Author: Charity Peak

Using Metacognition to Develop College Faculty

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D.

What does it take to become an exceptional college teacher? As many of us have learned, there’s much more to the art and science of teaching than merely knowing the content. Still, every year, several new faculty members begin teaching with the false assertion that solely learning more about their subject will lead to success in the classroom. Instead, metacognition about their development as a teacher could help propel them into their new roles with greater ease. Below is an appeal for new faculty to embrace metacognition about their instruction by understanding their developmental path with college teaching.

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Dear New Faculty,

Congratulations on starting your new role as a college teacher! You’ve worked hard to get to this point, spending years in class and writing that thesis or dissertation. Now you get to share all of that knowledge with aspiring students. Your passion will hopefully convert several of them into majoring in your discipline or even becoming your research prodigies. Your optimism is contagious and inspiring.

Despite the fact that you now hold an advanced degree, your learning is not over. In fact, the journey to becoming an effective teacher has just begun. Before you step into that classroom, take a strategic pause to become metacognitive about your teaching, not just your content. You must now design a course that is meaningful for your students. Sure, you can simply use the materials provided by the textbook publisher, especially those well-designed PowerPoint slides, but did you know college teaching requires so much more? Did you know there are developmental stages for becoming an effective college teacher?

Akerlind (2007) shares brilliant insights about progressing from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered approach. In order to focus on student learning, faculty need to become aware of how they are teaching and begin to adapt their instruction to best meet the needs of their students. In other words, effective college faculty engage in metacognition about their instruction through awareness of teaching strategies, reflection about their practice, and self-regulation of teaching methods based on student learning needs. To this end, Akerlind asserts that college teachers move through the following developmental stages:

Akerlind Teaching Development Stages
Akerlind Teaching Development Stages

If these stages hold true, what does this mean for you? As Akerlind shares, new teachers often expend most of their energies on understanding their disciplinary content really well. You may spend great effort reading the textbook and researching the topics as much as possible. In all likelihood, much of your class time will be spent lecturing or presenting information (perhaps using those textbook slides), a very teacher-centered style. In reality, if you take this approach, you may learn more than your students this year because you spent greater time and energy mastering the material than they did.

Over time, however, you may discover that students are not participating in class like you want, or you may notice dwindling attendance. Student evaluations might even reflect dissatisfaction with your teaching style. Don’t be dismayed; don’t give up. You will begin to shift into Akerlind’s next developmental stage by considering alternative methods for content delivery. You will move toward focusing on how to teach rather than what to teach, especially now that you feel more comfortable with the content of the course. During this stage, you will gain greater metacognition about your teaching.

Through trial and error, you will begin to explore and experiment with a variety of teaching strategies, increasing your toolbox of techniques from which to use. Trying these new strategies will not be sufficient, though. You will need to select evidence-based strategies drawn from the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) literature, and you will need to reflect on how well the new methods worked (also called reflective practice). Through reflection, you will begin to see which teaching techniques fit your personal style and subject matter. You will also begin to seek feedback, particularly from students, about how well these new strategies are being received.

Ultimately, though, you will discover that student satisfaction and snazzy teaching techniques fall flat if your students aren’t learning from the course. As Akerlind claims, you will move into the final developmental stage by designing your instruction and curriculum to be singularly focused on learning outcomes. You will search for a balance between being liked as a teacher to challenging students to transform their thinking. You may even embrace this positive restlessness and seek continuous improvement with your teaching each semester.

So why should you care about these stages of college teaching development? Because perhaps seeing your teaching as a journey and not a fixed goal will help you to be patient with yourself as you try new techniques and begin to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps metacognition about your future development will help you to progress more quickly through these stages to focusing on student learning rather than your instruction style. Go ahead and acknowledge that your first semester or two may be focused heavily on understanding the content at hand, but over time, try to embrace metacognitive instruction by leveraging knowledge about teaching and intentional awareness in the classroom to move toward more sophisticated methods for delivering that content. Become reflective practitioners who care about student feedback and continuous improvement, but eventually shift your focus to improving student learning outcomes.

The journey to becoming an effective college teacher will not happen overnight, even with this new metacognition you have, but rest assured that it will be rewarding and meaningful. In Bain’s (2004) pivotal work, What the Best College Teachers Do, you will discover that it could take up to 10 years to become an effective faculty member. However, maintaining metacognition about these stages of development will likely put you on target sooner, working toward a learner-centered approach to teaching. Good luck!

