Pandemic Pedagogy: Lessons Learned about Fostering Online Metacognitive Conversations to Increase Motivation in Students

by Gina Burkart, Ed.D., Learning Specialist, Clarke University

The 2021 Academic year brought new challenges to education, as teaching and learning quickly moved online. Those who had never taught online received crash courses and hoped for the best. Students found themselves learning either remotely from home or alone in dorm rooms through web conferencing. While online learning offered convenience, the remote and distant nature of the learning often left students and professors feeling isolated from each other. As a professor, I noticed students to be less engaged in discussions and interactions with each other. In online forums, other professors and colleagues complained of the same. As the semester progressed, students’ motivation seemed to plummet.

As the Learning Specialist on campus, I reach out regarding the Academic Concerns raised for students on campus. Academic Concerns are raised by professors through an electronic alert system when students struggle academically or stop attending class. The concerns come to my email and I reach out to the students and cc the students’ advisors and athletic coaches. During the 2020-21 academic year, I observed a large increase in concerns sent for students not submitting assignments, not attending class, and not participating in discussions. Lack of student motivation seemed to underlie many of these trends. As I read articles and discussion boards across the nation, I saw the problem was epidemic.

This blog post describes how I addressed this lack of motivation and engagement by incorporating metacognitive conversations into my work with students for whom Academic Concerns had been raised, and by incorporating similar metacognitive exercises into my Learning Strategies course. The majority of the students in the Learning Strategies course are on academic probation, so they often start with very low motivation. Some had been dismissed but allowed back in to the university on a last chance.

Engaging Struggling Students through Empathy and Metacognitive Conversations

I have been working with college students for over twenty years, and it continues to amaze me how much they crave to be heard. As previously mentioned, the past year, this need for connection and communication was epidemic—so much so that my calendar was full of meetings with students (every 30 minutes) throughout the entire Fall semester. Students wanted to meet and talk—and they often scheduled regular weekly meetings. The other anomaly was they kept the meetings—even on Fridays! These meetings became pivotal to rebuilding their motivation. And, it all began with empathy.

Discussions of the effects of technology on relationships and the importance of empathy in education are not new. Social Psychologist Sherry Turkle has been researching this connection between technology and human relationships since the 1970’s. Most recently she has written about how increased time with technology has negatively impacted our ability to interact with each other. In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle (2015) said “Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It is where we develop the capacity for empathy. . . . And conversation advances self-reflection, the conversations with ourselves . . . . (p. 3).

In meeting with the students, even though it was online, I worked to remove the barrier of technology and make the meeting human by conversing with them as though we were sitting together casually in my office. I asked students how they were doing, the names of their cats and dogs, about their family members, and I told them a little bit about what was going on with me. THEN I asked about what was going on with their courses. I empathized with them a bit and then we moved on to problem solve in a metacognitive conversation. A metacognitive conversation guides students in reflecting on and monitoring their cognitive processes, progress, and performance to build self-efficacy. For example, after empathizing with a student, I asked:

What is causing you to not turn in the assignments?
What might you do about that? How could I help?
What is interfering with you attending class? What might make a difference? How could I help?
How did you study for the test? What is one change you could make?
What if you tried this?
How might I help you?

I found it helpful to ask open-ended questions and let them talk as much as possible. Students really like to be heard. Many are seldom listened to and crave an audience. They also benefit from hearing themselves. Also, I benefit from hearing them talk—as I begin to pick up on themes I can say things like “I heard you say _____ a couple of times. This leads me to believe you tend to _____________.” They often respond with “exactly!” I then offer them some suggestions based on research and show them resources to try.

Together, we form a simple goal for them to implement and accomplish in a week and check on in the next week. I model it and practice it with them. Also, I connect the struggling student with a student Academic Coach who is trained by me. They can continue to work on the goal and engage in further metacognitive conversations. This type of follow up and academic mentoring between students fosters motivation and metacognition, as evidenced by increased class participation, improved GPAs, and attendance.

As Turkle (2021) shared in her latest book The Empathy Diaries “ . . . only shared vulnerability and human empathy allow us to truly understand one another” (xix). Once the students felt heard and understood, they were willing to work with me to solve their problems. In knowing someone else invested in them, they were willing to invest in themselves.

Infusing Metacognition in a Learning Strategies Course

I needed to revisit this lesson in my own teaching in the Spring when I also noticed a lack of student motivation in my own courses—even with the new infused strategies. And, it wasn’t that the students were confused. Over and over, they told me that the course was simple and easy to use and made sense. They demonstrated the ability to find materials and understanding of how to access materials. Yet, assignments were not being turned in. As motivation dwindled, important curriculum would not be studied and articles would go unread. Deadlines continued to be missed. The online chats I had set up with peer mentors for participation were not being attended. Engagement was dismal and grades were plummeting. So, although I already had incorporated some metacognitive strategies into the course, at midterm I attempted to infuse what was working with one/one meetings with students.

This effort began with midterm conferences. I always have had students evaluate themselves on the goals they set at the beginning of the semester and go over how they are progressing in the course. Students have always been amazingly honest. When I did this during the spring 2021 semester, they openly and apologetically shared they were not motivated and were not looking at the curriculum or submitting work. So, we focused on what was causing the lack of motivation.

Since the course curriculum (College Study Strategies) had all the resources they needed to solve the motivation problems, we revisited the resources in the course that they had missed—such as articles, videos, and power points on motivation, procrastination, time management, and so on. We read some together and set goals. I also reopened the deadlines so they could revisit the curriculum they needed and complete the discussions (now that they had purpose and motivation). They admitted they had known where the resources were and how to access them—they said they just had not had motivation to do it. But, after we had discussed how the resources applied to their situation and would help, and set specific goals, they began to appreciate a reason and need to access the materials.

To reinforce the goals set and encourage usage and follow through of the materials, I allowed extra credit to make up missed online chats related to the missed curriculum if students scheduled meetings to discuss the curriculum with an Academic Coach. The Academic Coach reported the meetings to me. The results of behavior changes after midterm conferences were significant. For example, at midterm there were 15 Fs in the course out of 28 students. When I submitted final grades, there were only 5 Fs. One F had changed to an A and 2 Fs had become Bs.

This experience led me to again appreciate the power of metacognitive conversations with students. Specifically, it reinforced how empathy can motivate students—even through technology and in a pandemic.

References

Turkle, S. (2021). The empathy diaries. New York: Penguin Press.

Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming conversations: The power of talking in a digital age. New York: Penguin Press.

Image from: https://www.connecttocommunicate.com/

Improving Metacognition By Understanding Cognitive Bias

by Dana Melone, Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School

This school year, I had the unique opportunity to continue to teach the Psychological Sciences as well as a course on Brain Based Study Techniques. As part of the psychology curriculum, I have always had a unit that taught students the various cognitive biases as well as how they impact their lives. In talking with my Study Technique students this year and reading their reflections in class on our lessons and how they are applying them to their classes, I noticed a common trend. They are making these cognitive errors in their own thinking and it was hurting their studying and learning.

I took this bit of anecdotal evidence and had students examine their own biases after their quizzes, exams, and course interactions. My hope was that this process would help them develop awareness of their own biases in their thinking and in turn help guide their future thinking and behaviors. It is not enough to just be metacognitive, but students must also be aware of when they might be relying on a biased interpretation of their studying and learning. The hope is that students will learn to recognize that bias has influenced their thinking and make adjustments as needed.

Targeted Cognitive Biases

There are over 50 cognitive biases that psychologists consider when they examine thinking, but I chose 3 of the biases to have my students examine:

Cognitive Dissonance: Cognitive dissonance occurs when we have a belief and we in turn do something that goes against that belief. That produces internal cognitive discomfort for us, so we develop an excuse to make ourselves feel better. Excuses can be truthful but they can also be non truths we tell ourselves to get over the discomfort. The most common way I saw this occurring with my students was after doing poorly on an exam.The students knew they should be getting help when needed and studying in the right way. When they did not do that thing, they often claimed that the teacher disliked them, they did not have time to use better study techniques, or the test was so hard no one could have passed it.
Self-Serving Bias: This occurs when we attribute good things that happen to us as a result of our own actions and in turn, negative things that happen to us are attributed to an external cause. I saw this with my students in our discussions as well. When students succeeded on a quiz or test they were almost always attributing that to their study method, understanding of the material, and ease of the test. When they did poorly, they talked about the test having things on it they did not study, or that teacher purposely created hard exams, etc.
Overconfidence: This bias occurs when we think we know more than we really do. We overestimate our ability on something. It can occur multiple ways, but my focus was post exam. Students receive a quiz or test score and really think they are about to get a great score. Instead, their score was much lower than they were expecting. I would often see students talk about this in their reflections. They would really think they knew the material and were shocked that they did not score well on the exam.

Overcoming the Biases

Once I realized that students were making these types of cognitive errors, I taught a lesson on the errors and we went over various examples. I then added an analysis of these biases to their weekly reflections of their classwork, test, and quiz outcomes.

Cognitive Dissonance: Think about cognitive dissonance and the three phases: I have a belief, I do something that goes against that belief, I develop an excuse to relieve the discomfort. This class is all about using correct learning, studying, and communicating techniques to improve our learning outcomes. This knowledge about effective learning represents our beliefs. In reflecting on your week, did you engage in behaviors that did not align with those beliefs and then fall victim to this bias? If so, explain. Then describe how you will help yourself overcome this in the future. If you feel you did not fall victim to this bias, provide commentary on how you overcame it with an example from your week.
Self-Serving Bias: Examine your reflection of the week. Choose a positive element from your reflection and explain how others helped to contribute to your success. Choose a negative element from your reflection and explain what you personally could have done differently to help change the outcome.
Overconfidence: Did you have any tests or quizzes this week that produced a lower score than you were expecting? If so, what could you have done differently in your preparation that may have helped you avoid overconfidence?

The goal of adding these questions was to help students think about ways their own cognitive errors may be contributing to their studying, learning, and assessment scores. Metacognition is best when we also incorporate awareness of possible bias and errors in our cognitions. My hope is that students will think about these biases as they move through high school and life, and that in turn they will use that thinking to become better learners in all their courses.

Why Metacognition?

By: Melissa Terlecki, PhD, Cabrini University PA

“Learning about myself wasn’t easy. Metacognition took way more work than all my other classes, but I learned so much about myself that I hope to apply in the future” – Anonymous Student Quote.

The Question at Hand

What do we want our students to get out of college? Does it extend beyond content – to include skills to potentially last a lifetime? I believe so, and argue that self-awareness and metacognition development should be part of what every college student achieves.

Self-awareness involves understanding one’s strengths and areas for improvement; it’s recognizing how we grow best and optimizing our potential. Metacognition is more than just “thinking about thinking” – it’s applying that self-knowledge to better oneself. Skills and strategies related to self-awareness and metacognition may not come naturally – or easily. Explicitly promoting them both through coursework in college may be a start.

Below are short overviews of two initiatives I have led at my institution, along with some student and faculty feedback and a brief personal reflections. I encourage you to think about ways to incorporate self-awareness and metacognition.

Metacognition in Leadership

I embarked on a journey to include metacognition as part of a Leadership program based on the Social Change Model of Leadership Development. Self-awareness is core to living and leading up to one’s greatest potential in strengths-based development. Metacognition, based on this model, is focused on building positive change in society as a leader at any level. Thus, I built a course around developing self-awareness while linking recognition of one’s skills to leadership potential. My “Metacognition in Leadership” course is open to any of our students, and although part of a Leadership minor, many seek to take it, despite the rumors of the workload.

Metacognition is built in every activity and assignment and simulates a flipped classroom. Course feedback shows that students are challenged yet do really well in the course, including self-measured improvements in metacognition. Grades are high and students argue that metacognition should be taught to everybody.

“Why is this not taught in grade-school? I would’ve done much better…” – Michelle Brzoska, Student.

“I believe for me it was challenging to dig deep into my traits and values. We just do things and say things without thinking about them. However, this course pushed me to consider those traits and reflect on them. Most of the time we do not have the time to reflect on ourselves and I believe sometimes it leads to false perceptions about ourselves.” – Maria Khan, Student.

Metacognition in First-Year Experience

I also sought to embed self-awareness in first-year experience (FYE) programming, as we know self-awareness of interests and strengths can lead to persistence (and retention) in academic settings. In 2020, our FYE programming was about to undergo revision. I was asked to step in to provide a metacognitive framework for students’ college success, as realizing their best path to learning and to their eventual major/s is the goal of such a course.

Students learned about topics such as self-regulation, emotional intelligence, motivation and achievement, among other areas, which were directly connected to student self-assessments. Faculty utilized regular reflections and feedback, with weekly check-ins and academic advising. Course feedback from both instructors and students was favorable: students enjoyed learning about themselves and faculty appreciated this, yet commented on the challenging nature of teaching metacognition (given faculty teaching our FYE course are from all different disciplines):

“Content was good but challenging to take on. Students got a lot out of it in only one semester. Faculty need more training in metacognition” – Anonymous Faculty Quote.

Reflections on Interventions

Adding metacognitive content AND pedagogy takes work. And time. And a lot of grading and feedback. It is an iterative process and is not static or traditional by any means. Students may resist active engagement that forces them beyond their comfort zones in passive learning, and especially self-awakening. This is a different type of learning than students are used to or expect at the college level, perhaps given their previous experiences at K-12. It takes more effort on both the student’s and the instructor’s parts.

Both students and faculty need training in metacognition: the pedagogy, the routine self-reflection and feedback. I provide metacognition training/workshops to institutions for both faculty and staff. I have seen and heard the impact these techniques can have on teaching and learning. For metacognition to stick, however, it needs to be more than quick tricks – metacognition is a “lifestyle” change in pedagogy for teachers. It has to be a new way of learning and self-discovery for learners. Again, this is not easy, but is well worth the effort, as benefits of self-awareness extend beyond the classroom to our relationships, our jobs, and our lives.

“I think it’s important for people to learn metacognition because of the awareness and understanding you get from it. Once you learn more about it, it’ll be easier to control your emotions and be able to comprehend how others feel” – Orlyany Sanchez, Student.

“I hope I can keep reflecting after this course is over. It has already changed how I think and feel about other people” – Anonymous Student Quote.

“It is extremely vital that we learn about metacognition to understand ourselves better so we can interact with others well. There were times where I was not able to connect with others because I was not able to connect with myself. But this [course] showed me the importance of knowing oneself as well as applying to my future” – Maria Khan, Student.

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Note: Feel free to contact the author, Melissa Terlecki, for more information on course materials and/or metacognition workshop availability to bring to your school! (mst723@cabrini.edu)

Note 2: Catch my talk on metacognition at the 2021 American Psychological Association virtual conference as the Harry Kirke Wolfe Lecturer! (12-14 August; see https://convention.apa.org/)

Learning Philosophies of Teachers and Students: Two Neglected Metacognitive Catalysts for Success

by Dr. Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities (retired)

Hmmm… COVID year… what a trip. If I slept through it, there were nightmares—lots of ’em. Where did I leave off last April (Nuhfer, 2020)? Oh yeah, we ended with a question: “How might teaching students to write their learning philosophies improve their learning?” Well, OK…let’s continue that… by first realizing that professors’ teaching philosophies are their learning philosophies, and those who do write them come to recognize how keeping such a written record enhances success in teaching.

Philosophies are reflective; they record the results of a metacognitive conversation with oneself. The results articulate the plan for practice disclosing what one wants to do, how one chooses to do it, and how to know the chosen practices’ impact. Philosophies focus on learning about process, which is too rarely the stuff of college education, where the emphasis is on learning content—the disciplines’ products. Even “student-centered-learning” structures too seldom involve directly teaching students to be reflective about how to learn.

$Illustration of components (thinking, teaching, learning) in the fractal generator for faculty and students (by Ed Nuhfer)$

Six critical components of a teaching philosophy appeared in the graphic of the fractal generator above (and also shared my April 2020 blog). An informed teaching/learning philosophy considers all six components. Three crucial components describe internal strengths enlisted during learning: affect, levels of thinking, and metacognition, and three more are competencies mainly built from external sources: content, pedagogy, and assessment.

