At this point, both students’ difficulties and our objectives are clear. It’s time to design next semester course, having in mind metacognition as an important skill for our students. A very interesting resource is: “Activities for Metacognition” by Center for Teaching and Learning of Chicago.

Activities for Metacognition | Learning Activities | Teaching Guides | Teaching Commons | DePaul University, Chicago

At this webpage are listed a lot of tools and techniques useful both in small or large classroom, both if you have only some minutes or a full session. You can adopt these techniques to make students reflect about their learning processes, difficulties they had, the awareness on their learning they acquired, about they have learnt and what they haven’t.

The objectives of using the listed techniques is to let students:

  • be aware about their new competencies and
  • reflect about the ways they arrived to acquire them.

Clicking on the URL, you will find the tools organized as follows:

Getting started and facilitating discussion

  • Jumpstart Journal;
  • Think-Pair-Share;
  • Ball Pass;
  • Fish Bowl.

Digging Deeper and Making Connections

  • What? So what? Now what?;
  • Force Field Analysis;
  • Photo Captions;
  • Generative Knowledge Interviewing.

Wrapping up and Taking Action

  • Index Card Takeaways;
  • Letters to Future Students;
  • Figurative Transformation.

Visit the webpage and learn more about these techniques.