Resources:

Akerlind, G.S. (2007). Constraints on academics’ potential for developing as a teacher. Studies in Higher Education, 32(1): 21-37. doi: 10.1080/03075070601099416

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Metacognition for Scholars: How to Engage in Deep Work

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D. (Independent Consultant)

True confession: I’m addicted to shallow work. I wouldn’t say I’m a procrastinator as much as I am someone who prefers checking small things off my list or clearing my inbox over engaging in more complex tasks. I know I should be writing and researching. It’s just as much of my job as teaching or administrative duties, but I get to the end of my day and wonder why I didn’t have time for the most critical component of my promotion package – scholarship.

It turns out I’m not the only one suffering from this condition (far from it), and luckily there is a treatment plan available. It begins with metacognition about how one is spending time during the day, self-monitoring conditions that are most distracting or fruitful for productivity, and self-regulating behaviors in order to ritualize more constructive habits. Several authors offer suggestions for how to be more prolific (Goodson, 2013; Silvia, 2007), especially those providing writing prompts and 15-minute exercises, but few get to the core of the metacognitive process like Cal Newport’s (2016) recent Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of 5 books and a blog on college success, shares his strategies for becoming a prolific writer while balancing other faculty duties.

Newport claims that deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is arguably the most difficult and crucial capability of the 21st century. Creative thinking is becoming progressively rare in our distracted world, so those who can rise above shallow work are guaranteed to demonstrate value to their employers, especially colleges and universities. In order to be creative and produce new ideas, scholars must engage in deep work regularly and for significant periods of time. Instead, Newport argues that most people spend their days multitasking through a mire of shallow work like email, which is noncognitively demanding and offers little benefit to academia, let alone an individual’s promotion. In fact, he cites that “a 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone” (Newport, 2016, p. 5). Sound like someone you know?

The good news is that if you carve out space for deep work, your professional career will soar. The first step is to become metacognitive about how you are spending your time during the day. One simple method is to self-monitor how you use your work days by keeping a grid near your computer or desk. At the end of every hour throughout your day, record how much time you actually spent doing your job duties of teaching (including prep and grading), writing and research, and service. Like a food diary or exercise journal, your shallow work addiction will become apparent quickly, but you will also gain metacognition about when and under which conditions you might attempt to fit in time for deep work.

Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, you can begin to self-regulate your behavior by blocking off time in your schedule in which you can engage in a deeper level of creative thinking. Each person will gravitate toward a different modality conducive to an individual’s working styles or arrangements. The author offers a few choices for you to consider, which have been proven to be successful for other scholars and business leaders:

  • Monastic: Eliminate or radically minimize shallow obligations, such as meetings and emails, in an effort to focus solely on doing one thing exceptionally well. Put an out-of-office response on your email, work somewhere other than your workplace, or take a year-long sabbatical in order to completely separate from frivolous daily tasks that keep you away from research and writing. Most teaching faculty and academic leaders are unable to be purely monastic due to other duties.
  • Bimodal: Divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, act monastically – seek intense and uninterrupted concentration – but schedule other time in your day for shallow work to be completed. One successful scholar shared the possibility of teaching a very full load one semester but not teaching at all during the next as an example of engaging deeply in both critical duties.
  • Rhythmic: Also called the “chain method” or “snack writing,” create a regular habit of engaging in deep work, such as every morning before going into work or at the end of each day. Blocking off one’s calendar and writing every day has been proven to be one of the most productive habits for scholars attempting to balance their research with other duties (Gardiner & Kearns, 2011).
  • Journalistic: Fit deep work into your schedule wherever you can – 15 minutes here, an hour there. Over time you will become trained to shift into writing mode on a moment’s notice. This approach is usually most effective for experienced scholars who can switch easily between shallow and deep work. Inexperienced writers may find that the multitasking yields unproductive results, so they should proceed cautiously with this method.

The key is to do something! You must ritualize whichever method you choose in order to optimize your productivity. This may take some trial and error, but with your new-found metacognition about how you work best and some alternative strategies to try, you will be more likely to self-regulate your behaviors in order to be successful in your scholarly pursuits. If you try new approaches and are still not engaging in enough deep work, consider joining a writing group or finding a colleague to hold you accountable on a regular basis. Again, like diet and exercise, others can sometimes provide the motivation and deadlines that we are unable to provide for ourselves. Over time, your addiction to shallow work will subside and your productivity will soar… or so they tell me.

Resources:

Gardiner, M., & Kearns, H. (2011). Turbocharge your writing today. Nature 475: 129-130. doi: 10.1038/nj7354-129a

Goodson, P. (2013). Becoming an academic writer: 50 exercises for paced, productive, and powerful writing. Los Angeles: Sage.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.