For nearly twenty years, I led week-long faculty development retreats in which each faculty arrived with a written one-page document that they had constructed as their teaching philosophy. A faculty member rarely arrived at a retreat with a written philosophy that addressed more than three of the six components.

Through the retreats, participants revisited and edited their philosophy a bit each day. Our final exercise of the retreat was sharing the revised philosophies in groups and polishing them more for use. No participant left without awareness of the vital role that each of the six components played. Participants’ written philosophies of practice were probably their most valuable tangible takeaway.

Why written philosophies?

Consider the advantage a written plan confers to constructing anything complex. Architectural design requires written blueprints and strategies because the challenge is just too complex to address well by acting spontaneously from what one can carry around in one’s head. Construction contractors avoid working without a written plan because doing so produces disappointing results.

Learning and teaching are challenges as complex as any construction project. A teaching/learning philosophy acts as the equivalent of an architectural design plan and encompasses the big picture of what we intend to do. Students need learning philosophies for the same reason professors need them, but acting spontaneously without any written philosophy is probably the norm in higher education. How many of your students approach learning with a written plan?

The six components that are so essential for professors to consider also confer similar value to students. It really is up to professors to mentor students to craft their first informed learning philosophies. An excellent way to start students toward constructing their personal learning philosophies is to give each a nearly blank paper with the six components’ names at the top.

Beginners must begin to incorporate the six as a checklist by asking self: “Where are awareness of affect, levels of thinking, etc. in my practice?” After they internalize these six through at least a year of practice, they become cognizant of how all six are interconnected, and awareness occurs that developing one component awakens new insights about the others’ roles. Some authors of philosophies later employ visualization and supplement their philosophies with graphics.

Years ago, the fractal generator shown above became my graphical philosophy. I produced fifty articles under the title “Educating in Fractal Patterns…” for The National Teaching and Learning Forum, as that graphic philosophy helped me more deeply understand and grow from my experiences. Those who maintain a written philosophy and reflect on it regularly will almost surely have similar “Aha moments.”

Essential Components

Let’s see how we can help students become reflective and increase their capacity to learn from the six components.

Affect

We can help students to appreciate the importance of affect by reflecting upon whether the affective mode in which they find themselves is “I have to do this” or “I want to do this.” (See assignment shared in Nuhfer 2014.) Wanting to learn enlists more brainpower to drive learning. Finding ways to make learning fun for ourselves, to want to do it—such as making a party of it by studying with others, can become our most valuable asset. Quantitative courses elicit the most negative affective responses from students (Uttl, White, Morin, 2013). Yet, the book I recommend as the most inspirational book ever written to learn to reverse negative feelings for specific content is Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing. A particular quote I like from p. 11 follows: “When some people ask, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’ what they are really asking is ‘When am I ever going to value this?‘”

Pedagogy

Teachers employ “active learning” pedagogies (Univ Wyoming resources) to increase learning through engagement. One principle underlies all “active learning:” the more of the brain invoked during learning, the better the learning. But another principle is seldom addressed: the longer the time spent in learning with significant portions of the brain activated, the greater the understanding.

Students can apply the same principles to enlist more of their brains. Writing to learn along with reading invokes more of the brain than only reading to learn. Revision of written products, multiple revisions, is one of the most powerful learning strategies known, at least as powerful as any modality on the “Active Learning Spectrum” linked above. For developing their learning philosophies, instructors should assign students to write, revise, and record at the end of each revision how doing revision improved their understanding. Learning to enlist active learning by writing to learn for oneself does not require doing a thesis. Simply writing and revising how to solve a word problem or an evaluative assignment offers sufficient capital through which to develop an appreciation for the power of writing to learn.

Content

Writing (Didn’t we just mention its power?) a knowledge survey builds understanding of the course content that faculty quickly appreciate (Nuhfer & Knipp, 2003). Watch these two very short videos to get a sense of what knowledge surveys are and their impact.

Screen shot of Dr. Ed Nuhfer talking about what knowledge surveys are and their benefits — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENW51282Bwk

screenshot of opening slide stating "Faculty reflect on the value of knowledge surveys" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWbw8buSXIo

With each knowledge survey item that a professor writes, they should follow that with the thought, “What do students need to know to respond with understanding?” That will lead to writing several additional items to build the scaffold needed to address the former item. While students lack the expertise to construct course-based knowledge surveys from scratch, instructors can direct students to share in scaffolding their learning. They can let students build a knowledge survey in small pieces by frequent assignments such as: “Given the content we covered today, replace the knowledge survey’s items about that content with your own authored items to address the equivalent content.” An additional brief helpful exercise to help students to build their own learning philosophy can be: “How did writing your own knowledge survey items change your understanding of the content material? Why might writing such items be a useful learning strategy for learning in other subjects and courses?”

Levels of Thinking

We have already covered developmental levels in a prior post (Nuhfer, 2014), and we showed the connection between levels of thinking and affect (Nuhfer, 2018). Nearly all students misperceive becoming educated as learning skills and content. They have heard of “critical thinking” or “higher-order thinking,” but almost none can really articulate what either looks like. They will not know about such developmental levels of thinking unless the faculty teach them. We earlier provided a module with which instructors can do so (Nuhfer & Bhavsar, 2014). If you are unfamiliar with such developmental models and levels of thinking, which is likely, go through the same module for yourself. Then, guide students through it.

Metacognition

Is it surprising that this component should receive a mention on this blog? What would be truly surprising is if any personal learning philosophy sentence was not a product of metacognitive reflection. A written philosophy archives the portions its writer valued that came out of purposefully directed conversations with self. It expresses the current state of the author’s focus at a specific stage of development. It will change with additional experiences and reflections.

Assessment

The assessment portion of the philosophy likely considers three questions. The first is “Did I really practice my philosophy—did I do what I planned to do?” The second is “What happened as a result?” The third is “Based on what I learned from what happened, what will I focus on next?”

When one develops the ability for “fractal thinking,” one is constantly considering what would result if a pattern of action taken at one scale were enacted at different scales. If these three assessment queries give valuable substance to building an individual’s expertise, what might result if we nurtured such happening at the scale of a program or an institution?

For years, I had hoped to convince an institution to replace the practice of using student ratings scores as the highest stakes criterion for the annual review of instructors with professors’ written philosophies instead. Review committees would examine each philosophy and ask correlatives to the three questions above. It seems easy to see why encouraging metacognitive reflection on improving practice offers a superior option to thinking instead of raising student ratings’ scores. Sigh! I’m still hoping for just one institution to try it.

In summary, writing, revisiting, and revising learning philosophies scaffold us to higher proficiency. Addressing the same six components offers professors and students common ground on which to come together to understand learning and the process of becoming educated.

Promoting Learning Integrity Through Metacognition and Self-Assessment

by Lauren Scharff, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy*

When we think of integrity within the educational realm, we typically think about “academic integrity” and instances of cheating and plagiarism. While there is plenty of reason for concern, I believe that in many cases these instances are an unfortunate end result of more foundational “learning integrity” issues rather than deep character flaws representing lack of moral principles and virtues.

Learning integrity occurs when choices for learning behaviors match a learner’s goals and self-beliefs. Integrity in this sense is more like a state of wholeness or integrated completeness. It’s hard to imagine this form of integrity without self-assessment; one needs to self-assess in order to know oneself. For example, are one’s actions aligned with one’s beliefs? Are one’s motivations aligned with one’s goals? Metacognition is a process by which we gain awareness (self-assess) and use that awareness to self-regulate. Thus, through metacognition, we can more successfully align our personal goals and behaviors, enhancing our integrity.

Metacognitive Learning and Typical Challenges

When students are being metacognitive about their learning, they take the time to think about (bring into awareness) what an assignment or task will require for success. They then make a plan for action based on their understanding of that assignment as well their understanding of their abilities and current context. After that, they begin to carry out that plan (self-regulation). As they do so, they take pauses to reflect on whether or not their plan is working (self-awareness/self-assessment). Based on that interim assessment, they potentially shift their plan or learning strategies in order to better support their success at the task at hand (further self-regulation).

That explanation of a metacognitive learning may sound easy, but if that were the case, we should see it happening more consistently. As a quick example, imagine a student is reading a text and then realizes that they are several pages into the assignment and they don’t remember much of what they’ve read (awareness). If they are being metacognitive, they should come up with a different strategy to help them better engage with the text and then use that alternate strategy (self-regulation). Instead, many students simply keep reading as they had been (just to get the assignment finished), essentially wasting their time and short-cutting their long-term goals.

Why don’t most students engage in metacognition? There are several meaningful barriers to doing so:

Pausing to self-assess is not a habitual behavior for them
It takes time to pause and reflect in order to build awareness
They may not be aware of effective alternate strategies
They may avoid alternate strategies because they perceive them to take more time or effort
They are focused on “finishing” a task rather than learning from it
They don’t realize that some short-term reinforcements don’t really align with their long-term goals

These barriers prevent many students engaging in metacognition, which then makes it more likely that their learning choices are 1) not guided by awareness of their learning state and 2) not aligned with their learning goals and/or the learning expectations of the instructor. This misalignment can then lead to a breakdown of learning integrity with respect to the notion of “completeness” or “wholeness.”

For example, students often claim that they want to develop expertise in their major in order to support their success in their future careers. They want to be “good students.” But they take short-cuts with their learning, such as cramming or relying on example problem workout steps, both of which lead to illusions of learning rather than deep learning and long-term retention. These actions are often rewarded in the short term by good grades on exams and homework assignments. Unfortunately, if they engage in short-cutting their learning consistently enough, when long-term learning is expected or assessed, some students might end up feeling desperate and engage in blatant cheating.

Promoting Learning Integrity by Providing Support for Self-Assessment and Metacognition

Promoting learning integrity will involve more than simply encouraging students to pause, self-reflect, and practice self-regulation, i.e. engage in metacognition. As alluded to by the list of barriers above, being metacognitive requires effort, which also implies that learning integrity requires effort. Like many other self-improvement behaviors, developing metacognition requires multiple opportunities to practice and develop into a way of doing things.

Fortunately, as instructors we can help provide regular opportunities for reflection and self-assessment, and we can share possible alternative learning strategies. Together these should promote metacognition, leading to alignment of goals and behaviors and to increased learning integrity. The Improve with Metacognition website offers many suggestions and examples used by instructors across the disciplines and educational levels.

To wrap up this post, I highlight knowledge surveys as one way by which to promote the practice and skill of self-assessment within our courses. Knowledge surveys are shared with students at the start of a unit so students can use them to guide their learning and self-assess prior to the summative assessment. Well-designed knowledge survey questions articulate granular learning expectations and are in clear alignment with course assessments. (Thus, their implementation also supports teaching integrity!)

When answering the questions, students rate themselves on their ability to answer the question (similar to a confidence rating) as opposed to fully writing out the answer to the question. Comparisons can be made between the confidence ratings and actual performance on an exam or other assessment (self-assessment accuracy). For a more detailed example of the incorporation of knowledge surveys into a course, as well as student and instructor reflections, see “Supporting Student Self-Assessment with Knowledge Surveys” (Scharff, 2018).

By making the knowledge surveys a meaningful part of the course (some points assigned, regular discussion of the questions, and sharing of students’ self-assessment accuracy), instructors support the development of self-assessment habits, which then provide a foundation to metacognition, and in turn, learning integrity.

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

Learning. Design. Analytics. Post 4: Metacognitive Design To Support Metacognitive Learning Within Virtual Learning Environments

By Yianna Vovides, PhD and Marie Selvanadin, MS, MBA, Georgetown University

We see the process of design and development of products as very much a metacognitive awareness process given that designers and developers are engaged in cycles of reflection, planning, monitoring, and evaluation with every prototype produced. This is especially the case when embarking on the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) because of the fact that the environment itself needs to enable and support engagement toward varied types of learning and meet the needs of both instructors and students. In this blog post we discuss the design and development process of a VLE, a web-based case analysis app developed by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. We highlight how the metacognitive design process of planning, monitoring, and evaluation supports a reflective practice that enables metacognitive learning.

Context: Ethical Decision Making for Global Managers (GUX)

The case analysis app was designed to augment case-based teaching and learning techniques by providing multiple ways for students to reflect on their thinking in relation to how they make decisions. In collaboration with a faculty member and program director, we approached the design of the app by contextualizing it within the Ethical Decision Making for Global Managers professional certificate offered via edx. The main goal that the app was designed to support learners in achieving is the following: “how to analyze real-world ethical dilemmas using multiple frameworks, considering many possible choices, and selecting a “best choice” option.” The courses in the certificate program focused on rules- and results-based decision-making processes.

Teaching decision-making, let alone ethical decision-making, is not easily done and doing so online, especially within an open self-paced learning environment, is even more challenging (Sternberg, n. d.).

Sternberg emphasizes that:

“[l]earning how to reason ethically is a dialectical, back-and-forth process. Simply delivering content through lectures and readings are at best supplementary forms of instruction. The primary form of instruction needs to be interactive because students need to present ideas, get feedback on those ideas, and then try out re-formed ideas that themselves will be subject to further modification.”

With this in mind, we knew that we needed to design the app in a way that enabled individuals to engage in a back-and-forth process that could support ethical reasoning. We realized early on that in order to make the interaction within the case analysis app meaningful to individual learners, the app itself needed to provide guidance at both the cognitive and metacognitive levels. Therefore, we needed to consider how the app itself could “speak” to the learner. In other words, what interaction could we design as part of the app to provide feedback to the learners along the way so help them reflect about their decision-making process and how they were using the rules-based and results based ethical reasoning approaches.

Our collaboration with the faculty and program director in relation to this project took place over two years, so we had time to understand and internalize the ethical decision-making framework that was being used in the courses which focused on rules-oriented and results-oriented approaches. For enabling both cognitive and metacognitive interactions within the app, we used the reflective sensemaking model (Vovides and Inman, 2016) to guide our design decisions. Sensemaking as a pedagogical approach to teach ethics has been gaining attention (Brandt and Popejoy, 2020).

The following section breaks down the design of the app in relation to the reflective sensemaking process. It includes screenshots taken from the web-based app itself using a case study being used in the Ethical Decision-Making for Global Managers professional certificate available on edx.

Design: Reflective Sensemaking

The reflective sensemaking process begins by asking a learner to explore a real-world case. The example we show in the screenshots is related to Policing Terrorism.

The learner is encouraged to read the case multiple times. A learner has the option to highlight and/or annotate parts of the case and to determine whether they want their annotations to remain private (visible only to them) or made public (visible to others interacting with the same case).

The learner is then asked a yes/no question about the key issue described in the case study In the Policing Terrorism case study, they are asked whether private high tech companies should develop and enforce their own standards to police terrorism on the internet.

Once the learner selects either yes or no, they are asked to write down the reasoning for their decision.

After this initial decision, the learner is presented with their own highlights and annotations from their reading of the case and asked to identify how important each highlight and annotation was in contributing to their decision.

4. Then, the learner is shown a summary of where their highlights/annotations fall within the Rules and Results decision-making framework. They are asked to consider the following questions:

- Which framework are you most aligned with? Perhaps you are closer to the middle.
- What values and assumptions did you bring to your fact selection and decision?

In addition, the app provides learners the option to see their highlights and annotations in context and explore how the instructor engaged with the same case. This aims to reduce the feeling of anonymity and isolation. We also see it as a way to enable further exploration of the case itself.

The learner is then asked to consider whether a rules- or results-based framework would lead to a “best choice” decision in the case they read. They are asked to use a slider to represent the degree to which they would prioritize rules- or results-based factors and then to explain their reasoning.

By allowing students to take the time to reflect on their learning and decision making, we believe that they are given the opportunity to think about their own thinking (which in simplistic terms is what metacognition is all about) and giving them an opportunity to reflect on their learning.

As a final step in the reflective sensemaking process, learners are asked the same yes/no question and given another opportunity to either keep the same decision or change it. In either case, they are asked to explain their reasoning. The focus in this particular example is related to ethical reasoning; however, the approach could be used for other types of reasoning.

