Reflection 2 – Deduction plus discovery, a formula that can lead to metacognition

On the last reflection I talked about the importance of conscious teachers, now I will go further and show a way in which a conscious teacher can provide the students opportunities so that they can go further in their metacognition process; this taking into account the video we saw of the teacher in New York and her strategies, and on the video of the expert of the brain that became a teacher. Allowing the students to deduct outcomes of certain processes and then discover what those outcomes really were can help students think about their thinking, because with the guidance of the teacher they will discover their reasoning process, improve it, and then use it to face new situations. In this exercise there aren’t wrong answers, because what’s important is the process that leads to the answer more than the answer itself, the how and why. This formula of deduction plus discovery involves the following metacognition elements: use of prior knowledge to solve new situations, creativity, value the students’ opinions, team work, importance of processes, critical thinking, knowing themselves through analyzing their own thinking process and improving it, acknowledgment of diversity, sensory integration, making sense of why they are studying a topic, among others. The following is a practical example of the above in the social studies subject. The topic is a historical process, in this case the Russian Revolution of 1917, the students have already studied the background of this event, due to explanations of the teacher and the students’ research in which they created timelines of the most important events occurring in Russia and in the world, mostly Europe, at the time. The exercise is that students, in groups of four and with the guidance of the teacher, will deduct what occurred soon after the revolution, and will use different methods to represent it, one group will act a short play, another group will write a story, another group will show it with play dough, and the last group will show it in drawings. They will choose from the following possible topics: the involvement of Russia in the war, what happened politically in Russia (e.g. return of tsars or other), what happened economically (economic system that ruled after the revolution), or what happened culturally (a possible Russian renaissance). Then it will be discussed how they arrived to that conclusion and the teacher will present the events that occurred soon after the Russian Revolution.