Fighting Imposter Syndrome Through Metacognition

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D.

Have you ever felt like an imposter at work? Taught a class that was not your expertise? Felt intimidated before giving a presentation? Nearly every faculty member experiences this imposter phenomenon at some point. After all, as faculty we work around incredibly smart and talented people who shine from being experts in their field. Additionally, people drawn to academia naturally feel compelled to be knowledgeable and often find themselves to be inadequate when they are not (Huston, 2009).

Imposter syndrome is “an overwhelming sense of being a fraud, a phony, of not being good enough for [a] job, despite much evidence to the contrary” (Kaplan, 2009). Apart from accomplishing significant professional milestones, people cannot seem to internally acknowledge their success or feel deserving. This sense of being an imposter is prevalent among women but is increasingly being revealed by men as well. Although the condition is often referred to as a syndrome, it is important to understand that it is NOT actually a diagnosable mental illness found in the DSM-V. Instead, it is an affliction, similar to test or performance anxiety, experienced by a variety of high-achieving individuals that can be treated successfully using metacognition and self-regulation.

Reactions to imposter syndrome vary widely and by individual. Typically, imposter phenomenon starts with a self-sabotaging internal dialogue, such as:

  • Who do I think I am? I’m not smart enough to teach this class or present on this topic.
  • What if my students ask me a question that I can’t answer?
  • What if someone finds out I don’t know what I’m talking about?
  • I’m not cut out for this. I really can’t do this.

A physical reaction similar to other stressful situations (fight, flight, or freeze) often follows:

  • Increased blood pressure
  • Blushing
  • Sweating
  • Shaking
  • Tonic immobility (i.e., mental block or “deer in headlights”)

Faculty in these situations tend to respond in one of two ways:

  • Undercompensating by becoming submissive, overly agreeable or even apologetic
  • Overcompensating with defensive, bossy and aggressive behaviors
  1. Recognize symptoms when they arise and recenter yourself through breathing:
  • Assume a comfortable posture
  • Close your eyes if possible
  • Focus on the sensations of your body
  • Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth
  • When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to your breath
  • Breathe in, breathe out
  • Repeat for at least 10 breaths and up to 5 minutes
  1. Reconstruct a new, positive internal dialogue. Talk to yourself as you would a good friend by being supportive and confidence-building.
  2. Posture yourself as confident. It turns out that “fake it till you make it” works with regard to physical posture. People who use Power Poses for 2 minutes demonstrate higher levels of confidence-building hormones (testosterone) as opposed to stress-inducing hormones (cortisol) (Carney, Cuddy & Yap, 2010; Cuddy, 2012).
  3. Acknowledge the limits of your knowledge. Instead of hiding your lack of expertise, build a repertoire of ways to deflect difficult questions, such as:
  • What do you think?
  • I don’t know. Does anyone want to look it up and tell us the answer?
  • Great question. Can we talk about that more after class (or meeting)?
  • Let’s not dive too deeply into that issue because it might distract us from today’s agenda.
  • Good thought. Does anyone want to collaborate to address that concern?
  • Here is what I know, and here is what I don’t know (Huston, 2009).
  1. Avoid “teaching as telling.” Rather than lecturing, which requires great preparation and pressure to be the expert in the room, move toward new pedagogical models of facilitation which turn the teaching burden over to the students, such as jigsaw and gallery walk.
  2. Know that you are not alone. It is plausible that nearly everyone in the room has felt this way at one point or another in their careers, even though they may not readily share these thoughts with others. Normalizing the feelings to yourself will start to defuse your anxiety.
  3. Share the issue with others you trust. A mentor or even a small community of colleagues can collaboratively strategize about how to address the issue.
  4. Recognize external factors that might contribute. Often people blame themselves for toxic situations which were created by outside circumstances. If the situation persists, consider declining future involvement to avoid setting yourself up for difficulties.

“Awareness is half the battle” really does apply to imposter syndrome. Through metacognition, you can conquer the self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that might prevent you from succeeding in your personal and professional life. Intentional self-monitoring of negative internal dialogue followed by practicing self-regulation through the simple strategies outlined above is the antidote to imposter syndrome. So next time you feel yourself break into a sweat (figuratively or literally), assume a Power Pose and leverage metacognition to triumph over your doubts!

