September 17, 2020 LIBE 477 Reading Review #1

Curricular Connections, Useful Pedagogy, Digital Enrichment to Support METACOGNITION and SELF AWARENESS

Many of us educators have survived the first full week of school.  As I am currently teaching late primary (Grade 3) in Langley, B.C. I feel like I am just beginning to navigate and fully understand the province’s redesigned curriculum and then a new predicament presents itself.  

September is usually filled with excitement, inquiry, challenges, and successes; due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising infection numbers, particularly in the Fraser Health community, the challenges and stresses seem amplified.  However, there are also some positive reflections to take away from this - students, more than ever, are grateful to be back in the classroom with their teacher, new friends, and non-enrolling teachers continue to lend their services with generosity, patience, and vigour.

So, learner engagement is high due to the long hiatus from face-to-face instruction, but important experiences like peer collaboration, professional teacher guidance, stamina, literacy proficiency is varied.  How can I encourage metacognition, self awareness in terms of intellectual, personal, and social growth with their new personal learning network, and help develop these skills to lay the foundations for success in the present and future?

British Columbia’s redesigned curriculum still outlines essential subject areas like literacy and numeracy concepts and processes critical to learning.  With the introduction of core competencies like communication, thinking, personal, and social, students are able to take content presented, and relate it to a big idea.  This is where I want to land after my inquiry.  Using a constructivist and reflective pedagogical approach, I would like to use a platform, like MyBlueprint, for students to explore and describe their passions, journal and track their learning, and create a virtual collaborative learning hub for the classroom.  I would like for students to build their own representations of their learning and incorporate this new understanding to their pre-existing knowledge and relate it to their world.  Students take an active role in their growth and this footprint carries on to future endeavours beyond Grade 3.

Building Student Success - BC's New Curriculum. (2016). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/