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Metacognition in the Classroom

The last post gave only a link to a post on math and metacognition. I’ve had a chance to follow up on the links offered in that post and wanted to share a little more detail.

Metacognition
Metacognition and Math: State of Vermont, Agency of Education, Post by Lara White and Tracy Watterson
Their instructional suggestions:
^Teach the concept of metacognition and associated language explicitly
^Require reflective journals
^Model metacognition
^Brainstorm solving techniques
^Estimate answers
^Practice careful questioning
http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-Math_Newsletter_Oct_2014.pdf

Metacognition and Growth Mindset: How to Promote Metacognition & “Growth Mindset” in the Classroom By John Mendes, Ed.D

“A crucial component to learning is being aware of our own thought process and consciously understanding how we process new information. This information allows us to have a better cognitive understanding of how our mind works, and this self-awareness will increase our overall learning efficiency. This insight allows learners to scaffold, using background knowledge and better utilizing learning strategies with focus and intent. Metacognitive skills are imperative in today’s classrooms, as we are preparing students to be tomorrow’s leaders and problem solvers.”
His suggestions:
^Avoid a “Fixed Mindset”
^Model the “Thinking Process”
^Activate “Background Knowledge”
^Reflection and Analysis: “What Your Know vs. What You’ve Learned”
^An Environment that Supports Metacognition
http://www.readinghorizons.com/blog/how-to-promote-metacognition-thinking-awareness-in-the-classroom

Vanderbilt University: Center for Teaching and Learning
by Nancy Chick, CFT Assistant Director
Thinking about One’s Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

It is hard to do justice to this source due to its depth, but here are a few suggestions offered:
^Students’ use of pre and post assessments
^Creating a “Metacognitive” classroom culture
^Students’ self-questioning as they plan and monitor and evaluate their learning
^Teacher prompts
^Teachers’ self-assessment questions
^Study strategy questions
And, there is a valuable bibliography!
http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/

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Metacognition and Math

Here’s a link math teachers might find helpful!

http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-Math_Newsletter_Oct_2014.pdf

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Met Learning Foundation 5: Building a learning community in the classroom/school benefits all learners.

As a developmental psychologist (among other things) I believe that learning is situated in a particular context. In the best of all (learning) worlds that context would have a commitment to learning together. In a community of learners we can take on a variety of roles depending on the tasks and purposes we are working with or toward. We can be learners, co-learners, teachers and co-teachers. We can help one another to collect, clarify, organize, criticize, imagine and reflect on the ongoing learning. We can offer one another suggestions, feedback, support (scaffolding), and sharing a workload. I’d like to call this collaborative learning. So we will look at the relationship between collaborative learning and metacognition.

Collaborative learning has both a long and a current “history.”

Cooperative Learning
See, for example the work of Johnson and Johnson in 1975. See, for example : https://www.teachervision.com/pro-dev/cooperative-learning/48531.html

Social Practice/Situated Learning
Situated learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXOQ9rXzL_8 Cartoon like
Barbara Rogoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdh_GjBsphg
Pitching In: Learning as a Collaborative Process (1 hr. 20 min video)
Maryann Griffin: 14 minute “lecture” video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPeoGamcLU Ph.D.
Etienne Wenger, Community of Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn3joQSQm4o ***
1 hour + (apprenticeship) (1980s) community/relationship btw expert and apprentice vs apprentice to apprentice (expert too busy) call that a community
Communities of Practice in Higher Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR1MSaXlLI
Rogoff check out http://languageandliteracytheoryandpractice.wikispaces.com/SOCIOCULTURAL-HISTORICAL+THEORY

Learning Organizations
And even in the adult world of learning, business learning, for example, we have the example of “The Learning Organization” formulated by Peter Senge of MIT in 1990. In the Fifth Discipline he listed the “5 disciplines “ that are the core of learning organization work. Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, Team Learning, and Systems Thinking. Following the original Text and a second one, “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook,” 1994, Segne and his team authored Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares about Education, in 2000. In that text, the authors say:

The idea of a school that can learn has become increasingly prominent during the last few years. It is becoming clear that schools can be re-created, made vial, and sustainably renewed not by fiat or command, and not by regulations, but by taking a learning orientation. This means involving everyone in the system in expressing their aspirations, building their awareness, and developing their capabilities together. In a school that learns, people who traditionally may have been suspicious of one another—parents and teachers, educators and local business people, administrators and union members, people inside and outside the school walls, students and adults—recognize their common stake in the future of the school system and the things they can learn from one another.” (p. 5)
More recently, we have the work of David Perkins: King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organization (2003).

Disciplined Based Learning Communities

Each discipline (science, history, mathematics, technology, art, etc.,) has its own way of learning. But each member of these communities does not learn alone. I want to reference here the science community (disciple) as seen in the eyes of elementary school children and reported by Karen Gallas in Talking Their Way Into Science: Hearing Children’s Questions and Theories, Responding with Curricula, (1995), Teachers College Press.
….It seems sad that this notion of not being “good at science” lives on for many children today (and for their teachers), because after collecting data on science talk for 5 years I haven’t yet met a child (or an adult) was unable to think and talk like a scientist…
Since 1989 I have audiotaped discussion with heterogeneously grouped classrooms where the science curriculum is taught by classroom teachers, and not by a specialist. I have collected data primarily from first and second grade children, but I also have participated in talks in third and fifth grade classroom and have had numerous discussions with teachers from a variety of setting who have begun to work with this kind of science talk….” (p. 3)
What will resonate, I think, are the children’s voices: the tremendous potential for complex thinking that they embody when spaces are made for them to act in concert, and the ways in which their voices make us long to go back and be prodded to think and image as children once again. (p. 4)

There is also work by Gordon Wells and Gen Ling Chang-Wells on Constructing Knowledge Together: Classrooms as Center of Inquiry and Literacy, 1992, Heinemann.