Metacognition promotes success by helping us overcome self-defeating thoughts. Share on X
 Resources:

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363-1368. doi: 10.1177/0956797610383437

Cuddy, A. (2012, October 1). Your body language shapes who you are [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en

Huston, T. (2009). Teaching What You Don’t Know. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kaplan, K. (2009). Unmasking the impostor. Nature, 459(21): 468-469. doi: 10.1038/nj7245-468a


Metacognition About Course Design: Creating a Paradigm Shift

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy

Recent studies have sparked a national conversation about the lack of accountability for student learning in higher education. Our Underachieving Colleges (Bok, 2006) and Academically Adrift (Arum & Roksa, 2011) are just two examples of scathing reviews of how colleges are falling short. Increasingly, colleges and universities are being asked to demonstrate their value, particularly during a recession.

The core reason for not achieving greater success is a lack of focus on student learning. Despite all that we know today, institutions continue to concentrate on belongingness, construction, and the almighty research dollar rather than on whether students are graduating with substantial learning gains. Additionally, most faculty believe they are supporting student learning. They can even recite many of the basic learning principles that are foundational to teaching, such as the value of relevance. However, many faculty are unsure about how to apply these principles to their own classes. Like our students, they need sufficient practice and feedback in order to be able to create well-designed courses that improve student learning.

One way to attack this issue is to provide opportunities for metacognition about course design, not merely lesson planning. If metacognition includes thinking about how one performs a skill (Schraw, 1998), then awareness and knowledge about how to design a course are critical for enhancing student learning. Are there clearly articulated learning goals for the course? Do the assessments align with those learning goals? What learning experiences will support student success on those assessments by providing ample practice and feedback?

Jones, Noyd, and Sagendorf (2014) propose institutional course design retreats as a method for creating metacognition about student learning. Through a series of steps and collaboration with peers, faculty might simply set out to design their courses, but often become transformed by the experience. For many years, the authors have facilitated this six-step process for course design, but it is now available for others to use in Building a Pathway for Student Learning: A How-To Guide to Course Design. The book offers a research-based course design process that can be applied to all disciplines and a variety of settings. Step-by-step, faculty walk through designing a course using a series of self-paced workboxes:

  1. Student Learning Factors – How do your students’ characteristics impact their learning?
  2. Learning Goals – What do you want students to know and be able to do as a result of taking your course?
  3. Assessment – How will you know the extent to which students accomplished your learning goals?
  4. Proficiencies – What knowledge, skills, and attitudes will students need to accomplish the learning goals?
  5. Learning Experiences – Which learning experiences (outside and inside class time) support the development of proficiencies and accomplishment of your goals?
  6. Feedback & Improvement – How will students receive useful feedback on their work so they can make the necessary adjustments to accomplish your goals?

The culmination of work is a one-page flow chart of the course – a map to student learning. This flow chart offers a metacognitive pathway through the course for students as well as faculty teaching the course. As with all learning, and perhaps most importantly, faculty gain a new awareness of who should be at the center of their course – the learner! Through metacognition about student learning, faculty are able to intentionally design college experiences that matter rather than passive lectures or fun-but-tangential activities that do not achieve the learning gains we most need in higher education.

Without appropriate support and metacognition, faculty will continue to design courses focused on content rather than learning. While the approach that Jones, Noyd and Sagendorf (2014) use seemingly addresses an instructor’s main goal in preparation of a new semester – finishing the syllabus – faculty become transformed by how to operationalize a learning-centered philosophy, which they will carry with them into all of their lessons. Through a process of metacognition about student learning, faculty begin to experience the paradigm shift about which Barr and Tagg (1995) dreamed twenty years ago.

References:

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (Nov-Dec 1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27(6), 12-26.

Bok, D. (2006). Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jones, S. K., Noyd, R. K., & Sagendorf, K. S. (2014). Building a pathway to student learning: A how-to guide to course design. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26, 113-125.


Linking Mindset to Metacognition

By Charity Peak, Ph.D. (U. S. Air Force Academy)

As part of our institution’s faculty development program, we are currently reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Even though the title and cover allude to a pop-psychology book, Dweck’s done a fabulous job of pulling together decades of her scholarly research on mindsets into a layperson’s text.

After announcing the book as our faculty read for the semester, one instructor lamented that she wished we had selected a book on the topic of metacognition. We have been exploring metacognition as a theme this year through our SoTL Circles and our participation in the multi-institutional Metacognitive Instruction Project. My gut reaction was, “But Mindset is about metacognition!” Knowing your own mindset requires significant metacognition about your own thinking and attitudes about learning. And better yet, understanding and recognizing mindsets in your students helps you to identify and support their development of mindsets that will help them to be successful in school and life.