Model: Where Learning Design and Analytics Align

This case analysis app presents one model for how learning design and analytics can come together to create a unique experience where reflection of the learning process is prioritized. Reflection is critical in developing metacognitive awareness (Schraw, 1998). We designed the app so that learners can go through multiple cases as they move through the Ethical Decision Making for Global Managers professional certificate program. Once learners complete one case then they continue to have access to it for review purposes in the app’s dashboard (shown here). Encouraging review of one’s completed cases enables learners to become more aware of how they reasoned through that case.

To align the learning design and analytics we began with a conceptual data model which we are still refining (see Sensemaking Process with Identified Variables diagram). We took the reflective sensemaking process and have started mapping the variables that could serve as proxies to better understand how learners are making sense of the case they are engaging with. We considered the number of different actions that a learner takes when reading the case itself. We also take into account whether the learner goes back and reviews the case, and more. This type of mapping of the data to the learning process will enable us to make the learner journey visible to the learner because we will be able to create a visualization of the reflective sensemaking process as they engage with the cases.

Therefore, our next step is to create the visualization of the sensemaking process for each learner who goes through a case that will be available as part of the learner dashboard in the case analysis app. Given that a learner could go through multiple cases, the visualization would also represent the learner’s sensemaking process across cases and over time. We envision that the dashboard itself could then become an active learning space that would support further metacognitive awareness as it would enable learners to interrogate how they reasoned through multiple cases over time.

Our Reflection so Far in relation to using metacognitive design to support metacognitive learning

Schematic of a spiral illustrating loops of before, during, after — Figure 2. Spiral – Before, during, after Model

To design a learner dashboard as an active learning space requires an adaptive learning design process so that we can account for changes from one iteration to the next as we gain a better understanding of how learners are engaging with the app. Given that adaptive learning design is a process that strategically modifies designs based on emerging learner needs (Bower, 2016), we incorporated from the start of this project reflective pauses to become even more aware of our own iterative approach. We planned what we would do before we developed a prototype, during our prototyping process, and after when conducting formative evaluations. Yes, it has taken two years so far!

The app launched in 2020 and we are currently in the process of collecting learner data from the platform and surveys to help us solidify some of the functionality that would be part of the active learning dashboard. We are also investigating options to introduce social learning opportunities as part of the active learning dashboard to reduce the sense of isolation and anonymity. Want to learn more, contact us!

References

Bower, M. (2016). A Framework for Adaptive Learning Design in a Web-Conferencing Environment. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, (1).

Brandt, L., & Popejoy, L. (2020). Use of sensemaking as a pedagogical approach to teach clinical ethics: an integrative review. International Journal of Ethics Education, 1-15.

Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional science, 26(1-2), 113-125.

Sternberg, R. J. (n.d.). Developing ethical reasoning and/or ethical decision making | IDEA. IDEA. Retrieved January 10, 2021, from https://www.ideaedu.org/idea-notes-on-learning/developing-ethical-reasoning-and-or-ethical-decision-making/

Vovides, Y., & Inman, S. (2016). Elusive learning—using learning analytics to support reflective sensemaking of ill-structured ethical problems: A learner-managed dashboard solution. Future Internet, 8(2), 26.

Learning. Design. Analytics. Post 3: Scripting Asynchronous Lectures: A Metacognitive Process

By Eleri Syverson, MA, Joe King, Yiran Sun, MA, Yianna Vovides, PhD, Georgetown University

In this post we’ll look at the process of scripting in the context of metacognitive awareness by walking through the processes and considerations we recommend for scripting. When we talk about scripting in this case, we are referring to the writing process of reflecting on a subject and drafting — as a word-for-word script, or at minimum a very detailed outline — a lecture to be delivered to a class of students. Most of our own experience with scripting is in developing asynchronous lectures for online courses (or similar online format) that are either entirely new or are being redesigned into an online format from an existing face-to-face course, and this is our focus in this post. However, many of the principles and practices we consider can be useful in designing face-to-face presentations and interactions too. We first address the conundrum of whether to script, and then we offer a script of our own in relation to how we guide faculty through the process of scripting.

To Script or Not to Script? Script, script, and script some more….

When we first meet with an instructor who is working to design an online course, one of the things we talk about is whether they have any plans to develop new content, such as a video, audio or text lecture, for the course. For the most part, the answer is yes. We recommend the instructor script out their lecture materials before we begin to record or build them for an online course. This might sound like the last thing an instructor wants to do for several reasons:

Perhaps they have been delivering lectures on this topic, maybe even for this very course, for many years. They may know these lectures very well, even without notes.
Perhaps they rely on spontaneity to keep the experience fresh and therefore fear they would lose that if they scripted.
Perhaps the time and effort commitment required to produce scripts seems daunting.

While these are valid concerns, a well-designed script will not take away from their inherent expertise on the subject or remove those elements of personality that make their lectures engaging. In fact, we emphasize that the value of scripting is less in the final product, but in the process itself which can help them plan, monitor, and evaluate their approach to each lecture anew.

During the design and development process for online courses we approach scripting, especially when working from existing materials or lectures, as a metacognitive act that relies on planning, monitoring, and evaluation about one’s own areas of expertise. By approaching scripting as a process that supports instructors in deepening their metacognitive awareness of how they teach and how their students learn, we encourage increased efficacy, coherence, and accessibility of lectures. By the end of the design and development process, instructors have accounted for the thinking of their students as well as their own and in fact have developed a lasting metacognitive practice.

A Script of our Own

In the first blog post of this series Yianna Vovides described a simple model we share with instructors to recognize the iterative process of design (see figure 1). When we think of the Before phase, we think of pre-production efforts, for During, we think of production efforts and for After, we think of post-production. Scripting is part of our pre-production efforts.

This section highlights the script we use in our process to guide instructors and we explain the thinking behind the process, our reasoning.

Script

Reasoning

If you are not sure whether or not to script your materials, you might start with a test recording to see how the lecture goes without a script.

In our process, we will often give faculty a rough cut of this initial test recording to give the instructor a chance to review this initial product and go over any concerns with them.

A common observation from instructors after this initial test recording is that lecturing to a camera or microphone can be a very different experience than lecturing to a classroom full of students.

In the classroom, students nod, ask questions, and make facial expressions that signal as to their engagement and understanding. Even the lack of such signals in the classroom would, itself, be a significant sign about the lecture, your students, or something else in the environment that is impacting your teaching.

This presents a unique opportunity to reflect on one’s own thinking while teaching, and to reflect on the experience of the learner. When lecturing in class, which moments typically brought about questions (or even were confusing to you as you learned it the first time)? Which examples do you find particularly impactful? What is essential to understanding the material? Scripting allows instructors to address these questions and plan the presentation of materials in the most helpful and more meaningful way, because it allows instructors’ time to reflect on both past and future deliveries of a lecture.

Through this writing process of reflection, planning, and drafting lectures as text, instructors can carefully consider meaning they intend to leave with their students, and work to ensure that their learning goals for a particular lecture are met. Writing itself is applied metacognition. “Every act of writing is an act of meaning production. Reading, re-reading, reflecting, and reviewing — processes traditionally associated with writing — serve as monitoring strategies to ensure that the production of meaning is in conformance with the author’s goals for writing…” (Hacker, Keener, Kircher 157). In scripting a lecture, instructors are not merely replicating a previously delivered lecture, but improving and adapting it for a new format. Keep in mind the following tips (and their reasonings) for writing for that new format.

Script	Reasoning
Keep your script brief and connected to learning objectives.	Remember that attention spans behave differently in the online environment than they might in face-to-face conversations. An ideal length for videos in online learning environments is 6-10 minutes, which comes out to about 2-4 pages of written text, single spaces. Audio only lectures can typically be longer, around 40 minutes to an hour. Consider the length of a typical Youtube video vs the length of a typical podcast.
Identify key terms or questions in advance. Include graphics in your script to illustrate key points. Please include the references! Once you send us the draft, we will then discuss with you how we pull all the pieces together.	By following these recommendations, post-production will be easier. It can also help you make sure that you are, in fact, addressing all of your learning objectives and covering all of the necessary topics in the video. This kind of metacognitive planning and evaluation of your student’s thinking increases the efficacy and coherency of your lectures.
In the same vein, this planning allows you to choose the most appropriate format for lectures.	You might script a lecture you have been giving face-to-face in the classroom for many years, only to realize that in the online format, the lecture may be more suited to a podcast format than a video. Different formats present other advantages to students as well — for example, an audio-only podcast lecture would allow students to listen on a walk around their neighborhood, as opposed to at home with the distractions of noisy family or roommates. Presenting content in a variety of formats, while letting the content direct the format chosen, provides students with additional flexibility. And choosing a format after planning the content, rather than as a first step, allows you this flexibility to present the content that is most suitable for the format itself.
Scripting and preplanning lecture materials not only forces you to consider the needs of your students and how they might interpret lecture material, it inherently addresses some of those needs by making materials more accessible	Transcripts not only benefit students with hearing impairments, but also students who may be listening to materials in their non-native language, students who are experiencing poor internet connectivity and cannot stream the video, students with learning disabilities who may need more time or alternate formats to process the lecture, or students who simply prefer to read or take notes on the transcript while listening along. Producing a transcript of a lecture can itself be time consuming or, if you outsource the effort, costly task. By creating a word-for word script and drafting it with your audience in mind, providing your script to students as a transcript eliminates the need to produce a separate transcript to address the accessibility concerns noted above.
It is important that you include your sources in your script to be incorporated into the video.	While a lecture video isn’t a peer-reviewed paper, it is more formal and more lasting than a face-to-face lecture or conversation, and it takes some additional effort to communicate corrections of any errors. Including sources also gives you an opportunity to review the sources and correct any errors, and gives interested students the opportunity to engage more deeply with the subject by exploring these sources.

Scripting lectures is a multi-layered metacognitive process. It requires the writer to think about their own thinking in reflecting on their own understanding of the material and past deliveries lectures. It also requires them to think about the experience of their audience, both in who they are and the context and channels which will affect the composition of their experience. Successful lecture scripting means making sure the material feels like it is for these students in this course.

Who are the students?
What they have already learned, what you hope they will learn, and where they are now?
Where might they be listening to these lectures?
How can the writer best facilitate their understanding?

These questions should be considered not just in regards to a specific group of current students, but future students or others who may view the lecture in a different context. A lecture might be relocated to a different part of a course, or sometimes a different course entirely. The social and historical context in which a lecture was recorded can change in just weeks. While the process of scripting might seem daunting, it should be thought of as a reallocation of efforts rather than an additional one: the metacognitive processes of reflection on self and audience, as well as the product of the script itself, contribute to a more robust and longer-lasting lecture that better addresses the needs of the audience.

Reference

Hacker, D. J., Kircher, J. C., & Keener, M. C. (2010). Writing is Applied Metacognition. In 1132034699 853417179 D. J. Hacker, 1132034700 853417179 J. Dunlosky, & 1132034701 853417179 A. C. Graesser (Authors), Handbook of metacognition in education (pp. 154-176). New York: Routledge.

Learning. Design. Analytics. Post 2: Utilizing Instructional Design Methodologies and Learning Analytics to Encourage Metacognition

By Zhuqing Ding, MA

What’s the interaction like in higher education between faculty and instructional designers? While faculty often have full autonomy in their course design and teaching methodologies (Martin, 2009), instructional designers play the role of a change agent. When instructional designers propose improvements in instructional strategies and recommend significant changes to existing courses, faculty may resist adopting their recommendations. With this in mind, the online course design team at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), Georgetown University, had implemented an adaptive approach to the course design process since 2018. During the pandemic, we were able to pivot and expand this approach to offer support to faculty across the university and not only to the ones who had been part of online programs.

So, what makes our process adaptive? The traditional ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate) instructional design model, focuses on linear processes in content development. Compared to the traditional instructional design approach, an adaptive approach has distinct iterative phases where we use learning analytics as evidence to initiate faculty members’ metacognition, thereby inspiring changes to future iterations of the course.

Here is how our course design team implemented the adaptive approach for transforming an existing classroom-based law course to fully online. Before moving online, this tax law course was offered once a week through one 2.5-hour lecture, accompanied by reading assignments and graded only by one final exam. During the first phase of our adaptive process our team tackled the following questions:

How can we transform the passive learning experiences in the classroom (receiving information) into active learning (interacting with the course materials)?
How can we strike a balance between good practices for online course design and the traditional methods familiar to/preferred by law school professors?
What are some of the strategies we will use to encourage the faculty members to evaluate their own teaching strategies to become more mindful and intentional about their own teaching?

While lecturing has been proven to be the most used instructional method, especially in higher education, it is more suitable for a face-to-face traditional classroom than an online environment (McKeachie, 1990). In an online course, passively receiving a large amount of information by watching a series of 2.5-hour lectures can be challenging for students. Following an adaptive process allowed us to guide faculty toward an awareness that designing an online course is more than recording lectures and that students need to interact with the lectures in order to be able to recall and retrieve what they are learning. The following image shows the metacognitive activities that we incorporated in the adaptive design approach. During the first phase of the course, our course design team introduced activities that support reflective practice to enable faculty members to become more self-aware about their own teaching and learning. Then, in the second phase we introduce activities that encourage a deepening of the reflective practice to spark creativity.

Interactive and short lectures

In order to collect data that can help us understand the students’ learning experience, we proposed to the faculty to create interactive and short lectures to replace the 2.5-hour long lectures in each module. To demonstrate to faculty the types of interactive elements that can be inserted into lectures, we introduced a storyboarding method. In the script, the faculty broke their long lectures into subtopics. Our instructional designers highlighted the keywords and areas that could be illustrated by graphics or animations. Then, the faculty confirmed the highlights and the graphics, and added/deleted as needed.

The resultant, short, subtopic videos were presented as playlists in the course. Within each video, the professor is shown lecturing on the right side of the screen, and on the left, relevant animated keywords, charts, and graphics appear. Certain parts of the charts were highlighted as the professor talked through certain elements within the charts. Such interactive elements within the lectures are designed to help students make a connection to the professor while also focusing on important keywords and short summaries of the lecture topics.

The analytics report provided by the video hosting platform that became available after the course launched helped with the faculty’s meta-thinking. Based on the total views, total minutes of content delivered, unique viewers, and the percentage of completion data for each video, the course team was able to understand important aspects of the students’ learning experience: the videos that had the highest views, the videos that students were not able to finish watching, and the videos that students watched again and again. Such evidence helped the faculty identify knowledge areas that students were not able to understand right away and recognize times when students’ participation dropped.

In the second iteration/phase of this course, the faculty took several actions to not only improve the course design, but also improved his teaching presence in this online course. First, during the low-participation time observed from the analytics report of the first iteration, reminders were sent to students to encourage them to keep up the pace. Additionally, more office hours including one-on-one and group office hours were scheduled, allowing students to clear up questions with the professor if they got stuck. The faculty was able to address common questions during the recorded office hour sessions, and made these sessions available to students. Overall, the student-faculty interaction was improved since, due to metacognition, the faculty became more aware of the importance of building interactive touch points to keep online students on track. The metacognition has initiated his awareness of the importance of the teaching presence in the online courses.

Weekly Activities

The law school has a long-standing tradition of using final exams as the only assessment in a given course. In face-to-face classes, interactions such as small talk among peers before and after the class and question-and-answer sessions after each lecture help students confirm whether they are on track. For online students, such checkpoints are missing and, therefore, it is necessary to periodically build them in so students can make sure they are following along.

In the first iteration of the course, we introduced weekly, ungraded quizzes, allowing students to practice, experiment, and reflect on their learning. Since this particular course is related to tax law, the quiz questions — most requiring calculation in Excel — were extracted from previous exams. Correct answers and short explanations were provided for each question at the end of the quiz. Students were allowed to take the quizzes multiple times. Such low-stakes activities provided the space for students to explore and discover the answers during their learning.

