In my years of teaching, I have developed my own theories to literacy acquisition for students. My current studies in the Reading, Literacy, and Learning course work at Longwood have solidified some of these formulated philosophies that emerged from my teaching experience. I believe that students need to be explicitly taught strategies that will enable them to problem solve through a variety of instructional activities as well as prepare them for life after high school/college. But after this initial modeling and practice, students should be gradually handed the reins to their own learning. This gradual release also includes giving the students choices along with other effective teaching methods.
The research verifies that students perform higher when taught how to think about what they are learning. Kevin Downing and colleagues argue that when students face problems in their learning and apply learned strategies, their level of understanding deepens and their awareness of their own learning increases (2008). Helping students to be aware of their own learning and thinking brings their education to a level that offer long term gains as students. Instead of teaching students what to think or what information to memorize, I believe we should teach them how to utilize strategies to guide their own thinking. It is my vision that students will gain more information autonomously through the use of good learning strategies than to acquire the information stated in the “standards” of learning.
Teaching students to think for themselves involved strategic instruction. The students definitely need explicit instruction on effective strategies for learning. The use of mnemonic strategies, concept mapping, graphic organizers, self-questions, monitoring, predicting, and rereading are but a few researched based strategies that students can employ at any stage of learning in any concept or subject (Gambrell, 2011; Dole, 1996). Explicitly teaching students how to use the strategy is crucial for the students to generalize the strategy and reuse it on their own. Helping the students to create value in the use of the strategy is also key to the students generalizing the strategies into their academics (Dole, 1996). Once they understand how the strategy helps them, they can utilize the techniques learned during any instruction where they are struggling. For example, when students learn to monitor their own reading, they learn to ask themselves if they understood what they just read. If they answer “no”, then they need to be taught and to practice going back and rereading. They become aware of the value of this strategy when they realize that when they reread, they understood. This takes discussion with the teacher about how to apply the strategy and why they applied the strategy. I believe when this value is built, students will begin to facilitate their own learning by applying the strategy autonomously.
This is a deeper level of thinking. They are thinking about their own thinking. Dole, Brown, and Trathen discovered that when students have value in their own learning their efficacy increases (1996). To access metacognition thinking skills, students require teacher assistance. This is a scaffolding process and involves discussion with feedback to reinforce students and encourage their motivation. The student will need to be manually stopped by the teacher after reading a passage asked directly if they understood what they read. When they say “yes”, they should explain in their own words the jist of the passage. If they can not, this is a wonderful opportunity ask them, “what can you do to make sure you understand what you read?”. It has been my experience that the students answer, “reread it”. So I prompt them to do just that, and then ask them again about a summary of the passage. The essential question to building value is then ask them if they understood the passage better the second time they read. When they say, asking why they think they understood the passage. This is the point that they are thinking about their own learning and constructing value in the strategy of rereading. Once value is constructing that is relevant to the student, they will utilize it more independently (Dole, 1996).
As a teacher I want to step away from teaching rote skills. It is not my vision to teach the same lesson for 25 years. It is actually an injustice to the children of our society to teach in this manner. Because teaching specific standards is not the end all of instruction, I believe our students deserve to learn how to problem solve and utilize strategies to guide their own learning. This prepares them to be self-reliant citizens and our future policy makers, bankers, teachers, scientist, parents and leaders.