If you haven’t read the book, below are some very basic distinctions between the fixed and growth mindsets that Dweck (2006) discovered in her research and outlines eloquently in her book:

Fixed Mindset Growth Mindset
Intelligence is static. Intelligence can be developed.
Leads to a desire to look smart and therefore a tendency to:

  • avoid challenges
  • give up easily due to obstacles
  • see effort as fruitless
  • ignore useful feedback
  • be threatened by others’ success
 Leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to:

  • embrace challenges
  • persist despite obstacles
  • see effort as a path to mastery
  • learn from criticism
  • be inspired by others’ success

 

What does this mean for metacognition? Dweck points out that people go through life with fixed mindsets without even realizing they are limiting their own potential. For example, students will claim they are “not good at art,” “can’t do math,” “don’t have a science brain.” These mindsets restrict their ability to see themselves as successful in these areas. In fact, even when instructors attempt to refute these statements, the mindsets are so ingrained that they are extremely difficult to overcome.

What’s an instructor to do? Help students have metacognition about their self-limiting beliefs! Dweck offers a very simple online assessment on her website that takes about 5 minutes to complete. Instructors can very easily suggest that students take the assessment, particularly in subjects where these types of fallacious self-limiting attitudes abound, as a pre-emptive way to begin a course. These assessment results would help instructors easily identify who might need the most assistance in overcoming mental barriers throughout the course. Instructors can also make a strong statement to the class early in the semester that students should fight the urge to succumb to these limiting beliefs about a particular subject area (such as art or math).   As Dweck has proven through her research, people can actually become artistic if taught the skills through learnable components (pp. 68-69). Previously conceived notions of talent related to a wide variety of areas have been refuted time and again through research. Instead, talent is likely a cover for hard work, perseverance, and overcoming obstacles. But if we don’t share those insights with students, they will never have the metacognition of their own self-limiting – and frankly mythical – belief systems.

Inspired but wish you knew how to apply it to your own classes? A mere Google search on metacognition and mindset will yield a wealth of resources, but I particularly appreciate Frank Noschese’s blog on creating a metacognition curriculum. He started his physics course by having students take a very simple survey regarding their attitudes toward science. He then shared a short video segment called “Grow Your Brain” from the episode Changing Your Mind (jump to 13:20) in the Scientific American Frontiers series from PBS. Together, he and his students began a journey of moving toward a growth mindset in science. Through an intentional metacognition lesson, he sent a very clear message to his students that “I can’t” would not be tolerated in his course. He set them up for success by demonstrating clearly that everyone can learn physics if they put their minds (or mindsets) to it.

Metacognition about mindsets offers instructors an opportunity to give students the gift of a lifetime – the belief that they can overcome any learning obstacles if they just persevere, that their intelligence is not fixed but actually malleable, that learning is sometimes hard but not impossible! When I reflect on why I am so deeply dedicated to education as a profession, it is my commitment to helping students see themselves using a growth mindset. Helping them to change their mindsets can change their future, and metacognition is the first step on that journey!

 

References:

“Changing the Mind.” (11/21/00). Scientific American Frontiers. Boston: Ched-Angier Production Co. Retrieved from http://chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season11.html

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.

Noschese, F. (September 10, 2012). Metacognition curriculum (Lesson 1 of ?). Retrieved from https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/metacognition-curriculum-lesson-1-of/

 


Metacognition for Purposeful Living

by Charity Peak, U.S. Air Force Academy*

One of my most remarkable professional experiences was teaching a humanities course called “Leading Lives That Matter.” After reading a variety of philosophical texts in an anthology by the same name, students explored the meaning of their lives.  Students identified what type of monuments they would want erected in their honor and wrote their own obituaries.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t a philosophy course; it was actually quite pragmatic.  It also wasn’t a higher level course for juniors or seniors.  And it wasn’t optional.  It was a mandatory requirement for all freshmen before embarking on their educational journeys.  The course was designed to help students reflect on why they were pursuing an education and determine a potential vision for their future after obtaining their degrees.  After all, if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars over several years, why not ask the important questions first?

Many students will say that they are going to school because they want to improve the lives of their families or because they hope to earn more money in a better paying job. But what do faculty do to help students see the grander vision?  What is an instructor’s role in supporting students to understand how their gifts and talents could transform the world around them?  Metacognition requires developing self-awareness and the ability to self-assess. It requires reflection about one’s education and learning – past, present, and future.  Helping students develop metacognitive skills is essential for them to become self-regulated learners with a vision for the future (Zimmerman, 2002).  Faculty, then, are ideally positioned to help students learn to leverage their self-awareness for purposeful living.