After the first iteration of the course, the professor was able to review the quiz analytics report provided by the quiz tool in Canvas, which allowed for metacognition on the activity design. There was a correlation between students’ performance on the weekly quizzes and the final exam. Students who didn’t participate in the practice quizzes at all achieved lower scores than students who did. Students who completed practice quizzes were also more active in the online office hours and found more opportunities to engage with the professor throughout the semester. Based on this finding, the professor realized the importance of motivating students to practice on a weekly basis in order to assess their understanding and ask questions before they fall too far behind.

By the second iteration of the course, a few actions were taken to improve students’ engagement in weekly quizzes. The professor improved the design of the quiz questions by adding downloadable Excel spreadsheets with formulas to the provided explanations of the quiz answers, allowing students to tinker with formulas and reflect on their own calculations. He also offered additional office hours following the quizzes in each module to make sure students had the opportunity to ask questions.

The professor moved from reluctance to including weekly quizzes at all, since they didn’t exist in the face-to-face class, to encouraging active learning processes by improving the quiz question design and proactively providing space for students to reach out to him with questions. Quiz analytics served as evidence that drove the faculty member to metacognition and improved the way he teaches online.

Summary

Metacognition is implicitly part of faculty development programs across disciplines. However, while working with law faculty, the adaptive approaches our course design team followed led to new reflections about their teaching practice. It was challenging to find the balance between traditional ways of teaching in the law school and an interactive online course that would allow students to succeed in a virtual environment. The adaptive approach allows the instructional designers and faculty to reach more agreements with iterative efforts. We used the analytics provided by the media-hosting tool and the quiz tools as evidence to encourage meta-thinking about the faculty’s teaching practice. This led to minor changes to the course with significant impacts. With such evidence, faculty are more open to adapting their long-standing teaching practices and embracing new ways of designing online courses. Sometimes these metacognitive approaches to teaching online also inspire faculty to rethink their teaching practices in traditional classrooms, such as providing more measurable learning goals or diversifying assessment methods.

References

McKeachie, W. J. (1990) Research on College Teaching: The Historical Background, Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 2, 189-200.

Martin, R. E. (2009). The revenue-to-cost spiral in higher education. Raleigh, NC: John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED535460.pdf

Learning. Design. Analytics. Post 1: A Faculty Development Approach To Support Metacognitive Awareness During Course Adaptation

By Yianna Vovides, PhD (Series Editor), Georgetown University

I once worked with a faculty member who was skeptical about teaching an online course, let alone spending time working with a designer on it. So, after my first meeting with him, realizing his hesitations, I created a prototype based on his course syllabus to show him what was possible. I remember him saying, I couldn’t see how to teach my course online, I am not a techie, but maybe I can if you help me.

He now saw me as his coach and partner, helping him plan how to engage students, helping him put in place assignments that he could manage within the course management system, helping him during his teaching. All along, during the four months we spent on his course, I would ask him about his teaching philosophy and his approach to teaching in his discipline. About a month before the course was ready to launch, I asked him if he could write a few paragraphs to explain to his students what he was sharing with me about his choices in the readings, his expectations in relation to how students approached a text and what he looked for in their assignments. He did.

We ended up recording these (only audio) and adding them to his week-by-week course structure. I then asked him if he was up for doing some more recording that focused on the selection of texts in his courses. I asked him to share his study of the authors themselves. He did. I then created an e-book that students would use to explore a bit more about the authors from their instructor’s perspective.

When the course opened, I spent an hour on the phone walking him through how to respond to student posts in the discussion board. He said, Thank you, I think I can do this! And he did. During the first run of his course, I sent him weekly emails to check in and point out the student monitoring/analytic features for making sure his students were keeping up.

What does metacognition have to do with it?

Because the process of online course development takes time, the relationship between the designer and the faculty tends to result in one that lasts past that one course experience. It is usually after the first course design and the first time faculty teach their course when they realize how much they learned about teaching and learning. They then go on to adapt their other courses. They are more metacognitively aware. They are aware of their own approaches to teaching and learning, aware of what it takes to design and teach a course in another mode, and are aware that good design and teaching involves planning, monitoring, reflecting, evaluating, and adapting existing practices. This is how I define the process of course adaptation that we will explore further in this post.

Let us dig a bit deeper into course adaptation.

In this post, I describe the adaptive approach we have implemented as part of our online programs efforts at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), Georgetown University. The approach connects instructional design practices with a faculty development focus that encourages metacognition (planning, monitoring, evaluating). I started with the following overarching question: How should instructional designers guide faculty to rethink their approach to course design to follow an adaptive faculty development process? I then identified the following sub-questions that formed the basis of the approach and operationalizing the process:

What techniques can instructional designers follow to engage faculty in design thinking?
What techniques can instructional designers follow to engage faculty in meta reflections about their teaching methods?
How can instructional designers use learning analytics to help faculty continue engaging in meta reflections during their online teaching?

The questions I listed above offered the CNDLS online programs team a way to problematize our approach to design. I realized that we needed to make visible the levels (macro, meso, micro) that we address during the design process and enable faculty to navigate these successfully. We implemented a model that enables conversations about design and development at all levels by following a before, during, after approach (see Figure 1).

circle schematic with three equal components: before, during, after — Figure 1. Macro – Before, during, after model

The guiding questions start at the course level and move to sessions and sequence of engagement exploring the teaching and learning experience across time. These questions include but are not limited to the following:

Tell us about your course. What do you love about this course? What do you think the students love about this course?
What are the things that you think about when you prepare to teach this course?
How do you engage your students before the semester starts?
What do you do during that first class session?
What do you expect students to do during the first class session?
What do you do after the class session?
What do you want students to do after the class session?

These questions help faculty reflect about their approach to teaching and learning. By asking these questions up front and throughout the course adaptation process we are embedding metacognitive instruction within the course design model itself. In addition, throughout the design process we include check-in sessions that allow both the designer and faculty to pause and ask:

Is our design plan still valid?
Is our choice of technology going to support students in their learning process?
Do we need to do anything differently?

What these check-in questions do over the span of four to six months of engaging with an individual faculty on the course design and development process is that the conversations become connected across time and merge into a spiral design model. Figure 2 visualizes the spiral model that supports the faculty development approach that instructional designers take. Once faculty members experience this model, they continue to follow this design approach as they envision their other courses. In addition, they tend to re-visit their approach to their teaching shifting from an instructor-centered to a student-centered approach.

Because the model is based on time, it easily communicates across the various disciplines. What do I mean by that? Because the conversations that surround this model are related to teaching practices, it is also a way to account for contact time (faculty-student interaction) and learning time (student effort). We refer to the combination of contact time and learning time as instructional time in conversations with faculty. In remote teaching and learning, instructional time is an entry point to envisioning how learning can happen in different ways.

The rest of the mini-series on Learning. Design. Analytics. includes examples using this approach that highlight strategies used to activate metacognitive awareness during the course design and re-design process through the designer-faculty interaction. In addition, the series highlights how technology interventions and learning analytics are integrated as part of the process.

Some background about instructional design and online education to frame the approach

Adapting traditional classroom-based courses to online may sound simple given that online education has been around for more than two decades. In fact, instructional design, a field of study that is over 80 years old, offers theories, models, and processes that guide designers to make this adaptation from traditional classroom-based teaching to online. This is a technical challenge – solutions are available and are knowable. However, in higher education, the instructional design process, when framed to support faculty development, introduces complexity. The challenge is no longer technical because the focus of the challenge is no longer about the course adaptation from traditional to online but the people involved in making the adaptation happen (faculty, designers, media specialists, students, and other members of the team that supports this process). It is a process of transformation.

Let us pull this apart a bit more. Higher education as an institution has been described as lacking innovation and flexibility for promoting impactful teaching and learning (Rooney et al., 2006). That was in 2006. Between 2006 and 2016, we have seen online education grow and thrive with over 6 million students (approximately 30% of all higher education students) enrolled in at least one distance education course in the United States (Allen & Seaman, 2017). Then COVID-19 happened. Remote teaching and learning is happening across the globe and is now the new normal. Given the speed of the changes, some schools have been able to pivot and put in place the needed support for their instructors while others are struggling to determine what that support needs to be and how to operationalize it.

There are many factors that contribute to these decisions besides resources such as institutional, departmental, and individual cultural norms. For example, the institutional culture may be known by those who are in it but much of it is hidden from those new to it which may lead to actions that are oftentimes driven by assumptions rather than visible evidence (Halupa, 2019). Many academic departments tend to value individual contributions and can propagate a competitive rather than a collaborative environment. This may then lead to a less cohesive curriculum online. Individual faculty members are experts in their discipline but not necessarily in the discipline of teaching and learning. Therefore, within this complex network of needs, faculty development efforts in higher education try to balance group and individual engagements to provide opportunities for faculty to get the support they need in their teaching.

Recognizing that there are different instructional development needs necessitates that we offer different entry points and pathways in our faculty development programming. Within the online course design efforts, we work with faculty to help them see their teaching challenge from a design thinking perspective that begins with an exploration of what individual learners will experience. By doing so, we are no longer facing a technical challenge but rather an adaptive one because we are now focusing on individual learner needs. To tackle this adaptive challenge that is implicitly dynamic because of the focus on humans, we argue that the approach requires that planning, monitoring, and evaluation become an integral part of the process at both the cognitive and metacognitive levels.

References

Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2017). Digital Compass Learning: Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017. Babson survey research group.

Halupa, C. (2019). Differentiation of Roles: Instructional Designers and Faculty in the Creation of Online Courses. International Journal of Higher Education, 8(1), 55-68.

Rooney, P., Hussar, W., Planty, M., Choy, S., Hampden-Thompson, G., Provasnik, S., & Fox, M. A. (2006). The Condition of Education, 2006. NCES 2006-071. National Center for Education Statistics.

Using Metacognition to Facilitate Scholarly Identity

by Anton Tolman, Ph.D., Guest Editor

This is the final and concluding blog for our series. I want to thank my colleagues for their time and effort in this project: Steven Pearlman, Christopher Lee, and Benjamin Johnson. Speaking for all of us, we hope you found our thoughts helpful in enriching your own thinking regarding metacognition and its importance in student learning.

The topics of this series, critical thinking, inclusive classrooms, student motivation, and succeeding with collaborative learning, are all essential themes in local and national discussions right now concerning student engagement and effective teaching. Each of the blogs in the series also touched on resistance to change (faculty or student), either explicitly or implicitly, the role of humility, and the development of metacognitive skills in achieving successful outcomes. Enhancing metacognition in ourselves and in our students is an ongoing progression, a journey, and we are happy to be walking it with you. In this last blog, I address the connection between metacognition and development of students’ personal narrative, their identity as scholars or educated persons. I believe this is the true heart of higher education and the core of its value to society.

You Can’t Change What You Can’t See

This phrase is an axiom in clinical work with clients. Clients often come to see a therapist knowing that things are wrong in their lives, but they don’t understand the reasons why or do not see a path forward to healing. They can’t change their lives for the better until they begin to “see” the nature of their problems, accept responsibility for their own role in those problems, and imagine and start to walk the road ahead.

This axiom applies to students. They usually come to college based on the promise of an economic benefit like higher paying jobs, or because they see a degree as a requirement for future goals. Many, if not most, see the purpose of education as learning facts or information and therefore, see the role of professors as experts who teach them content. When they are confronted with assignments that ask them to use critical thinking, solve problems, or work together, they can become easily frustrated. Thus, the terms “jumping through hoops” and “busy work” are commonly found in student conversations about their classes. These forms of resistance (Tolman & Kremling, 2017) are understandable because many students can’t see that the real goal of higher education is skill development, not content; it is not easily visible to them. Like the therapist’s clients, they won’t make progress until they develop the capacity to recognize the underlying issues and see the path ahead as one of purpose and value.

Student resistance to learning begins to diminish when students evaluate their own attitudes and behaviors and connect those behaviors to their academic performance. When they learn to develop metacognitive skills they can “see” previously unseen patterns in themselves and others: they recognize their own complicity in their academic struggles and begin to grasp that they are not just consumers of external information or persons being judged by some authority figure. This empowers them to assume responsibility, take action on their own, to succeed, to grow, and to become part of a community of learners.

Seeing is Believing: Shifting Identity in Higher Education

In his recent blog, Taraban (2020) describes identity as an ongoing form of development grounded in episodic memory: the story we tell ourselves about who we are. This self-narrated story is strongly shaped by the boundaries of what students “see” as the purpose of education, their personal goals, and how they approach learning. If students’ sense of identity about who they are does not change from that of being consumers of content or “students”, then we have failed them.

If we were to adopt the model of cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1987) in our teaching, seeing ourselves more as mentors to students, then our major task becomes to shift their story, their identity, to that of being apprentices, not students. As apprentices, they are learning new skills under the guidance of an expert who cares for them, and who asks them to constantly re-evaluate what they are learning, consider how they are learning it, and when and how to use what they are learning. This entails a transition towards seeing themselves as participating members of the academy, as scholars and educated persons who contribute to society; metacognition is at the core of this identity shift.

Undergraduate research is a great example of this as articulated by Charity-Hudley, Dickter, and Franz (2017). They explain that the mechanism of action of this “high impact” practice on student success and retention, especially for minority or under-represented students, begins as students enter into a mentored relationship with a professor. Moving away from the traditional “student” role enables them to realize there is more to learning besides getting a grade or completing course assignments. Metacognitive activity like learning to reflect and ask their own questions, carry out their own research, generate new data, challenge their own ideas as well as existing ideas in the discipline, and create new understandings, makes them a contributor to knowledge, not just a consumer. They are a scholar, or at least a scholar-apprentice, and those episodic memories begin to shift their own narrative identity — who they see themselves to be, how they interpret their own life and future. Of course, participating in research is not the only path available to this outcome.

This student progression requires creating opportunities for students to develop and use their metacognitive skills. In both Steve Pearlman’s (this blog series) and Hale’s (2012) potent arguments, the development of metacognitive and critical thinking skills is integral to development of a “personal intellectual narrative”; you cannot discuss metacognition without referencing aspects of critical thinking, and you cannot explain critical thinking without referring to the metacognitive processes involved. As Hale (2012) says, cultivation of an “intellectual language” is a key process in this development; it inducts students into the “Great Conversation” and it becomes part of their own personal history of intellectual development. The more we integrate metacognitive opportunities in our classes, and across the curriculum, the more likely we are to observe this transition occur.

Suggestions for Teaching

Here are some thoughts about ways to incorporate metacognitive practices that promote personal narratives in students:

Emphasize transparency and relevance. Explain the purposes of our assignments not just for short-term outcomes (learn something for a grade), but for the long-term (learn something to enhance a career and personal life, contribute to society); define and set expectations about the value of metacognition and its role in professional thinking within your discipline.
Assign metacognitive tasks that require students to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses as learners, identify learning strategies they are using and those they are not, and ask them to connect this information to their personal and career goals. Benjamin Johnson’s description of the Personal Learning Plan (this blog series), based partly on completing practical metacognitive inventories and evaluating how to improve is an example.
Emphasize the value of students thinking about their own development over time and their personal histories; reflective writing assignments, in all fields, are useful for this.
Use inquiry assignments requiring students to develop their own questions, do their own research, and apply it to course content and their lives.
Create opportunities for students to make their own thinking visible to themselves. Encourage them to question their learning, their assumptions, and acknowledge their areas of confusion as a community of learners. Hale (2012) suggests learning logs, real-time student writing of their thinking, questions, and descriptions of how they are approaching content, assignments, and preparation.
Shift your role from “sage on the stage” to a mentor of cognitive apprentices. Model professional thinking; demonstrate metacognition and critical thinking and help the students recognize it and practice it. One way I do this is to ask, and continuously reinforce, that students call me Coach T. In my syllabus I explain the rationale for this: my purpose is to facilitate their learning, give them exercises to improve, and to clarify or assist, but the basic responsibility for their learning, as with any athlete, actor, or musician, lies with themselves.
Evaluate your course design: what are the memories and personal experiences your students will take away relevant to metacognition? Do your assignments focus primarily on content acquisition or do they promote skill development, a sense of growth and progress towards becoming a scholar, ability to speak the intellectual language of the discipline and to reason within its context? What are your course objectives and where do they point your students: towards content, or towards becoming scholars?

