What did I set out to do for the Action Learning Project?
- to improve my teaching of literacy through introducing specific metacognitive and visual literacy skills to my Year 6 students in 2012
Which metacognitive skills did I focus on?
‘The act of learning is made transparent: students need to know what, how and why they are learning.'
Bull, G. & Anstey, M (2010) Evolving Pedagogies: Reading and writing in a multimodal world. Education Services Australia Limited, Victoria. (p.143)
Bull, G. & Anstey, M (2010) Evolving Pedagogies: Reading and writing in a multimodal world. Education Services Australia Limited, Victoria. (p.143)
- thinking about thinking - 'why are we learning this?'
- self reflection - 'what am I learning? What do I need to do next time to improve?'
- peer assessment - 'tell me what you think about my work'
- KWHL - planning to learn and reflecting on learning
- Discussion - introductory and plenary sessions that are meaningful and assist student learning
What visual skills did I focus on?
- still images in picture books for older readers
- close up images for communicating emotion and main idea in narrative stories
- vectors and gestures in still images and how they contribute to the telling of the story
- still images used for stimulus and clarification of ideas when composing narratives
- student artwork used to link to metacognitive skills (what am I imagining when I read or write and how can I communicate this thinking to others...dioramas, portraits, descriptive drawing etc)
How does metacognition relate to or assist in the development of Visual Literacy?
Students learnt to use visual images to interpret their own thinking to encourage them to better understand narratives. Metacognition skills enabled the students to understand the process of their own thinking and to then use this understanding to assist them to comprehend others narratives by interpreting their own visual images when reading. They then used this knowledge and understanding to improve their own use of description in their narrative writing to engage their audience by providing clear visual images through their use of descriptive vocabulary.