Each semester I teach, I encounter a student in distress, desperately struggling to identify how their education can help them develop into the person they wish to become. I am not a trained counselor, yet I often find myself coaching and mentoring these adults – both young and old – to determine how they can utilize their gifts to contribute to the world in some way.  As John F. Kennedy so eloquently shared with us, “One person can make a difference, and every person should try” (http://thinkexist.com).  But so many people seek higher education for such limited reasons – money and jobs.  Instead of being focused on how an education could aid students’ chances of surviving fiscally, what if faculty embraced their role of facilitating greatness?

This insight has transcended all of the settings in which I have taught throughout my career – from elementary school up through adult learning – but it has never been more evident than where I am now. Advising students at a military service academy lends itself to even more critical conversations about purpose and meaning.  These young people are receiving a “free” education, which helps their family’s financial commitment, but at a great price – risking their lives for their country.  It becomes apparent very quickly that what brings students to a military service academy is not what keeps them there.  While all college students go through a bit of an identity crisis, these students will potentially pay the ultimate price for their commitment to their country.  They must be solid in their decision, and they must evolve into an altruistic state much earlier than the average college student.  Money and job security are not enough to get you through a service academy’s rigor, let alone the life of a military officer.  As a faculty member, it is my duty to help these young people make the right choice, one that is good for them and their country.

While these metacognitive insights are quite visible at a military service academy, all faculty should commit to the duty of enabling metacognitive reflection about purposeful living at their own institutions. They should facilitate courses, or even a series of conversations, that encourage students to be metacognitive about who they want to be when they grow up – not what job they want to possess (self-seeking) but how they want to contribute (community building).  In order to venture down this path, however, we as faculty and advisors need to provide ample time and guidance for self-reflection in and out of our courses.  We should help students to gain self-awareness about their gifts and talents so that they can see their collegiate journey as a path toward purposeful living.

If vocation is “the place where deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (Buechner, p. 112), faculty should consider what role they play in helping students to become metacognitive about how their talents lead to majors, which guide careers, and eventually become paths to greatness. By helping our students identify how to intentionally lead lives that matter, we too can benefit vicariously by renewing our spirit to teach.  After all, many of us chose this vocation because of our own yearning to live purposefully.

References:

Buechner, F. (2006). Vocation. In Schwehn, M. R., & Bass, D. C. (Eds.), Leading lives that matter: What we should do and who we should be (pp. 111-12). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory into Practice 41(2): 64-70. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1477457

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Making Thinking Visible

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

In Making Thinking Visible, the authors propose that we must make our students’ thinking visible in order to create places of intellectual stimulation.   To do this, the authors suggest first determining which modes of thinking are necessary for our disciplines or courses.  Then, through a series of research-based thinking routines, we can scaffold and support the development of individuals who can think, plan, create, question, and engage independently as learners.  If you are looking for both inspiration and pragmatic strategies, this book offers ideas that can be applicable to all educational settings and audiences.


Faculty Metacognition of Verbal Questioning

by Charity Peak, U.S. Air Force Academy*

Few faculty would argue that teaching requires asking questions of students, but rarely do instructors consider the what, how, or why of their verbal questioning behavior.  Without metacognition of questioning strategies, this foundational instructional technique can be wasted on habit rather than design.

Faculty question students for a variety of reasons.  Surprisingly, most faculty use verbal questioning as a classroom management technique.  This might look something like a machine gun approach, firing question after question in multiple directions in an effort to keep the class engaged.  See a student dozing? Fire!  Someone checking Facebook? Fire!  Some researchers estimate that teachers ask as many as 120 questions per hour—a question every 30 seconds (Vogler, 2005)!While this strategy may keep students on their toes, it does not necessarily aid student learning.  Often these questions are low level cognitive questions, requiring mainly recall of factual knowledge.  If teachers wish to develop deeper levels of thinking, they must stimulate their students’ own evaluation of the content rather than merely requesting regurgitation of the basics.

At the other end of the spectrum is a master teacher’s approach to instruction that utilizes a specific questioning taxonomy proven to be effective for a variety of disciplines.  Rather than using the run-and-gun approach, this faculty member masterfully leads students from one point to another through a series of thoughtfully derived questions.  He or she might start with the big picture and lead to a specific point or, in contrast, begin with minutia but guide students to one main relevant theme by the end of class.  Watching these instructors in action is often humbling.  However, even these most masterful teachers are often not cognitively aware of the strategies they are using.  They have figured out what works over time, but they likely can’t point to a specific methodology they were using to support their instruction.  Rather than shooting in the dark over many years, faculty would be wise to understand the metacognition behind verbal questioning if they wish to be effective in creating higher order thinking in their students.

