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OPEN: Start with the music and logo in a wrapper (intro and outro).

0:08
John: (a couple of slides w/ IwM branding: (1) “What is metacognition?” (2) bullet list
Metacognition, it refers to an intentional awareness about a process. We’re all metacognitive to some degree, whether we’re students engaged in learning, educators refining our teaching, maybe professionals trying to improve our workflow, or hobbyists honing our craft. I guess there’s no way we could be metacognitive about everything, but metacognition can help when we get down to that real and often messy business of trying to figure out how we are going to achieve our goals. It’s that intentional awareness about the process that allows us to check in and make adjustments when we need to.    

Metacognition is not rote behavior, AND it’s more than personal reflection, or critical thinking about course content, or even mindfulness of the world around us. Metacognition requires that we focus our reflective awareness on OUR own INTERACTION WITH that goal-directed PROCESS.

Let’s look at some examples…

1:17
Lauren: (talking heads w/ branding in corner or next to name at bottom of screen – possibly interrupted by an image/slide if useful – background “Student metacognition”)
Something I commonly hear from students who are struggling to improve their learning and performance is “I need to study more.”  This statement indicates good intent, but it also indicates a rote behavior that does not address the specifics of the learning expectations or context. Simply “doing more” of something that didn’t work well in the first place is unlikely to yield a better result. When this happens, I’ll ask my student, What exactly do you mean by “study more”? A common response is that they “read through” their notes or the text. For many students, “reading” means “moving one’s eyeballs back and forth across the pages until the required set of pages has been completed.” Re-reading as part of studying often means doing this over and over until things “seem familiar.” This rote behavior leads to very little learning and can build cynicism about the value of reading. Instead, I encourage my students to identify specific goals for their studying before they start. Then they should think about what studying behavior might best support those goals and how they will determine if they actually accomplished those goals. They should pause occasionally and self-assess if they are making progress. If not, then they should consider a different strategy rather than doing more of one that isn’t working well. In other words, they should be metacognitive about their learning!

2:34
Patrick: (talking heads w/ branding in corner or next to name at bottom of screen – possibly interrupted by an image/slide if useful – background “Instructor metacognition”)
As instructors, we can be metacognitive about our teaching. I teach engineering courses and I seek to get my students to actively engage with course material during class. In one particular flipped class, students work through labs involving coding arduino boards and building breadboard circuits. Problems and errors can arise in many places and debugging is inherent in this work, but students are novices and have a lot of questions. Additionally, students are required to demonstrate their lab exercises for check-offs. My students’ questions and needs for check-offs eclipse my physical and mental capacities, overloading my ability to provide the constructive support I strive to give them. Experiencing this during class is metacognitive awareness – monitoring the situation and recognizing I am not meeting the goal for providing support to my students. To deal with my overwhelm I choose to prioritize students’ needs for help over requests for check-offs. I direct students to take a video of the check-off material to play for me later. I also have students sign up for help on the whiteboard to provide a way to work through the que equitably. This is taking metacognitive action to address the bottleneck; I am alleviating the mental overload and moving toward more constructive support through concrete actions.

3:54
John: (talking heads w/ branding in corner or next to name at bottom of screen – possibly interrupted by an image/slide if useful – background “Personal metacognition”)
I think about the ways that metacognition can help us in our daily activities. So, if I’m baking a cake with my grandchild, then a metacognitive check-in can help us realize that we have eggshells in the batter, we should probably pick them out, and when we do we’ll have a tastier cake. But I should probably also monitor my behavior because it is possible to have a really super tasty cake and a really miserable grandchild because grandpa had ridiculous standards on this baking thing. And, so, in that way, a metacognitive check-in could help me realize that what’s really important is that we have a cake that’s filled with love and with laughter and that’s probably more important than what it actually tastes like. So, in that way a metacognitive check-in can help us both make progress towards our goal (like having a super tasty cake), but it can also help us evaluate and clarify what we want our goals to be in the first place. At the same time a lot depends on context, because it’s possible that if I’m making a cake for a friend’s super fancy and very public wedding, then standards would be different. But again, metacognition can help us define what the goals are and help us make progress toward those goals given whatever the circumstances happen to be.

5:23
Conclusion: Patrick (branded slide with voice-over)
These examples just scratch the surface in practicing metacognition. If you’re looking to grow metacognitively, help your students grow metacognitively, or do research on metacognition, we encourage you to check-out our website at www.improvewithmetacognition.com or email us at improvewithmetacognition@gmail.com. If you visit the website, you can also find ways to contribute. Come explore metacognition with us!….(fade to music)

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