Making Students Apprentices

I cannot remember which of my teachers first introduced the word metacognition to me and the rest of my classmates. However I do remember she was blonde, so it was either my seventh grade teacher ELA teacher or my third grade teacher. In "What is Metacognition?" Martinez said that many teachers define metacognition as "thinking about your thinking." Although I cannot remember which teacher introduced me to the term, I do remember she defined it just so.
I wanted to open with this anecdote because it was the first thing that popped in my head when I saw these readings were on metacognitive processes. Now, before we dive in, here's a picture of someone thinking about thinking.

"Ah basta de pensar" = that's enough of thinking

However metacognition is more than just thinking about the way you think.

Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject Area Classrooms

There was a lot about this reading that I liked, since it broke things down and gave some great examples of real-life teachers building up students literacy skills in different domains or disciplines. A lot of what we as a cohort have already learned about good teaching and perhaps witnessed in the classroom is very similar to this idea of apprenticeship.Before this we have talked a lot about Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and on how to scaffold students. These definitely connect to metacognition and the idea of apprenticing students, although these ideas seem more expansive. I like how the was broken up into four dimensions, so I am going to highlight those in my own response.

Four dimensions 
1) Social Dimension: building a community of readers
     This dimension is about establishing a sense of community and safety among the students when it comes to reading. I feel like this one is super important, because without it students will not want to move forward. For this dimension the reading talked about students feeling safe enough to share what they did not understand. I believe this needs to encompass students reading and speaking as well. Students must respect one another's thought processes, as well as each other's reading abilities and literal voices.
In my own classroom this past week, we were doing a worksheet as a class that involved some science and math. It was about bugs and their masses. There were two short paragraphs on the page, and one of the students who volunteered to read was laughed at by several students for how he pronounced something. I interjected to let the students know that it was not okay to make fun of someone else for how they were reading or speaking. This is something that my classroom will definitely have to work on so that we can tackle more challenging disciplinary material together.
2) Personal Dimension: giving apprentice readers a feeling of capability or agency
     This personal dimension builds nicely on the first dimension. For students to feel capable they must first feel safe and supported.
3) Cognitive Dimension: acquiring tools to comprehend texts
     It is vital for students to have reading strategies. It is also vital for students to see other people, especially their teachers, using reading strategies. We have to model what we do to make meaning out of texts, and we have to do it often so that students can see that even the experts use strategies. Some of this is specific and graphic strategies like those we present for each other every week in class. Some of it is also little things like doodles and comments in the margins of a book or other type of text. 
     I particularly like how the readings talked about making your "invisible" strategies "visible" and allowing students to see how you, a grown person, struggle sometimes and how you overcome it. This is something that is simple but can go a long way with your students, especially since many of them do admire you.
     When my class was working on the worksheet about bugs I mentioned earlier in this post I walked them through how I visualized one of the facts on the sheet in order to understand it. It was something about a certain insect having 3-30 times the biomass of humans, depending on the area. So I invited the class to close their eyes and visualize it with me in order to understand what the text was saying. They loved it, and I could see on some of their faces the meaning of this fact clicking. 
4) Knowledge-Building Dimension: connecting to prior knowledge and building on it
     This is something that is essential for us to remember to do with our students. There is even a section in our edTPA lesson plan template that asks us to examine our students' prior knowledge that may relate to the lesson. It is something that can make scary new concepts familiar and accessible to students.

My questions for you (answer as few or as many as you would like)

- Do you see your mentor teachers doing any sort of literacy apprenticeship in the classroom?
- Are there any ways you are thinking of implementing this apprenticeship framework during your student teaching or later in your own classroom?
- What are some of the strategies you like to use when making meaning?
- What was confusing to you about this week's readings?
- Any questions about what I wrote here?

Thank you for reading :)