Moving beyond simple recall in questioning is certainly good advice for creating more opportunities in thinking, but it’s easier said than done.  Faculty often report feeling uncomfortable trying new questioning strategies.  Asking higher order thinking questions for application, analysis, and synthesis often creates extensive dead air time in the classroom.  More difficult questions require more time to think, often in silence.  Also, students are reluctant to change the very well-established classroom culture of “getting the answer right.”  Based on years of classroom experience, students will often fire answers back, playing the game of “Guess what’s in the teacher’s head.”

Despite these cultural norms, it is possible through metacognition to improve verbal questioning.  Some scholars argue that faculty should understand some of the basic questioning taxonomies that exist and how they influence learning.  For example, asking open-ended versus closed-ended questions will alter the cognitive level of thinking and response (Rothstein & Santana, 2011).  Open-ended questions tend to achieve thinking which is higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Students are required to generate thoughtful answers to questions as opposed to firing one to three word facts.  For example, instead of asking, “What is an adverb?” faculty might ask students to apply their learning by identifying an adverb in a sentence or even creating their own sentences using adverbs.  Better yet, The Right Question Institute (Rothstein & Santana, 2011) encourages faculty to get students to ask their own questions rather than teachers doing all the work.  After all, the person generating the questions is arguably the person who is learning the most.

Other scholars suggest that faculty should consider the sequencing and patterns that are possible when asking questions (Vogler, 2005).  For example, cognitive psychologists often suggest a funneling or convergent questioning technique, which leads students from big picture to details because it mirrors the cognitive functioning of the brain.  However, depending on the subject area, faculty may find success in guiding students from narrow to broad thinking (divergent) by first asking low-level, general questions followed by higher-level, specific questions.  Some disciplines lend themselves to using a circular path to force critical thinking in students.  This pattern asks a series of questions which eventually lead back to the initial position or question (e.g., “What is justice?”).  While students often find these patterns frustrating, it emphasizes to students the value of thinking rather than correctly identifying the right answer.

Ultimately, though, faculty would be wise to spend less energy on the exact strategy they plan to use and instead focus on the main goals of their questioning.  In Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011), the authors propose that the purpose of questioning is really to make our students’ thinking visible by understanding our own expert-level thinking—aka metacognition.   To do this, the authors suggest that instead of complex taxonomies and patterns, we should focus our efforts on three main purposes for questioning in our classes:

  1. Modeling our interest in the ideas being explored
  2. Helping students to construct understanding
  3. Facilitating the illumination of students’ own thinking to themselves (i.e., metacognition)

By asking authentic questions – that is, questions to which the teacher does not already know the answer or to which there are not predetermined answers – instructors create a classroom culture that feels intellectually engaging, fosters a community of inquiry, and allows students to see teachers as learners (31).  Faculty must frame learning as a complex communal activity rather than the process of merely accumulating information.  Thoughtful questioning creates this classroom climate of inquiry, but only if faculty are metacognitive about their purpose and approach to using this critical pedagogical strategy.  Without metacognition, faculty risk relying on the machine gun approach to questioning, wasting valuable class time on recall of factual information rather than elevating and revealing students’ thinking.

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rothstein, D., and Santana, L. (2011). Make just one change: Teach students to ask their own questions. Boston: Harvard Education Press.

Vogler, K. E. (2005). Improve your verbal questioning. The Clearing House, 79(2): 98-103.

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Creating a Metacognitive Movement for Faculty

by Charity Peak, U.S. Air Force Academy*

Faculty often complain that students don’t complete reading assignments.  When students do read, faculty yearn for deeper analysis but can’t seem to get it.  With SAT reading scores reaching a four-decade low (Layton & Brown, 2012) and nearly forty percent of postsecondary learners taking remedial coursework (Bettinger & Long, 2009), it’s not surprising that college students are increasingly unable to meet the reading expectations of professors.  Faculty sense the waning reading abilities of their students, but they struggle to identify how to address the problem.  After all, they weren’t trained to be reading teachers.

In February 2012, a group of faculty gathered for a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Circle at the U.S. Air Force Academy to discuss how to get students to read more critically.  The topic spurred such great interest that an interdisciplinary faculty learning community on Reading Critically was formed to investigate the issue and share strategies to use in the classroom.  What evolved was a collective movement by faculty to become metacognitively aware of why and how they were assigning and apprenticing students to read more critically within their disciplines.

