  What would life be like if they were one of the characters?  In reflecting on the major events, the setting, and the characters in the story, students are making further connections to the story.  These deeper connections strengthen comprehension.  Therefore, reflection and discussion allow students to further develop their reading comprehension metacognitive skills/strategies.  

I was amazed at the students' abilities to apply metacognitive comprehension skills before, during, and after reading/listening to Officer Buckle and Gloria .  After taking Reading Education 430, I realize the importance of explicitly teaching comprehension strategies to even the youngest of readers.  "Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers," by Anne E. Gregory and Mary Ann Cahill, outlines some of the strategies I mentioned in this post.  This article is a wonderful resource for those intending to teach the primary grades!