Thinking+About+Our+Thinking+(Metacognition)

//It is important to think about your own learning strategies and to evaluate their effectiveness. Can you explain your own learning strategies? If you were asked "Tell us what went on in your head to come up with that conclusion? Would you say, "I don't know I just did it"?//
 * Thinking About Our Thinking (Metacognition)**

Teaching the rest of my Chemistry class a ten-minute lesson on electrochemical cells was a unique opportunity for me to learn while being a teacher. Each individual in my class was given a topic, and our assignment was to prepare a lesson (approximately 10 minutes) to teach the rest of the class the concepts of each topic. As a student, I'm accustomed to being taught, and being told what to do by teachers. It is rare that teachers have given us the chance to directly act as teachers to our classmates.

While preparing my lesson, I learned a lot about myself. Since the obvious goal is to have your students fully understand the concepts of what you are teaching, I had to think about how I learned best, so that I could teach my classmates in the way that I thought I would learn the most. I made sure that my lesson wasn't just one ten-minute lecture, because I knew that I would have trouble staying focused if all a teacher did was lecture, without having any activities involving the students. I incorporated a short video that summarized how electrochemical cells work, in the middle of my lesson, so that the students would be able to see a different explanation of electrochemical cells. The video also summarized a lot of the information that I presented before it. I ended my lesson with a short "quiz", to see how well people were paying attention. I also asked several students to go up to the board to draw and label various parts of electrochemical cells. At the end of my lesson, I felt confident that I did a good job in teaching the class about electrochemical cells.

When I was making my lesson, I kept on putting myself into the shoes of the people that I would be teaching (which wasn't hard, considering that I'm a student as well). I thought that, as a student, I would like for teachers to use a wide variety of teaching methods (powerpoints, videos, and interactive "quizzes"), because I learn best when I'm presented information in more than one way, and I have a chance to demonstrate that I know the information in the form of a quiz of some sort.

Some slides from my power point:

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