Creighton, Pre-service Elementary Generalist Teacher
Elementary Art Methods Class, UNL 2021
The Metacognition Project
puts thinking at the heart of the classroom. Students learn to see thinking as an evolving, poetic form of art. By turning their thinking into artworks, they help others understand their process. They make ideas visible and develop a 'language of thinking'. This project is especially empowering for special education and neuro-divergent students.
The Metacognition Project is an example of teaching-as-creative-practice, a collaborative decentralized artwork designed to help teachers transform schooling through curriculum. Here, you will find teaching resources and a gallery of students' metacognition artworks.
Using this curriculum with your own students? We would love to highlight their metacognition projects in our gallery; please reach out!
Placing Thinking
at the Center
of the Classroom
“I think that sometimes strong thinkers are able to think metacognitively without being taught, but I would not have thought much about it without being taught it. Understanding my thinking process is motivational because it keeps leading me to the next idea, which keeps me interested in learning.”
-12th grade student
Key questions:
"How do creative approaches make the vocabulary of thinking accessible to all students?"
"How do we help students see thinking as fuzzy, imperfect, exciting play?"
"How do we teach students to make their own thinking and learning visible?"
"How do we create communities of thinking in k-12 classrooms?"
Lessons & Rescources
In Lesson 1, students describe their own thinking process, learn about metacognition, and identify ways they are asked to be metacognitive in each discipline in school. Students will understand that metacognition is a key skill that is being practiced across classrooms in their school experience.
In Lesson 2, students identify academic thinking words that teachers use to describe thinking processes. They then unpack those words, explore the cognitive function happening for each, and design a list of metaphorical or poetic words to make those processes more accessible to all learners. To do this, we 'tour' familiar spaces for students, and identify tools they commonly use that could describe thinking processes.
In Lesson 3, students return to their own thinking, and design a visual metaphor to more poetically describe their thinking process. They explore materials and techniques, and then create an artwork that makes their thinking visible.