These teaching practices help students “connect the dots” and see patterns they did not know existed: how they approach learning, how well they are learning, the purpose of education, and their own intellectual growth and development. Doing this reduces resistance and shifts their understanding of learning and of themselves. When we move our perspective from content to skills and weave metacognitive development into the fabric of our class, we create an environment encouraging the exploration of new personal narratives and identity for our students. This brings us closer towards achieving the potential that higher education has to offer. If you are already doing these things, hone your work, expand your empathy, and become more transparent. If you are not, you can see the road ahead, and you don’t have to travel it alone. Reach out, learn from others, and find greater joy in what you do.

References:

Charity-Hudley, A.H., Dickter, C.L., & Franz, H.A. (2017). The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success In and Beyond College. New York: Teachers College Press.

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1987). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics (Technical Report No. 403). BBN Laboratories, Cambridge, MA.

Hale, E. (2012). Conceptualizing a personal intellectual history/narrative: The importance of strong-sense metacognition to thinking critically. In M.F. Shaughnessy (Ed). Critical Thinking and Higher Order Thinking. Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Taraban, R. (2020, June 25). Metacognition and the Development of Self. ImproveWithMetacognition.com. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-and-self-identity/

Tolman, A.O. & Kremling, J. (2017). Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Boosting the Effectiveness of Collaborative Learning Using Metacognition

by Anton Tolman, PhD, Guest Editor, Utah Valley University

The introductory blog for this series included a figure of the Integrated Model of Student Resistance (IMSR; Tolman & Kremling, 2017). That image (shown below) illustrates that student resistance is the outcome of systemic factors, including lack of metacognition. The IMSR demonstrates that family and the larger culture (including institutional culture) may promote consumer expectations and that these elements (poor metacognitive skills and culture) often intersect with instructor behaviors and attitudes, leading to negative experiences in education. This, in turn, increases student resistance, especially towards active learning.

These elements are also exacerbated by student cognitive development, which is overlooked by many instructors as a relevant element in metacognition, classroom experiences, and resistance. For example, Nufher (2014) summarizes the work of William Perry (1999) who carried out longitudinal studies of college student cognitive development. Students react with varying degrees of resistance to education depending on their level of cognitive development. Progressing in cognitive development can take time, but several authors have noted that effective use of metacognition and other strategies may accelerate this process, including careful metacognitive exercises (see Nuhfer, 2014; Nelson, 2015; Kloss, 1994).

The IMSR was created to help instructors begin to see resistance differently than they typically do; it is a communication signal from students that something is not working and, rather than dismiss it or try to assert their authority, the solution lies in addressing the underlying causes, including lack of metacognition. A recently published study in nursing (Stover & Holland, 2018) reported that use of the IMSR to redesign a collaborative learning-based course resulted in reduced resistance to collaborative learning, a greater sense of belonging to a community of inquiry, higher student satisfaction, and less negative comments or concerns. For a full explanation of the model, see Tolman and Kremling (2017).

Students not actively using metacognitive skills are more likely to resist active teaching efforts because they see themselves as passive consumers of information whose main concern is to meet requirements set by an authority figure in order to graduate. My experience is that student resistance is greater in courses requiring collaborative learning because students are expected to work together on activities important to their grade. Now, imagine the level of resistance to collaborative learning in my online Abnormal Psychology course! When students see the syllabus, the most common resistant comment I receive is “I took this course online so I would not have to work with others.”

We should acknowledge that some of that resistance is justified. Collaborative learning pedagogies are not simple, and unfortunately are sometimes implemented ineffectively, leading to negative experiences for students. U.S. culture is highly individualistic and emphasizes personal success rather than group efforts despite the fact that society depends on the ability of people to work effectively together. Students often see collaborative learning as either a potential threat to their grade, or often based on prior experiences, as an added burden due to social loafing by peers. Many students have never been explicitly taught how to manage conflict, work with others, seek understanding of alternate viewpoints, and are unaware of the data indicating that diverse groups usually reach more effective problem solutions.

Thus, we have a storm of interacting elements here of culture/consumerism, negative prior experiences (with both peers and instructors), student lack of awareness of their own level of communication and collaboration skills and how to monitor and improve collaboration, and usually cognitive development where some students on the team see collaborative assignments as about “getting the right answer” rather than being about enriching their understanding of the material and promoting critical thinking (see Nelson, 2015). Let’s use the specific example of my Abnormal Psychology course to illustrate these issues and how promoting metacognition can help.

Example of Incorporating Metacognition: An Online Abnormal Psychology Course

Students know from the syllabus that the class will involve working in teams; they also know that course objectives are weighted towards development of professional skills as well as content learning. They begin to engage with metacognitive assignments by completing two instruments¹:

the TTM-Learning Survey (TTM-LS) assesses the student’s degree of readiness to change how they learn and their readiness to engage with a collaborative team, and
the Learning Strategies Self-Assessment (LSSA) measures how often they use known effective learning strategies and engages them with reflective questions.

These assignments are due the first two weeks, before team activities begin.

A comparison of typical responses across two particular LSSA questions reveals some helpful insights on student thinking about collaborative learning. One LSSA reflective question asks them about their personal goals for the course. Despite knowing the class will involve teamwork, only 5% of the students indicated any related personal goal for improving their teamwork skills and learning (Fall, 2018 class). However, when the LSSA asks students to review their learning strategy scores and identify their strengths and weaknesses as a learner, 39% of them acknowledged weakness in collaboration or a reluctance to work with others. For instance,

Student A wrote, “I have a hard time asking for help when I get frustrated or confused. I feel like it is my responsibility to learn the material and do not want to put someone else out by making them take the time to teach me a concept I should be able to learn on my own.”
Student B replied, “I noticed that I’m very good at doing things on my own but when it comes to asking for help or working in groups, I don’t do it as often.”
Student C said, “I have learned many strategies throughout my academic experience on working with teams and they were mostly negative.”

At the beginning of the semester, these instruments opened the door for students to own these emotions and experiences, to think about how they could do better, how ready they were to change, to take responsibility for their own skill development, and to at least be willing to consider the value of collaborative learning. Instructors using instruments like this have the opportunity to provide feedback, lower resistance, and engage with these students in productive ways to prepare them to do well in a collaborative course, even if it is online.

Sibley and Ostafichuk (2014) describe some interventions instructors can take to help students “buy in” to the value of Team-Based Learning (TBL) including explaining the purpose and relevance of TBL, acknowledging negative experiences, and demonstrating the difference in quiz scores by teams compared with individuals (teams do better). These efforts are useful, but they are not inherently metacognitive and could be seen as just more instructor justification. The critical task for the instructor is to foster, across the semester, metacognitive thinking and evaluation of how collaborative experiences enhance their learning and strengthen their critical thinking and communication skills. Other aspects of TBL such as self and peer evaluation, if done well, also promote metacognitive development and learning.

Making Metacognition Pervasive

To be effective, metacognitive activities in collaborative environments must occur across the semester; single assignments or events will be insufficient. For example, a week after completing the two instruments above, students complete a Personal Learning Plan. They are asked to reflect on their TTM-LS readiness to change stages and to explain their next steps to become more effective learners and team members. They also create a personal study plan for the semester.

As students launch their teams, they engage in readings about the value of professional team skills in the workplace and engage with sites like Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (https://teamwork.umn.edu/) to identify common myths contributing to negative experiences and devise a plan for working together. A later team workshop asks them to evaluate team progress and identify areas for improvement. Online videos and class discussions on these topics, connecting the themes to professional practice in the field, are also vital. These metacognitive “boosters” help them continue progress in the development of these skills.

Wirth and Perkins (2013) note that metacognitive skills must be developed in the disciplinary context, with students questioning their own mastery, progress, and applying relevant concepts. Designing collaborative learning courses to engage students in metacognitive activities from the very beginning and then continuing that dialogue can lead to significant gains in learning content and development of metacognitive, critical thinking, and collaboration skills.

At the end of the semester, my students complete the TTM-LS and LSSA again. Some questions ask them to identify activities that enriched their learning and how they will use what they learned in the future.

Student A stated, “I will try to form a study group or a team to try to learn the material, because I felt the more I taught the others the more I learned for myself.”
Student B noted, “…Meeting in a group was probably the most beneficial way for me to learn the course material. Looking back, it’s kind of ironic that that is my favorite aspect because I fought it so hard in the beginning”, and
Student C, who had a difficult semester, reflected, “[My] attitudes have been changing and so [has]my way of dealing with group work. I learned I had to change my attitude in order to change the way I think about an issue…”

In total, 80% of the students made statements positive about team work and how it benefitted them in response to these questions. Building ongoing metacognitive activities into collaborative learning environments makes a significant difference to student success.

References

Kloss, R.J. (1994). A nudge is best. College Teaching, 42(4), 151-159.

Nelson, C. (2015, February 15). Fostering Metacognition: Right-Answer Focused versus Epistemologically Transgressive. ImprovewithMetacognition.com. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/fostering-metacognition-right-answer-focused-versus-epistemologically-transgressive/

Nuhfer, E. (2014, July 15). Metacognition for Guiding Students to Awareness of Higher-level Thinking (Part 1). ImprovewithMetacognition.com. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-for-guiding-students-to-awareness-of-higher-level-thinking-part-1/

Perry, W. G., Jr. (1999). Forms of intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. (Reprint of the original 1968 1st ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sibley, J. & Ostafichuck, P. (Eds). (2014). Getting Started with Team-Based Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Stover, S. & Holland, C. (2018). Student resistance to collaborative learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 12(2), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2018.120208

Tolman, A.O. & Kremling, J. (2017). Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Wirth, K.R. & Perkins, D. (2008). Learning to Learn. Retrieved from: http://www.macalester.edu/geology/wirth/CourseMaterials.html

¹ These instruments are available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to contact me (Anton Tolman).

Change Instead of Continuity: Using Metacognition to Enhance Student Motivation for Learning

by Benjamin A. Johnson, Ph.D., Utah Valley University

“New occasions teach new duties”
James Russell Lowell

In 2020, as we start a new decade, continuity appears to have taken a backseat to change. While change rapidly spreads through and disrupts such areas as health (including a viral pandemic), education, culture, economy, and technology, continuity offers stability, knowledge gained from the past on the human condition and peoples’ capacity to flourish. In this current climate of change, the expression, “new occasions teach new duties” resonates well (Lowell, 1890, p. 184) and appears to have a double meaning for our situation: not only do the events or “new occasions,” require us to “teach new duties,” but the “new occasions” can actually teach us “new duties.” As students navigate the many disruptions in our schools and communities, they urgently need professors who encourage metacognitive strategies to assess and enhance student motivation for engagement and learning.

It seems that student resistance and motivation not to engage is often driven by the motivation to maintain continuity, to stay in safe territory, to avoid anxiety. Students are often motivated to do what is familiar, such as engaging in surface approaches to learning: to memorize, recite, or do the minimum. As students advance through their majors, they may become more intrinsically motivated because they see the courses as relevant to their career goals. Even then, they can become overwhelmed at exams, and may have other priorities that push them towards continuity. On the other hand, effective teaching and engaged learning is all about change. Considering the current pandemic and the sudden transition to online and hybrid learning, faculty and students must be metacognitively aware as never before.

A 2-Step Framework for Change

Some students will not come prepared to class, will not engage at a high level with the assignments, and will not take owernship for their own learning. This can be extremely challenging for professors. Rather than staying frustrated, here is a two-step framework a professor could cultivate to enhance student strengths and encourage positive change:

Step 1: Become more broadly aware of student resistance behaviors, including types and contributing factors.

Step 2: Create self-assessment opportunities for students to become more self-aware of their own openness to change.

Step 1: Identifying Student Resistance to Change

The Forms of Student Resistance Matrix (Tolman & Kremling, 2017) below offers insight on how students may reveal their motives for resistance to learning. The matrix categorizes fundamental forms of resistance, each with different emotional foundations. It shows that students in the accommodation/anxiety (“Preserving Self”) column want continuity, education delivered in the way they find comfortable and familiar, while those in the anger/frustration (“Asserting Autonomy”) column seek change and validation.

Once we have identified types of student resistance, we can effectively focus our energy on helping students think metacognitively about their own learning needs and goals, and help them evaluate their own contributions to obstacles to their success (such as use of relatively ineffective learning strategies). As they better understand their own needs and challenges through self-assessment, they are more likely to decrease their resistance to learning.

Forms of Student Resistance Matrix
Adapted from Tolman & Kremling, 2017

Asserting Autonomy
(Seeking Change)

Pushing against external influence
Emotions: anger, frustration, resentment

Preserving Self
(Seeking Continuity)

Trying to accommodate to external influence
Emotions: anxiety, fear

Active Resistance

Arguing or disagreeing with professor in the classroom
Repeatedly asking for the rationale for assignments
Saying they paid for the class and want it taught how they like
Inciting other students to rebel or not collaborate; disrupting class activities
Complaining to higher authority

Repeatedly asking for detailed clarification of grading criteria
Taking over group assignments to ensure an adequate grade
Arguing with the professor over grades received, seeking additional points or consideration
Focus on surface approach to learning

Passive Resistance

Refusing to come to class
Refusing to participate during in-class exercises (does not get into groups, does not comply with assignment tasks)
Does not turn in assignments at all or is consistently late
Complaining about the professor to other students

Expressing concerns about working with others
Avoidance of conflicts and refusing to resolve situations or bring them to the professor’s awareness
Minimal participation in class (withdrawn, doesn’t speak or give feedback, lets others make all decisions)

Step 2: Student Self-Assessment—Helping Students Recognize Stages of Change

Helping students assess their own openess to adopting new behaviors is key to supporting their learning. Self-assessment helps them recognize that their own attitudes and choices shape their educational outcomes and that their learning is not simply a product of their professors’ work. One assessment tool that can help students self-assess and self-regulate is the TTM Learning Survey (Tolman & Kremling, 2017), based on Prochaska and DiClemente’s (1983) Transtheoretical Model (TTM). Most often utilized in clinical settings, TTM theory provides a useful model for understanding a person’s path towards adopting new behaviors. TTM readiness to change stages include precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.

Assigning the TTM-LS along with a Personal Learning Plan (PLP; a reflective follow-up exercise that asks the individual to identify how to improve and to plan for the semester) may help students work metacognitively to identify their readiness to change (Tolman & Kremling, 2017). Part of the PLP requires the student to evaluate their stage of readiness to change and then describe how they can move forward and overcome their own forms of resistance. I have observed that using these instruments two to three times during the semester improves student metacognition, as evidenced by student reflections.

Additionally, by working through these self-reflective activities, students become more intentional or mindful about their own motivation to change, providing them multiple opportunities to think through their own behavior and learning. Though students may advance or step up higher through the stages of change, they may also revert back to a previous stage. Professors should help them view this regression as developmental and invite them to persist.

Surveys and reflective assignments like the TTM-LS and PLP help students think more about why they might not be not willing to adopt new behaviors and help them acknowledge their own reluctance to change their learning strategies (Tolman & Kremling, 2017; Yanqun, 2019).

Using the Forms of Student Resistance matrix above (Tolman & Kremling, 2017), an actively resisting autonomous student (left column) may acknowledge in their PLP that when they become frustrated, they request the professor be available regularly to explain the rationale for assignments. On the other hand, an actively resisting preserving-self (or an anxious) student (right column) might respond with fear to conform to the expectations of the professor while arguing for a better grade. Self-assessment helps the student better understand their own motivations, fears, and goals, so they can then move forward more deliberately.

This focus on intentionality is a core aspect of genuine metacognitive thinking because it can help students accept their own role in learning—understanding that what they choose to do shapes how they learn and that the main responsibility for learning resides with them, not with the professor. Once students begin to recognize their patterns of resistence and strategies for overcoming this obstacle, they will take more ownership over their learning. Assessments like these help students to shift their education from something that is being forced on them externally (by parents, society, employers) to something that they can personally control (Perry, et al., 2019).

