Metacognition is a difficult thing to achieve.   Taking yourself out of your head to analyze your own thought processes does not come naturally.  I like that this week we were required to look back over our writing because it revealed to me patterns of which I had not been aware.  While writing my blog posts, I was able to notice a few things about my writing process.  I found that very often I began my blog with one idea in mind, or perhaps a handful of ideas that were loosely related, and more often than not, ended up focusing my post on something different.  Writing was a means for me to sort through my thoughts and arrive at a somewhat cohesive, formulated idea.  I think this has been the most valuable thing about blogging in this class – I come to a clearer understanding of a text through the process of writing about it.  Go figure.

While reading over my blog posts from this semester, I discovered some patterns that I had not been aware of while I was actually writing them.  I noticed that I tended to incorporate three things in nearly every one of my posts.  The first was that I often made reference to either topics from our class discussions or from other articles we had read for the class.  Making these connections is obviously a way for me to create meaning.  Anther thing I noticed was that I asked a lot of questions.  I did not ask many questions in my posts about Blau (possibly because I found this book easy to read because of its practical application), but in some of the other posts I did.  For example, in my post about Gee there are six question marks, and in the one over Sherry Linkon’s article there are eight.  I guess I really took Salvatori and Donahue’s suggestion seriously about generating questions to find meaning.  Finally, I noticed that each of my posts ended in the same way – with an attempt to relate the ideas and questions put forth in the blog post to the challenge of teaching.   This class has obviously been making me think, and I am happy that the blogging assignment serves as a tracking device of sorts, allowing me to follow the development of my thoughts about the teaching practices and theories that we are exploring.