Our first meeting tackled the big question, “What do we want to know about college reading?”  Despite our interdisciplinary nature, we easily identified several common areas of concern:  Compliance (completing reading assignments), Comprehension (understanding what they read), and Critical Analysis.  These Three C’s of College Reading guided our discussions over the next two academic years and eventually led to the creation of a website to assist other faculty members struggling with the same issues.

As academics, our first inclination was to dive into the literature to determine what other institutions had discovered about this issue.  Surely we weren’t the only faculty grappling with these concerns. Not surprisingly, the research literature confirmed that the vast majority of college students do not read assignments ahead of time and do not consider the textbook to be a critical component of learning (Berry et al., 2010).  In fact, a number of studies find that college students only read textbooks about six hours per week (Spinosa et al., 2008), with just 20-30% reading compliance for any given day and assignment (Hobson, 2004).  Faculty hoping to set the stage prior to class and engage learners in meaningful discussions during class must first address reading compliance among students.

Unfortunately, reading is not indicative of comprehension.  The combination of students’ weak reading abilities (particularly marginalized students) and difficult textbook structure produce unskilled learners, which faculty are unprepared to handle.  Hobson (2004) explains that most college teachers – content specialists – do not realize their students are struggling to comprehend assigned texts.  Furthermore, if faculty insist on emphasizing reading as part of their course structure, then “helping students improve their reading skills should be the responsibility of every college-level teacher” (p. 4). Without specific strategies to address the reading needs of students, typically far outside the spectrum of the usual subject area specialist, faculty are rendered helpless in creating deep thinking environments in the classroom.

Because low reading compliance predicts nonparticipation (Burchfield & Sappington, 2000), college faculty must address the issue in an effort to drive deeper learning.  Over the course of two years, our Reading Critically faculty learning community identified and shared several research-based strategies to assist faculty in improving reading compliance, comprehension, and critical analysis.  With no budget and nothing more than a dedication to the cause, we invited speakers to our meetings from our own institution to share how they were apprenticing readers within their courses. We discovered the value of pre-class reading guides, concept mapping, equation dictionaries, and even reading aloud in class. The interdisciplinary connectedness and learning through a common academic concern became a welcome respite from the typical silos that exist in higher education.

By the end of our first year together, our faculty learning community had gathered a wealth of research-based practices that could be implemented in courses across all disciplines.  While each of the group’s participants had learned a great deal, we weren’t sure how to spread the word and continue the movement.  Then, we discovered Carnegie Mellon’s Solve a Teaching Problem website.  Alas, a model for us to follow!  We set out to design a website for faculty to Solve a Reading Problem.   Collaboratively, we created a step-by-step way for faculty to address reading issues they were encountering in their courses:

Step 1: Identify a reading problem

Step 2: Investigate a reason for the problem

Step 3: Initiate a strategy to address the problem

Our learning community pooled resources together by suggesting various problems and solutions along with research-based literature to support our ideas.  Faculty then submitted lesson ideas and classroom strategies they found successful in their own courses to support better reading compliance, comprehension, and critical analysis.  While the website is still very much a work in progress, it represents two years of metacognition around why faculty assign readings and how to maximize those opportunities in the classroom.

Ultimately, our faculty learned that we have a responsibility to be metacognitive about our own teaching practices in order to improve learning.  This group’s commitment to the cause created an interdisciplinary metacognitive movement among our faculty that is still developing.  What metacognitive movement can you lead at your institution?

References:

Berry, T., Cook, L., Hill, N,. & Stevens, K. (2010). An exploratory analysis of textbook usage and study habits: Misperceptions and barriers to success. College Teaching, 59(1), 31-39.

Bettinger, E., & Long, B. (2009). Addressing the needs of underprepared college students: Does college remediation work? Journal of Human Resources, 44(3), 736-771.

Burchfield, C. M., & Sappinton, J. (2000). Compliance with required reading assignments. Teaching of Psychology, 27(1), 58-60.

Hobson, E. H. (2004). Getting students to read: Fourteen tips. IDEA Paper No. 40. Manhattan, KS: The IDEA Center.

Layton, L., & Brown, E. (September 24, 2012). SAT reading scores hit a four-decade low. Washington Post. Washington, D.C.

Spinosa, H., Sharkness, J., Pryor, J. H., & Liu, A. (2008). Findings from the 2007 administration of the College Senior Survey (CSS): National aggregates. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.