Fostering Metacognitive Skills and Critical Thinking in Your Classroom

Thanks to everyone who attended my session at COABE this year. Thanks to all who shared ideas for increasing critical thinking and metacognitive skills!

Let's keep thinking and sharing our ideas to help each other. Please post below to share ideas you have found work with your students. No idea is too basic. 

Thanks to Julie Frost, District 214, and recent graduate of the Institute to Credential Special Learning Needs Resource Specialists, for sharing her ideas:

Thinking aloud so they can hear my thought processes helps but usually I try to explain why we are doing what we are doing.  I sometimes pose it as a question to see what they can generate.  For example, I usually put a one page reading on one side of the paper and the comprehension exercises or questions on the backside.  I love to ask them why after they keep flipping the pages back and forth. They usually suggest that I'm trying to be eco-friendly.  I tell them that and I am exercising their minds because they have to remember the information long enough to turn the paper over and write it down.  I also thinks it helps to prevent overt copying and helps them to paraphrase.  In summer school, I usually post a recipe for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside in the hallway.  I ask the high school students to run out, read it and then come back and write down what they can remember.  It is a race between groups.  Only one member of each group can leave at a time.  It is so much fun.  Then they have to make it according to the directions they wrote down.  Eating it is the prize.