PLE Post 7

Think of an activity or lesson component that explicitly teaches one or more metacognitive and one or more problem solving skills.

One reading lesson activity that can be used to explicitly teach both a metacognitive and a problem solving skill is summarizing. Summarizing is a really important skill for students to have because it allows them to remember what they have just read without memorizing every line. As a future teacher, I think summarizing is an important yet difficult skill to teach. Fortunately, I have learned that this skill can be taught by teaching students to think critically and use the RAP-Q heuristic.

As Sarah and I explained in our PowerPoint presentation, there are six levels of critical thinking. Summarizing is a critical thinking skill listed under "Level Two: Comprehension." To teach students how to summarize, I would have them read a short story and brainstorm what ideas or sentences from the reading they believe are the most important. While the students brainstorm, I would use a lot of questioning to help them think metacognitively about why they are including certain sentences in the summary and not others. For this discussion, my goal is for students to gain a deeper understanding of why we summarize and how this affects what information we include. 

Summarizing can also be taught using the RAP-Q heuristic that I found at a website entitled "The Learning Toolbox" (http://coe.jmu.edu/Learningtoolbox/strategies.html). This heuristic is used to help students understand the main ideas of what they read, which will help them remember the main points that they need to include in their summary. For this heuristic, students simply need to remember to follow each step of RAP-Q. First, they need to Read a section of the story. Next, they Ask themselves what the main idea was and Put the main idea in their own words. Finally, students write a Question for the section and answer it on the back of an index card so they can flip through them later to see how all the main ideas are connected in the story. In my summarizing activity, I would explicitly teach students how to use the RAP-Q method and would remind them to use it whenever they are having trouble summarizing a story.

For my resource this week, I decided to share the website where I found the RAP-Q heuristic (http://coe.jmu.edu/Learningtoolbox/strategies.html). This is a great resource for us to use in our future classrooms because it has many unique and easy-to-remember heuristics that we can use to help our students problem-solve. The website contains heuristics for organization, test taking, study skills, note taking, reading, writing, math, and advanced thinking.