Encouraging metacognition

Everyday, I ask my students, "what did you learn today?"

And every time I ask them, they always have something to say. I accept (most) answers, as all learning matters. What they learn in maths and reading is important, yes, but so are developing social skills and their ability to think and talk about their own learning.

It is a class, syndicate and school wide goal to get our students to think more about their own thinking (metacognition) and to talk about their thinking. Simply asking them for one thing they learnt that day is a great way to get them to

• think about the new things they learnt that day
• to have their learning on their mind as they are walking out the door at the end of the day instead of what they did at lunchtime. 

This is Tuesday's response

Today I learnt... 23 March 2016 from Tamaki Primary on Vimeo.

You will notice a lot of them talked about their blogs, as we did a focus session on accessing their blogs and how to post for the first time (they are very new to their blogs).

I plan to show them this video, and talk about the benefits of talking about our learning, and different ways we can show what we have learnt.