Asking Students to Think Metacognitively Requires Change

Due to changes in this pandemic year, we can also invite students to become more metacognitive about:

technology use: their feelings toward new technology used for virtual or hybrid class settings and their level of mastery of that technology
learning on their own (less interaction in the classroom) – what works and what doesn’t
monitoring their own progress and anxieties in this dynamic environment

The more we support their metacognitive skills in these areas, the more willing they may be to intentionally make this shift. For example, as universities phase into more online learning, students who are motivated not to engage in new learning strategies may struggle to adapt. They may resist actively participating in online learning in its many forms. Professors can implement surveys such as the TTM-LS and a PLP to open the door to key conversations about students’ goals, what they hope to achieve from the class, and especially, how they might need to adapt to become successful in the new modality.

Learning in itself is a process of change, and as students use metacognition to accept rather than resist learning as an individual responsibility, their motivation can shift for the better. At its core, metacognition is about being open to seeing new possibilities and being willing to change (moving from the precontemplation to contemplation stage, for instance). As students practice self-assessment, they can accept the need for change and embrace “new duties.”

References

Lowell, J. R. (1890). Poems. Riverside Press. (Original poem published 1844)
Perry, J., Lundie, D., & Golder, G. (2019) Metacognition in schools: What does the literature suggest about the effectiveness of teaching metacognition in schools? Educational Review, 71(4), 483-500.
Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C.C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390-395.
Tolman, A. O., & Kremling, J. (2017). Why students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students. Stylus.
Yanqun, Z. (2019). The Significance and Instruction of Metacognition in Continuing Education. International Forum of Teaching & Studies 15(1), 29-37.

Metacognition and the Fish in the Water

by Steven J. Pearlman, Ph.D. The Critical Thinking Initiative

As the saying goes, you cannot ask a fish about water. Having had no other environmental experience as a counter reference, the fish cannot understand what water is because the fish has never experienced what water isn’t.

Cognition—broadly meaning that the mind is working—is to homo sapiens as water is to fish. So steeped are we in the water of our own cognitive processing that we cannot recognize it. Even though we all possess an extensive list of examples of other people failing to think well, we nevertheless lack an internal reference point for being devoid of thought; every consideration we might make of what it would be like to not-think can only happen through the process of thinking about it.

This is the difference between metacognition, which is being intentionally self-aware of what we are doing when we are thinking, and critical thinking, which, loosely speaking, is the capacity to reason through problems and generate ideas. In one sense, we seem to do just fine thinking critically without that metacognitive awareness. We solve problems. We invent the future. We cure diseases. We build communities. But in another all-too-real sense, we struggle, for if we lack the metacognitive acumen to understand what critical thinking is, then we equally lack the capacity to improve our capability to do it and to monitor and evaluate our progress.

The Problem and the Need

Case in point, even though research shows that critical thinking is typically listed among necessary outcomes at educational institutions, “it is not supported and taught systematically in daily instructions” because “teachers are not educated in critical thinking” (Astleitner, 2002). Worse than that, one study of some 30 educators found that not a single one could provide “a clear idea of critical thinking” (Choy & Cheah, 2009). Thus, even though “one would be hard pressed to construct a serious counterargument to the claim that we would like to see students become careful, rigorous thinkers as an outcome of the education we provide them. … By most accounts, we remain far from achieving it” (Kuhn, 1999).

But we do need to achieve that rigorous thinking, because nothing is arguably more important than improving our overall capacity to think. To do so, we must seek to understand the relationship between critical thinking and metacognition, for though interrelated, they’re not the same. In fact, we can think critically without being metacognitive, but we cannot be metacognitive without thinking critically. And that might make metacognition the seminal force of true critical thinking development.

Some Classroom Examples

Consider, for example, asking a student, “What is your thinking about the assigned readings about the Black Lives Matter movement”? Were the student to respond with anything substantive, then we could loosely say the student exercised at least some critical thinking, such as some analysis of the sources and some evaluation of their usefulness. For example, were the student to state that “by referencing statistics on black arrests, source A made a more compelling argument than source B,” then we could rightly say that the student generated some critical thinking. But we cannot say that the student engaged in any metacognitive effort.

But what if the student responded, “Because of its use of statistics on black arrests, Source A changed my thinking about the Black Lives Matter because I was previously unaware of the disparities between white arrest rates and black arrest rates”? Is that metacognitive? Not truly. Even though the student was aware of a change in their own thoughts, they expressed no self-awareness of the internal thinking process that catalyzed that change. There is not necessarily a meaningful distinction between what that student did and someone who says that they had not liked mashed potatoes until they tried these mashed potatoes. They recognized a shift in thought, but not necessarily the underlying mechanism of that shift.

However, if the student responded as follows, we would begin to see metacognition on top of critical thinking: “I realized upon reading Source A that I held a tacit bias about the issue, one that was framed from my own experience being white. I had been working under the assumption that race didn’t matter, and it wasn’t until the article presented the statistics that my thinking was impacted enough for me to become aware of my biases and change my position.” In that sentence, we see the student metacognitively recognizing an aspect of their own thinking process, namely their personal biases and the relationship between those biases and new information. As Mahdvi (2014) said, “Metacognitive thoughts do not spring from a person’s immediate external reality; rather, their source is tied to the person’s own internal mental representations of that reality, which can include what one knows about that internal representation, how it works, and how one feels about it.” And that’s what this example demonstrates: the student’s self-awareness of “internal mental representations of … reality.”

The Value of Metacognition to Critical Thinking

When metacognition is present, all thinking acts are critical because they are by nature under reflection, and scrutiny. While one could interpret a love poem without being metacognitive, one could not be metacognitive about why they interpret a poem a certain way—such as in considering one’s biases about “love” from their personal history—without thinking critically. Since metacognition can only happen when we are monitoring our thinking about something, the metacognition inherently makes the thinking act critical.

Yet, even though metacognition infuses some measure of criticality to thinking, metacognition nevertheless isn’t synonymous with critical thinking. Metacognition alone does not successfully critique existing ideas, analyze the world, develop meaningful questions, produce new solutions, etc. So, we can think without being metacognitive, but if we want to improve our thinking—if we want to understand and enhance the machinations of our mind—then we must seek and attain the metacognitive skills that reveal what our mind is doing and why it is doing it.

Accomplishing that goal requires an introspective humility. It means embracing the premise that our own thinking process is at best always warped, if not often mortally wounded, by our biases, predisposition, and measures of ignorance. It means that we often cannot efficiently solve problems unless we first solve for ourselves, and that’s not easy to do for a bunch of fish who are steeped in the waters cognitive.

References

Astleitner, H. (2002). Teaching Critical Thinking Online. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 29(2), 53-76.

Choy, S.C. & Cheah, P.K. (2009). Teacher perceptions of critical thinking among students and its influence on higher education. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 20(2), 198-206.

Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational Researcher, 28(2), 16-25.

Madhavi, M. (2014). An Overview: Metacognition in Education. International Journal of Multidisciplinary and Current Research, 2.

How Metacognition Can Foster Inclusivity in the Classroom

by Christopher Lee; Snow College

Kelly Field (2018) reports that “A growing body of research suggests that students who feel they belong at their college are more likely to remain there [and] that first-generation and minority students are less likely to feel a connection to their colleges” (para. 27). As an instructor at a 2-year college, I recognize the important role that my institution plays in functioning as a bridge to further educational opportunities, particularly for underrepresented students. Crucial to this mission is ensuring that I do my part to facilitate a classroom environment in which these students feel valued and included.

Inclusivity means working to ensure that curricula and teaching practices don’t exclude marginalized minority students and help to close existing achievement gaps. It means not only valuing diversity but creating a space for diverse groups of students to actually feel included. It entails serious introspection from faculty (before we even enter the classroom) about implicit biases we may hold toward others, opportunities for privileged students to examine their attitudes about underprivileged peers, and opportunities for minority students to critically reflect on their own academic abilities. An inclusive classroom, then, is contingent on honest metacognitive reflection from both faculty and students.

Faculty: Holding Up the Mirror

Inclusivity requires holding the mirror up to ourselves as instructors and asking how our behaviors, teaching practices, and curriculum choices may confirm or exacerbate student feelings of exclusion. As we strive for an inclusive classroom – in relation to race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, age, culture, or ideology – it’s critical that we examine the hidden biases we may hold about certain groups of students and recognize how these biases manifest in the classroom.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that we may have negative biases, but can we actually identify and control them? Patricia Divine’s (cited in Nordell, 2017) research suggests that it is possible to identify and mitigate biases, noting that they can be overridden, but not overwritten. In other words, completely removing our biases doesn’t seem to be a realistic goal, but we can moderate them, once recognized. Divine offers a model for faculty that incorporates key components of metacognitive thinking.

First, we must become aware of our own implicit biases. Although there’s no silver bullet, the Implicit Association Test at Harvard’s Project Implicit can be a useful resource. Second, we must become concerned about the implications and outcomes of our biases, acknowledging that there are very real and harmful consequences to holding unchecked biases. Finally, we must work to replace biases with more productive attitudes that align with our conscious or aspirational values. Subsequently, we can design strategies to monitor and assess our progress.

Metacognitive Practices for Students

The work of creating an inclusive, “decolonized” classroom (Seward, 2019) can’t be reduced to a short and simple list; however, these three practical suggestions can be effectively implemented in any course in an effort to utilize the benefits of metacognition toward increasing inclusivity.

Assign Reflective Exercises: Start students reflecting on their thinking processes and assumptions early in the semester, particularly in relation to their abilities and potentially flawed preconceptions about themselves, others, and college. I have students write a short essay about their writing and thinking processes, previous experiences with English courses, including negative internalized experiences, and their expectations about our current class. Students can choose to share their thoughts and experiences openly with each other, demystifying the idea that there’s one “correct” (i.e. white, male, middle class, etc.) way to approach writing, thinking, and other academic skills. Previous negative experiences aren’t necessarily exclusive to them individually and won’t act as permanent barriers to their educational goals.

With opportunities to metacognitively reflect, students are more likely to feel included in the classroom environment, early on, if they see a variety of effective approaches to learning tasks. With this understanding, they need not feel pressure to conform to the norms of a hidden curriculum (Margolis, 2001).

Invite Former Underrepresented Students to Speak: Former students, particularly those who are underrepresented, can be a powerful reference point and model for current students, in both bolstering the self-efficacy of underrepresented students and busting negative minority stereotypes held among other students. Encourage students who have successfully navigated your course to candidly discuss successes, failures, and effective learning strategies. This could be followed-up with a quick one-minute reflection paper that students complete in which they acknowledge their own struggles and make plans for addressing them.

Although we need to be careful not to inappropriately spotlight students (which usually results from us “volunteering” students), this can help underrepresented students to feel more represented and included. We can also use underrepresented student work as models, particularly work that reinforces the idea that there can be multiple ways to reach course goals.

Engage Students in High Impact Practices: Design projects that allow for greater engagement. Opportunities to participate in undergraduate research, for instance, require students to design, monitor, and adjust their work with faculty mentoring and peer feedback. I incorporate such research opportunities in my freshmen research writing courses to various degrees. As Draeger (2018) notes, “undergraduate research allows students the opportunity to become co-inquirers within an existing scholarly conversation” (para. 4). Actively contributing to an existing academic conversation, rather than passively reporting, requires a number of metacognitive traits, such as identifying and working to mitigate existing biases about topics, assessing what they already know or think they know, how to weigh and prioritize information (including where research gaps exist in the broader conversation), and how to adjust a research question when source material presents new and often contradictory evidence. I scaffold assignments with reflective components to serve as individual checkpoints along this path.

First generation and other minority students, in particular, have been shown to benefit from undergraduate research because of increased interactions with faculty and the institution, developing closer relationships with peers, and the opportunity to challenge existing knowledge and power structures with their own primary research contributions (Charity Hudley et al., 2017). These outcomes help to alleviate some of the most prominent barriers to an inclusive classroom.

Practices like these, in addition to reflecting on our own potentially excluding attitudes and behaviors, can aid us in shaping our classroom spaces to be more inclusive and, ideally, help further serve the mission of colleges and universities in recruiting, retaining, and advancing minority students.

References

About Us. (2011). Project Implicit. Retrieved July 7, 2020, from https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/aboutus.html

Draeger, J. (2018, June 22). Metacognition supports HIP undergraduate research. Improve with Metacognition. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-supports-hip-undergraduate-research/

Field, K. (2018, June 3). A third of your freshmen disappear. How can you keep them? The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Third-of-Your-Freshmen/243560

Charity Hudley, A.H., Dickter, C.L., & Franz, H.A. (2017). The indispensable guide to undergraduate research: Success in and beyond college. New York: Teachers College Press.

Margolis, E. (2001). The hidden curriculum in higher education. New York: Routledge.

Nordell, J. (2017, May 7). Is this how discrimination ends? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/unconscious-bias-training/525405/

Seward, M. (2019, April 11). Decolonizing the Classroom: Step 1. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/blog/2019/04/decolonizing-the-classroom/

Series Introduction – Ways Metacognition Can Enhance Student Success

by Anton O. Tolman, Ph.D., Utah Valley University Guest Editor

There appears to be growing interest among faculty and researchers on the topic of metacognition. This is evidenced, in part, by increasing research and published works related to the subject such as Saundra and Stephanie McGuire’s (2015) book regarding teaching students how to learn. Other recent works (e.g., Doyle & Zakrajsek, 2018; Bain, 2012) are aimed primarily at students, encouraging them to recognize how the brain works and how they can adopt behaviors and strategies that will enhance their learning. These are laudable efforts that provide a solid foundation for faculty to introduce to students thereby increasing students’ chances of success. Yet, faculty and others who approach metacognition only from the perspective of enhancing student learning strategies or behaviors (process metacognition) are missing the opportunity for a deeper understanding of metacognition’s central role in learning.

With a broader understanding, all faculty and staff who have contact with students can promote and advocate for metacognitive skill development in general education, course development, across programs and curricula, and as valued skills in students’ personal and professional lives.

Three Ways Metacognition Can Enhance Student Success

Here are three quick examples of how metacognition furthers student success as well as promoting the overarching goals of colleges and universities:

Fostering process metacognition helps students understand how they learn and promotes the acquisition and development of effective learning strategies across subjects (including General Education) as well as within the major. This promotes content mastery and improved academic skills and performance as well as transfer across knowledge domains, but only if the use of these skills is perceived as valued by instructors across courses and within the major. Otherwise, students tend to see this emphasis as restricted to a particular course or professor. If student advisors also encouraged buy-in of the value of these skills and their value to professional careers, this could also have a significant impact.
Metacognition reduces student resistance to learning. Students, especially in their first years, often see themselves as consumers, functioning primarily in a passive “student” role they know well and are comfortable with. Resistance to learning is ubiquitous in education and plays a major role in decreasing student motivation to learn. Resistance arises due to systemic influences (see Tolman & Kremling, 2017), one of which is the lack of metacognitive awareness (see Figure below).

Students’ lack of self-awareness of learning strategies, their relative effectiveness, and the ability to monitor and evaluate their learning (beyond grades) naturally leads to negative classroom situations, frustration, and anxiety. In their consumer or “student” role, pushed in part by social expectations and institutional culture, many believe that if they have put in good effort, they should receive excellent grades. If this does not occur, natural targets of that frustration are the instructor (she doesn’t teach well), the content (I’m no good at this subject), or the generalization that they do not belong in college.

Promoting student metacognition, especially, shifts the responsibility for learning back towards the student who hopefully realizes they can succeed by using better learning approaches and encourages them to seek help when they realize they have not mastered important skills or concepts. This also increases student motivation and desire to learn and can curtail the sense that they do not belong. Instructors, advisors, and others who emphasize the relevance of metacognitive skills in professional careers, or even effective parenting, can help students see value and meaning in using these skills in many environments and across their lives.

Another vital aspect of metacognition is that in becoming self-aware of their own motives, approaches, level of resistance, and personal responsibility, students begin to shift their personal narrative and identity away from that of consumer to that of someone capable of success. They begin to see themselves as someone who can be a lifelong learner and a learned person in their profession and in society. Taraban (2020; Taraban & Blanton 2008) described this process of personal narrative development as inherently metacognitive. In addition, Hale (2012) likewise explores the powerful interdependent relationships between metacognition, critical thinking, and personal narrative.

