Article: Reflective Teaching
Using Metacognition to Select and Apply Appropriate Teaching Strategies
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Struggling to decide which teaching strategy or activity to implement in your class? This article offers some specific questions you can ask yourself to guide your decision-making.
While the mindful choice of instructional strategies is important, we believe that instructors should also remain mindful in-the-moment as they implement strategies. Questions they might ask themselves include:
- What are you doing to “check in” with your learners to ensure progress towards daily and weekly course objectives?
- What are signs of success (or not) of the use of the strategy?
- How can you adjust the technique to better meet your student needs?
- Are your students motivated and confident, or are they bored or overwhelmed and frustrated? Are your students being given enough time to practice new skills?
- If learning is not where it needs to be or student affect is not supportive of learning, what are alternate strategies?
- Are you prepared to shift to them? If not, then why not?
These prompts can help instructors adjust and refine their implementation of the chosen instructional strategy in a timely manner.
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