This month's CPD video focuses on philosophy and philosophical thinking in the classroom. Each month we link to a carefully selected lecture, presentation or documentary in order to help educators develop professionally; accompanying each video is a selection of metacognitive questions designed to help you get more from the video. Philosophy in schools can make a valuable contribution to metacognition provisions because exploration of epistemological issues helps students to reflect on the fundamental nature or knowledge and the process of gaining it!
Using metacognitive reflection questions before and after the videos you show your students is a straightforward way to foster metacognitive reflection. By engaging with the metacognitive questions below you can see for yourself how useful they are in helping to increase learning power!
For each question take a moment to think about the answer. When using this exercise in lessons it is best to use some form of ‘think, pair, share’ approach so that students share their reflections with the group – thus helping to ensure engagement.
Pre-Video Metacognitive Questions…
1. What are you hoping to learn from this video?
2. How can you ensure that you learn as much as possible from the video?
3. In general, what are the strengths and weaknesses of your approach to learning from videos
This Month's CPD Video
Post-Video Metacognitive Questions
1. How did your own attitude impact the amount you learnt from the video?
2. How could you have been better prepared prior to watching the video?
3. What were you actually doing with your mind whilst you watched the video?
Further Reflection Questions
Which philosophical issues can be be linked to your specialist teaching subject?
What is the fundamental difference between philosophical thinking and regular thinking?
How might philosophical thinking contribute towards metacognition and self-regulated learning?
How to Use Metacognitive Questions With Videos in Your Lessons
Using metacognitive question prompts at the start, middle and end of a video or documentary you show students in lessons activates each stage of the self-regulation cycle: planning, monitoring, evaluating and regulating.
We’ve created a simple PowerPoint tool that will facilitate your delivery of metacognitive questions in lessons whenever you use a video: regardless of the school subject or videos topic. It allows you to instantly generate metacognitive questions for each stage of the metacognition process using an integrated menu:
Student are then presented with one of thirty-six slides like the ones depicted below, each contained 3 of 108 questions aiming to trigger metacognitive reflection, awareness and knowledge:
You can download a free sample of the resource here – it’s perfectly easy to use in your lessons and requires no preparation. The demo version contains 6/36 slides (18/108 questions).
The full version contains the complete array of 108 questions and access to all 36 slides: this makes the resource almost infinitely reusable. Furthermore, unlike the demo version, the full version is fully editable so that teachers can add their own metacognitive questions. Click here to download the full version. If you are a membership plan holder please visit the Members Area to download it for free.