These relationships are so interdependent and so potent, they underlie the documented effectiveness of what are called “high impact practices” in learning and retention. A good example of this is the power of undergraduate research, an enterprise heavily laden with metacognitive experiences if done well, to shape students’ personal narratives and create a new sense of identity as a scholar, as someone capable of asking their own questions and finding answers. These experiences are especially powerful for first-generation and minority students as clearly described by Charity Hudley, Dickter, and Franz (2017) and the work of Tarabon and Blanton (2008).

Overview of this Guest Editor Series

Even with these limited examples, it should become obvious that metacognition is central to successful learning. The purpose or goal of this Mini-series is to explore several pivotal aspects of learning in higher education related to student resistance and motivation and to encourage all faculty and students to explore these boundaries. In the upcoming blogs, you will hear from the following authors on several important subjects:

Christopher Lee on How Metacognition Can Facilitate Student Inclusion in the Classroom
Steven Pearlman on Metacognition and the Fish in the Water
Benjamin Johnson on Change Instead of Continuity: Using Metacognition to Enhance Student Motivation for Learning
Anton Tolman on Boosting the Effectiveness of Collaborative Learning Using Metacognition

I will conclude the series with a blog focusing primarily on personal narrative and self-identity. Above, I noted that student resistance is a common occurrence in our classrooms. However, resistance is not limited to students. It is time that we, as professors, go beyond the constraints of thinking of ourselves as “content experts” and consider the broader scope of what we are capable of achieving by promoting metacognition in our assignments, our curriculum, across the major, and our institutions. We hope this blog series will help you see some new possibilities.

References

Bain, K. (2012). What the Best College Students Do. Belknap Press.

Charity Hudley, A.H., Dickter, C.L., & Franz, H.A. (2017). The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success In and Beyond College. New York: Teachers College Press.

Doyle, T. & Zakrajsek, T.D. (2018). The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain (2^nd Ed). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

McGuire, S. Y. & McGuire, S. (2015). Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Taraban, R., & Blanton, R. L. (Eds.). (2008). Creating Effective Undergraduate Research Programs in Science: The Transformation from Student to Scientist. New York: Teachers College Press.

Taraban, R. (2020, June 25). Metacognition and the Development of Self. ImproveWithMetacognition.com. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-and-self-identity/

Tolman, A.O. & Kremling, J. (2017). Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Identity Matters: Creating Brave Spaces through Disputatio and Discernment

by Marie-Therese C. Sulit, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program, Mount Saint Mary College

Six months ago, colleges and universities across America—and the world—shut down in an effort to curb the COVID-19 Pandemic even as the unjust deaths of Black Americans likewise instigated a call-and-response from administrators. Calls for racial awareness, couched within various campus initiatives under the banner of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” [DEI], have been issued to address and investigate variegated forms of institutional racism. As we follow social-distancing protocols on campus, how can those of us particularly invested in DEI continue to create a space for healthy and honest discourse within our diverse and divergent campus communities?

CREATING A SPACE FOR DISPUTATIO

In the opening piece of this mini-series, I bridge reflection with metacognition in order to address the place of the affective, and contemplative, pedagogy within the teaching and learning climate of a classroom amidst this pandemic. In this closing piece, I seek to highlight disputatio as a contemplative practice particular to Dominican colleges and universities like Mount Saint Mary College. “A method that seeks to resolve difficult questions and controverted issues by finding the truth in each,” the strengths of disputatio reflect its conceptual complexity in accounting not only for one’s “talents” and “abilities,” particularly in rigorous argumentation, but also in addressing “urgent questions of justice and peace” (A Vision in Service of Truth 5). In other words, the contemplative nature of self-examination inherent in disputatio is synonymous with metacognitive reflection or reflective metacognition.

The focus on “urgent questions of justice and peace” affirms disputatio as a tool for answering the call of the Black Lives Matter movement on our home campuses. More so, the cultivation of disputatio, as a “rigorous exploration of multiple ways of resolving a question,” necessitates a process of discernment of “the truth” in “truth-seeking endeavors” predicated on understanding multiple and disparate perspectives (A Vision in Service of Truth 5). This is to say, disputatio, by design, honors those diverse and divergent stakeholders on our campus communities–voices that must be at the table as we move forward with DEI initiatives at the college.

PRACTICING DISPUTATIO THROUGH READING LITERATURE

How we represent ourselves and our situations, in and out of the classroom, is both an interpretive and political act when we consider how we, as people, in particular situations, can be re-presented and/or mis-represented through our institutional structure and through our use of language within the teaching-and-learning environment. As a multicultural practitioner in literature, I teach literature through the prisms of history, culture, and society. I deploy the following steps that ascribe forms of literacy to the reading process with the understanding that the subject matter can reveal one’s conscious and unconscious biases as participants listen, reflect, and respond; one can only know one’s own position through understanding the positions of others.

Basic Literacy, or Reading the Lines: discerning the basic plot of a story on your terms (based on our personal experiences and responses) and articulating the “who, what, when, and where” of that story in our speech and prose, via in-person and computer-mediated communication.
Critical Literacy, or Critically Reading between the Lines: discerning the deeper meaning of the story on its terms and articulating the “how and why” of that story through the background of the story itself and our present historical, literary, and political moment.
Multicultural Literacy, or Reading Critically against the Lines: discerning the gaps and omissions of that story on its and our own terms and articulating ways of filling in these gaps and omissions by posing alternative readings.

Of course, understanding the multiple truths in this reading process is predicated on students feeling safe enough to honestly share the lenses through which they read. If we consider our classroom and our campus as “safe,” then that “safe space” can be fraught as both the common and the contested ground on which all of us stand.

FROM A “SAFE” PLACE TO A “BRAVE” SPACE: ENTER … DISCERNMENT

To further the contemplative practice of disputatio, I begin the processes of reflection cum metacognition utilizing “Crosswalk Prompts,” created by fellow multicultural practitioner, Dr. Paul Gorski. These prompts run the gamut in inquiring about all components of one’s identity: race and ethnicity, socio-economic class and education, to gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality. Students and the instructor respond to questions by either standing or raising a hand to self-identify. For example, “If you worry semester to semester whether you’ll be able to afford your college tuition” or “If an educator, counselor, or other authority figure ever discouraged you from pursuing a particular field of study or profession.” Students and the educator are required to look around the room to see who among them are standing or sitting. Thus, each individual’s subject positions are established from the onset for ensuing lively, and at times challenging, dialogues to be held throughout the semester. Given the sensitive nature of some of the questions, it is important that participants feel safe so they can be brave and share with the class. Thus, in contradistinction to the word “safe,” the word, “brave,” conceptually allows for one’s vulnerability and exposure within and throughout the classroom.

Applying the contemplative, cum argumentative, practice of disputatio, disciplinary parameters provide the structure to discern “the truth” and “truth-seeking endeavors” within a specific classroom through its course content. Metacognition constitutes both disputatio and discernment, thus including both a form of argumentation and a means by which multiple and/or disparate perspectives can be brought to light. Thus, the processes of reflective metacognition, or metacognitive reflection, provide the methodology for one and all in a particular site to discern the components of their own “baggage” between and among others.

CONCLUSION

Currently, the Mount stands poised on its own DEI Initiative, integrated into its Strategic Plan for 2020-2025, which includes objectives and focus areas guiding the establishment of Implementation Teams and their respective leaders, for the curriculum, the institutional structure and organization, and the students. Various co- and extra-curricular initiatives are underway to encourage and promote awareness about DEI, including a Knight Reading Initiative centering Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi’s Tell Me Who You Are (2020), a set of personal narratives centering on race, culture, and identity.

As this college-wide reading initiative unfolds this fall, it is up to each discipline to determine for themselves how to integrate these components into their curriculum. To facilitate this process, I offer tools for teaching multicultural literature through the steps of the reading process and identifying the subject positions of all classroom participants as readers. In moving forward, it is my hope that disputatio and discernment will guide debates and discussions of any particular narrative. It is also my hope that metacognitive reflection, or reflective metacognition, at the heart of disputatio will guide all our campus’s conversations as we continue to discern who and what is at stake in our larger work of cultivating justice and peace.

WORKS CITED

The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education: A Vision in Service of Truth. Dominican University. 2012.

Gorski, Paul C. PhD. “Crosswalk Prompts.” 11 September 2012. Hand-Out.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues—Megan Morrissey, Gina Evers, and Charles Zola—for supplementing my lone voice with theirs. I would also like to thank our editors, Lauren Scharff and John Drager, for giving us the opportunity to share our work at Mount Saint Mary College with the readers of “Improve with Metacognition.”

Contemplation and Service as Metacognition: The Dominican Scholars of Hope

by Charles Zola, Assistant to the President in Mission Integration, Director of the Catholic and Dominican Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy

High Impact Practices (HIPs) and Learning Communities (LCs)

The AAC&U identified Several High-Impact Practices (HIPs) designed to significantly improve student success (Brownell and Swaner xiii). One type of HIP is a living learning community (LLC) where faculty and students engage in a more focused and intentional way than is normally experienced in traditional courses. LLCs can take various forms, and in 2016, the Catholic and Dominican Institute of Mount Saint Mary College launched a LLC inspired by the heritage and mission of the school entitled, The Dominican Scholars of Hope (DSH) Program.

Open to all Mount students regardless of religious affiliation, the program cultivates the Dominican value of contemplation in the lives of students. This post provides an overview of how reflective engagement in the diverse requirements of the program heightens members’ self-awareness and actualizes their capacity for self-improvement and ability to contribute to the community.

Background: Dominican Contemplation and the Four Dominican Pillars

Study and contemplation engage all of reality in the pursuit of the true and the good for the sake of others. … Dominicans have engaged the reality of the world and sought a deeper truth through assiduous study and contemplation. Dominican pedagogy, then, is a union of study and contemplation in the service of truth, wherever it leads.” (The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education.)

Since its founding in the 13th-century, Saint Dominic de Guzman recognized the essential contribution that formal academic study and contemplation had in fulfilling the objectives of the Order. For nearly eight centuries, these values shaped the intellectual tradition of the Dominicans and the schools that they founded. The Dominican intellectual tradition articulates an intimate connection between the intellectual and practical ends of life mediated through community and service.

Dominican saint and scholar Saint Thomas Aquinas weighed the merits between scholarly activity and service. Reasoning that it is better to illuminate than to shine, Aquinas argued what has been gained in study and contemplation is meant to be shared with others: contemplare et contemplate aliis trader (to contemplate and to share with others what has been contemplated). Consequently, the Dominican ethos is structured around four main values or pillars: spirituality, study, community, and service.

The Dominican Scholars of Hope and Metacognition

The objectives of the DSH program are similar to those proposed for LCs in the LEAP initiative, but refracted through the prism of Dominican higher education’s emphasis on the four pillars. As such, the program has the following objectives: 1. cultivate students’ academic development through membership in a supportive learning community that is conducive to study and scholarship; 2. foster students’ personal, spiritual, and social development through community-building activities; 3. foster students’ character formation through participation in programs related to community service and social justice.

DSH programming aims to cultivate a contemplative disposition in the students, guiding and encouraging them to develop habits of mind and heart that align with the practices and outcomes of metacognition, cultivating awareness and using that awareness to guide actions.

~Spirituality~

The Dominican tradition understands spirituality as a means to gain deeper awareness of self, the world and God. In turn, self-awareness intimately links to the deeper existential questions of life concerning meaning and purpose.

Weekly meditation and journaling promotes this objective. Weekly meetings begin with time for quiet reflection and communal prayer. Students are provided a brief explanation of a religiously based theme, followed by reflective questions that invite students to consider how the values or lessons illustrated by the theme may relate to their own lives or the larger community.

After a period of quiet reflection and contemplation, students are invited to share their thoughts with the group. Student feedback varies, but often students share personal feelings of stress or anxiety related to school, personal issues, or current events. Other times, students express recognition of their limitations and see, in this kind of prayer or religious meditation, the means by which they find inner strength and resiliency to face whatever might challenge them.

In addition to the public, communal meditation, students are also strongly encouraged to journal. Each year, members receive a bound journal, with the expectation that they will use it to record their personal thoughts throughout the year. This type of reflection may be more compelling to students who are introverted and reluctant to share their thoughts in the weekly meditation period.

The experiences of communal reflection and journaling provides an opportunity wherein students are able to assess their personal values in light of spirituality. In doing so, they can recalibrate, redirect or recommit to their values.

~Community and Service~

Free to select the type of service event that best suits their schedules, members of the DSH are required to participate in three community service events per academic year. Afterward, students submit a reflection on their participation. The reflection exercise asks them to consider three main points in order to heighten their awareness of the impact of their service and how that might affect them going forward:

What circumstances or conditions created the need to offer service to others?
What impact do you see your service having in the lives of others?
In what ways has your service changed any of your attitudes about others, the world, or yourself?

In reading and commenting on the students’ reflections on service, I have been struck by how much the students empathize with the plight of those who are less fortunate than they are. Their reflection helps to engender a greater understanding of and appreciation for their own ability to help others, and, more importantly, a greater sensitivity to the needs of others.

~Study~

The DSH program neither offers nor requires any particular courses. However, the program encourages students to view education in a more holistic way that is not limited to a traditional classroom setting and major requirements. This objective coincides with the Dominican ideal that values contemplation as an “engage[ment] in the reality of the world.”

Free to choose from a broad range of approved events, members are required to write three formal reflection exercises per academic semester that are based upon an academic or co-curricular activity. Among these are communal field trips to educational sites, attending guest lectures, artistic performances, participation in campus workshops, or extra-curricular activities.

The reflection exercise asks students consider several points:

What did they learn, and did it relate to a subject they are currently studying?
Did the event make them more interested in learning more about the topic?
Did their views or perspectives change because of the event?
Will their future actions change because of what they learned or experienced?

The students’ papers are returned with comments and become part of their individual portfolio. At the end of the academic year, students review their portfolio that also includes their community service reflections. They then engage in a summary and evaluative reflection, considering how they have developed and matured through participation in the program’s requirements.

Conclusion

In my estimation, the end-of-the-year reflective summation best reveals the metacognitive value of the program. Similar to Aristotle’s definition of god as “thought thinking itself,” the students’ annual review challenges them to develop awareness of how their own ideas and values may have been strengthened, developed, or transformed over the course of the year.

Personal change and development rarely occur in one moment or due to one event; it is usually a gradual process. The portfolio review provides students the opportunity to view themselves over a short span of time using their own reflective narrative as the means to gain a better sense of themselves and the unique contribution that they can make to social justice and the common good.

WORKS CITED

Brownell, J.E., and L. E. Swaner. 2010. Five High Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education: A Vision in Service of Truth. 2013. Dominican Higher Education Colloquium: 11.

Training Tutor-Learners in Contemplation: Reflection in the Writing Center

by Gina R. Evers, M.F.A., Director of the Writing Center, Mount Saint Mary College

REFLECTION AS BENCHMARK

An institution that foregrounds “contemplation” as one of its core Dominican values, Mount Saint Mary College is no stranger to conversations around metacognition. I chime in as the founding director of our on-campus Writing Center. Our mission is to provide supplemental writing instruction, which we do through one-on-one, peer-facilitated consultations. I train and mentor a staff of seven undergraduate writing tutors, who conduct an average of 614 consultations every academic year.

As peer tutors, my team moves fluidly between learning and teaching as they participate in ongoing tutor training while simultaneously advising their writers. This makes training complex, as their roles as tutor-learners shifts to those of tutor-teachers the moment they sit down for an appointment.

So how do I know whether I’ve effectively trained my tutors to not only navigate their dual roles but also to be successful in the one-to-one teaching of writing? My benchmark has become reflection itself. While I certainly equip my team with the necessary grammatical concepts, rhetorical awareness, and writing process theory, I’ve designed this writing instruction within pedagogically reflective structures. Anyone can train in comma usage – no doubt a valuable communication skill – but training in reflection allows the tutor to determine whether and how a lesson on the comma might benefit their writer. When my tutors engage in authentic and honest self-observation, reflection, and ultimately metacognition during our staff meetings, they demonstrate the requisite skill to be effective teachers of writing.

TUTOR-LEARNERS REFLECT ON WRITING CENTER WORK

I asked my tutors for their insights on the role of reflection in tutor training during a recent staff meeting. During our meeting, we discussed assessment scholars Elizabeth Barkley and Claire Major’s comparison of student-learning outcomes to archery. Barkley and Major say a learning goal is an archer seeing their target; a learning objective is an archer aiming for their target, and a learning outcome is an archer hitting their target.

Applying this to the Writing Center, my tutors were quick to extend the analogy. The archer is one of our writers, who comes to us for assistance wielding the bow of writing skills. With our training on how to use the bow, the writer is able to hit their target: a “good” paper. But, as my tutor Leanna astutely noted, if all we do is teach writers to produce “good” papers, once they’re in a new environment they won’t be able to use the bow independently, making the target suddenly elusive and strange.

In his foundational 1984 essay, Stephen North notes that a writing center “represents the marriage of … [writing] as a process … [and] that writing curricula need to be student-centered” (North 49-50). In the Writing Center, it’s the tutors who tailor our writing curricula to every individual writer who walks through our doors. We understand that the writing process is distinct for every individual writer and for every individual writing project they undertake.

North understands this too, and that understanding fuels his dictum that writing centers create “better writers, not better writing (50, emphasis mine). That is to say, because curricula is tailored to each individual, and because that individual’s process varies based on their current project, we have to focus on the individual and their skill set – the archer and their technique in using the bow – in order for them to be able to navigate any future writing project that might be coming their way. In order for the Writing Center to truly support our writers in this, its tutors must be equipped with tools to assess and reflect on what each individual writer needs before teaching them that content.

REFLECTIVE PEDAGOGIES IN WRITING TUTOR TRAINING

For tutor training, my staff and I meet for a two-hour seminar each week. During these meetings, I structure reflection on writing center scholarship, reflection on the tutors’ own writing and writing process, as well as reflection on tutoring skills. The common denominator is clear:

Writing Center Scholarship. No tutor training program would be complete without covering foundational theories in the one-to-one teaching of writing, and discussions of the readings ask tutors to thoughtfully reflect on their own tutoring practices in light of the scholarship, thereby connecting writing center theory to writing center practice.
Writing Instruct-shops. A term of my own invention, the writing instruct-shop blends three modes of writing instruction: in-classroom instruction, the writing consultation, and the writing workshop. Using one of the tutor’s pieces of academic writing as the text, I facilitate these instruct-shops to simultaneously practice tutoring skills (borrowing from the writing consultation model), improve tutors’ writing skills (borrowing from the writing workshop model), and gain fluency with the identification and application of components of the writing process, rhetorical concepts, and grammatical conventions (borrowing from the traditional classroom model). Because the tutors’ works are at the center of these conversations, reflection on the duality of their roles as tutor-learners and tutor-teachers emerges.
Triumphs & Challenges. As a regular agenda item, tutors share the details of one recent writing consultation that left them feeling triumphant as well as one that was particularly challenging. We spend about an hour hearing these reflections and discuss how to revise tutoring techniques for future consultations.

It is pedagogical nomenclature to say that teaching, like writing, is a “reflective practice”; however, I can say with certainty that tutor training is an environment where the rubber meets the road. My tutors concurred: “It’s the reflection that allows us to become better tutors.” Even if you have a challenging session, reflecting on it and asking for help will give you the skills to do something differently next time.

TUTORS AS THE FIRST LINK: A CHAIN OF REFLECTING

The ability to reflect before proceeding is the benchmark of an effectively trained writing tutor. Returning to Barkley and Major, this means that, at least in my work, the target is teaching my students how to reflect before charging through the challenge at hand. Armed with insights from their reflection, the tutors are able to more effectively choose individualized pedagogies to teach their writers. In other words, tutor reflection evolves into tutor metacognition as they adapt skills they’ve learned as tutor-learners and then put them to use as tutor-teachers. My tutor Leanna calls this evolution “a chain of reflecting.” I build reflection into tutor training, my tutors think metacognitively as they transform insights they’ve learned into teaching strategies, and writers then have tools of reflection at their disposal for both their writing projects and the challenges of everyday life. Reflection is the ultimate transferrable skill.

WORKS CITED

Barkley, Elizabeth F. and Claire H. Major. Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, Jossey-Bass, 2016.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, Edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Fourth Edition, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 44-58.

Metacognition and First-Year Students

by Megan Morrissey, Assistant Director of Student Success, Mount Saint Mary College

MY OWN INTRODUCTION TO METACOGNITION

“But, Meg, how am I supposed to remember this stuff?”

I heard this question quite frequently throughout my first year in 2012-2013 as a part-time Academic Coach, a new position for me in higher education. The core values of my job included:

developing holistic relationships with my students
assisting them in feeling more confident as a college student both academically and personally
aiding in their overall transition to college life

Armed and prepared with questions and exercises I thought would help my students open up to me, I used an intake form that posed logistical questions, like their contact information and intended major, as well as questions that spoke to their interests and self-awareness. However, what became apparent to me is that this generation of students was craving skills that would help them retain information in more meaningful ways, and my focus was to support them in becoming more metacognitive.

For my student meetings, my toolkit included ways to learn and many inventories that tested students’ learning styles. Although these strategies might have worked for an initial exam, giving them a good place to start, these were not enough to help them fully understand key concepts they would be seeing over and again, throughout the semester, and the rest of their college career. They used the skills I gave them to cram information and facts in for that first test, and then they would push all of it aside to do the same thing for the next exam, never truly immersing themselves in the material and understanding the concepts themselves.

THE FEAR OF ASKING QUESTIONS

[In high school] “I didn’t have to study. I paid attention and got good grades.”

Prevalent in secondary education, the “teach to the test” mentality that some educators have is understandable. Being evaluated by standardized test scores, teachers and administrators feel the need to educate their students on exactly what to expect. However, what happens when these students get to college and suddenly the answers to the exam are not so black and white? When they need to defend an answer instead of just memorizing a Power Point slide? When professors want them to immerse themselves in the material? What scared my students the most was their faculty encouraging them to ask questions in class and/or share their informed opinions on what they thought about the material.

Coupled with an intimidation of new faculty, many students face a real imposter syndrome coming into college and feel as if they do not truly belong there. My students have told me that they “don’t want to bother their professors” or are afraid of asking “dumb questions” and risk having faculty look at them in a negative way. My students also struggled with figuring out specifically how to word questions to faculty to get the clarification they need. In order to help them with this task, I would ask them in our meetings to explain what they might be having trouble with in class, asking my own questions to ensure I understood what they needed. Then, we would do a role-play:

My students play their professor, and I play the student.
They give me the absolute worst things that they think their faculty might say and I, in turn, show them how to navigate the situation and get their questions answered.
We then switch roles so that they can practice and anticipate their own reactions and responses.

HOW DO HIGH-ACHIEVING STUDENTS DO IT?

The role-playing exercises I used with my students to ease their anxiety in relating to their faculty led me to think more about how other higher achieving students were able to perform at such a caliber. A study from Iowa State University investigated academic achievement, achievement goals and beliefs about learning surrounding study strategies. The researchers concluded that competence, it seems, can be found both through performance, i.e. the results of an exam or quiz, and through reflection in comparing the actual results achieved to their own expectations (Geller et. al., 2018). Four patterns of achievement goals constitute the development of student competence:

They cultivate a personal sense of having learned the material.
They create the greatest link with metacognitive skills.
They monitor their own progress.
They adjust their study habits accordingly.

To achieve more, successful students engaged in metacognition, assessing the work they have already successfully retained, creating questions to more accurately understand the material they have yet to master and adjusting as needed. They also relied on study skills that included self-testing and planning out their study schedules to avoid procrastinating and cramming.

SUPPORTING STUDENTS WITH ANXIETY

In order to address a rise in the number of students with anxiety-related health issues, we deploy a reverse design in developing several strategies to help them cope. I assist them in the following tasks and activities:

creating a structured study schedule, working backwards from when their exam is, breaking down how much material they feel they can handle in a day, and
rehearsing, i.e. going to the actual classroom, when empty, and creating a practice test (using questions from their professors, textbooks and/or the internet), having them sit in their seat, and taking the practice test in the time they’re usually allotted. This activity not only facilitates the comprehension of the test material, but also anticipates the coping mechanisms they will use in case they get anxious, e.g. deep breathing, repeating a mantra they have created, and scanning the test to see what answers they absolutely know. This process of focusing awareness on their state of mind (specifically looking at when, where, how and why their anxiety peaks) and then using that to adjust their behaviors is another form of metacognition.

HOW CAN FACULTY HELP?

“If metacognition is the answer to being a more engaged and high achieving learner, what strategies can be utilized in class to better assist them in engaging in metacognition?”

Instructors can be powerful influencers by incorporating strategies in their courses and explicitly encouraging metacognitive practices. A study done by Wilson and Bai (2010) at the University of Central Florida concluded that educators need to make metacognition a priority in their lessons and demonstrate the flexibility of these learning strategies in order to show students that they need to reflect and think about how they are retaining information. These reflections can include the following:

active discussions and think-alouds
asking students to hand in questions anonymously before class—concepts, ideas, and points-of information—that they may not have understood from the previous lesson and/or homework assignment
incorporating reflective writing at the end of each class session and to guide them in making connections in what they have been learning

CONCLUSION

My students often come into my office during the first few days of their new journey at our institution. Their emotions are raw and they’re terrified of making any type of mistake. In bridging reflective practices with the development of students’ metacognitive skills, the power, for me, lies in asking purposeful, thoughtful questions and, thus, guiding them as they confront their fear of asking questions and learn to ask questions themselves. Metacognitive skills assist them in building self-confidence in and out of the classroom.

WORKS CITED

Geller, Jason, et al. “Study strategies and beliefs about learning as a function of academic achivement and achievement goals.” Memory (2018): 8. Article.

Wilson, Nancy S. and Haiyan Bai. “The relationships and impact of teachers’ metacognitive knowledge and pedagogical understandings of metacognition.” Metacognition Learning (2010): 20. Study.

Reflection Matters: Using Metacognition to Track a Moving Target

INTRODUCTION: A CALL FOR CONTEMPLATIVE PEDAGOGY

“Study: one must truly learn how to do it.”—Fr. Guido Vergauwen, OP

Everyday mitigating factors, such as distractions, pressures, insecurities and anxieties, can become manifest in the teaching-and-learning classroom climate on the parts of both instructors and students and, thus, can exacerbate the challenges that all already face in that place. However, the philosophy and praxis of contemplative pedagogy allows everyone to focus on the present and engage in the moment in order to address whatever needs tending to in that instant.

The practices of contemplative pedagogy creates a space within one’s intellectual and emotional reactions to course content and/or whatever informs one’s engagement therein—be it a spoken or written remark, a difficult topic, or an emerging theme. These practices bridge reflection (or contemplation), as the serious consideration of one’s thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, with metacognition, which highlights the awareness and understanding of one’s thought processes in the development of one’s skills sets. Integrating reflection with metacognition holds the potential in creating a rich teaching-and-learning environment.

AN ANALOGY: TARGET PRACTICE

In order to create and cultivate this kind of climate and culture, I draw upon Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire H. Major’s analogy of target practice, in Learning Assessment Techniques (2015). Here, Barkley and Major differentiate Goals (broader plans) and Objectives (steps, methods, and tools in achieving goals) from Outcomes (the results from the execution and delivery of objectives)—all of which are applicable outside of higher education.

Teaching & Learning Goals: See the target.

Teaching & Learning Objectives: Aim for the target.

Teaching & Learning Outcomes: Hit the target.

While I can establish these determinants for any class in which I find myself, what is essential is that the students articulate their own determinants for any class in which they find themselves with me. Within the first week of classes, I deploy a set of assignments that connect reflection with metacognition:

a questionnaire for creating a climate for teaching and learning that asks the students various questions that account for best and worst practices on the parts of students and instructors;
a set of diagnostic paragraphs that require the students to reflect on their perceptions of self and others, and study habits and lifestyle issues that may affect their course;
guidelines that determine what failure and success looks and feels like from the students’ perspectives.

Here, allow me to extend Barkley and Major’s useful metaphor of target practice in emphasizing that the practice itself anticipates two goals: cultivating a sense of discipline through practice and hitting the target. In her Faculty Focus essay, “Enhancing Learning through Zest, Grit and Sweat,” Lolita Paff applies these terms to the teaching and learning opportunities and practices that inform our pedagogy (November 14, 2018).

zest equates with the cultivation of curiosity;
grit represents the tenacity in meeting a challenge;
sweat embodies the work ethic embodied in the intellectual labor itself.

For instructor and student alike, motivation itself informs zest, grit and sweat as part and parcel of one’s metacognitive reflection (or reflective metacognition) when assessing one’s failure or success in a course.

A TIME FOR CONTEMPLATION: PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY DURING COVID-19

“Listening is an encounter. And an encounter is like a crossroads—our own and that of the person who is listening to us.”—Sr. Jeanne-Marie de Menibus

Throughout the course of a semester, I adopt reflection with metacognition in order to gauge where we are with where we need to be by the end of the semester. On any given day, I check-in with the students to ask the following formative questions:

What works?
What does not work?
What needs to be amended, revised, and/or updated altogether?

However, this past March of 2020, the auspicious timing of COVID-19 with Spring Break necessitated The Pause and The Pivot in adapting our instructional delivery to the virtual arena—Pandemic Pedagogy—across all grade levels in the United States. Here, allow me to borrow the language of public health that guides all of us in this pandemic: the above questions, so typical for me at this juncture in every semester, compelled me to truly cull and glean—triage—what was and was not essential in the course in order to gauge where all of us—students, colleagues, family and friends, and myself—were at that time. Always, first and foremost, the need for authentic communication—a check-in—fosters a mindset that encourages simply asking questions, in a classroom, in a meeting, in a heightened conversation even as it also necessitates a slowing down to hold still and listen in contemplation.

Requisite course evaluations function as a Pandora’s Box of sorts insofar as their usefulness as authentic assessment tools in shaping one’s pedagogy while holding one accountable for their philosophy and praxis. Typically, and to counterbalance course evaluations, I deploy a closing commentary that asks student to reflect upon the course. This reflection, approached as a professional letter to me, runs the gamut of prompts that solicit specific pieces of information: the reading selections, the various assessment tools, e.g. exams (instructor- and student-created), writing assignments (low- and high stakes), and their own thoughts and suggestions for future students.

At the close of this semester, and in emulating practices across other American colleges and universities, I added a few formative questions in order to enhance the processes of metacognitive reflection (or reflective metacognition) in the following:

involvement or engagement
motivation or passion
a literacy skill honed throughout the semester
a new technological, practical, or communicational skill honed (in the virtual classroom)
a practice, an activity, or an idea for me to sustain (in an actual or virtual classroom)

CONCLUSION: THE GREAT PAUSE

How does one protest a problem without first mentioning it?—A Zen Koan

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.—Albert Einstein

In discerning what is and is not essential in a course, in going remote these days, the “business as usual” approach strikes me as intensely odd because The Old Normal was not always working, was not always effective, and was not always … good. Living in The New Normal has exposed the underpinnings and trappings of The Old Normal in such startling ways that for some of us tracking a moving set of targets—the curves of a pandemic, work-at home adjustments, updates in our pedagogical practices through technology—necessitates holding still in contemplation.

WORKS CITED

de Menibus, Jeanne-Marie, OP. “A Contemplative Listens and Teaches.” Towards the Intelligent Use of Liberty: Dominican Approaches in Education. Edited by Gabrielle Kelly, OP, and Kevin Saunders, OP. 2014. 99-102.

Vergauwen, Guido, OP. “The Charism of Study in the Education of Dominicans.” Towards the Intelligent Use of Liberty: Dominican Approaches in Education. Edited by Gabrielle Kelly, OP, and Kevin Saunders, OP. 2014. 89-98.