Finally, I will mention Communities of Practice; and, to get a start, offer a link:
http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/

Communities of practice
A brief introduction
Etienne Wenger-Trayner
The term “community of practice” is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance .This brief and general introduction examines what communities of practice are and why researchers and practitioners in so many different contexts find them useful as an approach to knowing and learning.

So, beginning in elementary school, if not before, and following through high school and college and into the work force, collaboration becomes a center piece of learning. As I review the collaborative learning idea though a variety of frameworks and resources, my intent is to show the relationship between collaborative learning and metacognition. I hope to address the ways in which collaboration helps leaners to become more aware of and in control of their learning: i. e., become metacognitive.

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Metacognition and Empathy

Knowing a student means being tuned in to their feelings and how they perceive their successes and “failures.” Here is one relevant view on the importance of empathy.

http://www.baytreelearning.com/blog/2014/07/22/empathy-alert-teacher-cares/

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Metacognition and Scaffolding

There are many ways to think about knowing a student’s strengths and challenging. Here is a post that addresses those differences from the perspective of “scaffolding” and how it differs from differentiated instruction.

http://dbassett.blogspot.com/2014/10/i-usually-post-regarding-student-meta.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ReflectionsOnMeta-cognition-ForEducatorsByEducators+%28Reflections+on+Meta-cognition+-+For+Educators+by+Educators%29

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Meta Foundation 3 Part 2: Teaching children to “learn how to learn”

Foundation 3: What do children learn?
It is true that when we think of “what” children learn, we are usually referring to learning “content.” In the realm of meta learning, we also need to consider what children know/learn about their own affective and cognitive approaches to learning, their “learning to learn” skills. Do they, for example, know about attributions (why they are successful or not – how they “explain” unsuccessful learning?

Equally important is their knowledge of their own cognitive processes and skills and the role they play in learning. For example, do they know the role of attention in learning? Are they aware that they are “not paying” attention or that they are not being “selective” in their attending. Do they know that there are several kinds of memory: short term, working, and long term. Are they aware of the importance of transferring info/ideas from short term to long term memory? Do they understanding how to maximize working memory. Do they understand the concept of generalization, how to “transfer” learning from one context to another?

When they are given a task—analyze a poem, synthesize the information on pollution, critique an author’s treatment of “the cold war”—do they know what those “cognitive verbs” mean and how to—analyze, synthesize, critique? Do they know to ask for guidance if they don’t know what the cognitive verb means? How good and extensive is their “academic vocabulary”? Do they understand all of the “terminology” in a set of directions? (See, for example, Burke’s list of assignment words: http://www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/acvocabulary2.pdf

Equally important, do their teachers know what their students know about these affective and cognitive dimensions of learning? There are several frameworks for looking at these meta cognitive dimensions of learning. There are many research articles on attention, memory, and various cognitive “verbs.” I would like to focus on only frameworks here: Tomlinson’s work on Differentiation and my own work on “Diagnostic Teaching: CAERTONS”*. Both of these sources look at what makes a task difficult.

Tomlinson’s work was originally with gifted children. Her more recent work (l999, for example) that has attracted a lot of attention from teachers, focuses on differentiation within the regular classroom. Of particular interest here is reference to one of her 8 “key principles of a Differentiated Classroom (p. 48): “The teacher adjusts content, process, and product in response to students readiness, interests, and learning profile.” She says, on page 11, “Learning profile has to do with how we learn.” And then she refers us to the Appendix. Figure A-2 in the Appendix “provides some descriptors to help teachers and curriculum developers consider ways to modify curriculum and instruction along various continuums.” The Appendix lists 9 dimensions that can be manipulated by the teacher:

1. Concrete to abstract.
2. Simple to complex.
3. Basic to transformational
4. Fewer facets to multi-facets
5. Smaller leaps to greater leaps
6. More structured to more open…
7. Less independence to greater independence.
8. Quicker to slower
9. Clearly defined Problems vs fuzzy problems

Lastly to be noted here, Tomlinson writes in The Differentiated Classroom (1999): The Teacher Share the Teaching with Students. One way she suggests for doing this is “metacognitive teaching.” “That is, these teachers explain to students such things as how they plan for classes, what classroom issue they puzzle over when they go home at night, and how they chart progress.” (p. 33) In a later work she mentions executive function. See, for example: http://www.caroltomlinson.com/handouts/NELMS%20Brain%20&%20DI.pdf

A second way to look at these “cognitive” aspects of processing/processing skills has a more developmental framework. Basing my work on Piaget and other developmental psychologists, I constructed a framework to try to help teachers understand why learning was breaking down (Learning and Individual Differences: A Cognitive-Developmental Model, 1994). I suggested 7 dimensions of tasks that would make the task more or less challenging: conceptualization, abstraction, representation (remembering), engagement, tentativeness, number (working memory) and strategy.

Conceptualization: the ability to understand concepts and ideas that make up our knowledge base.

Abstraction: the ability to manipulate our conceptual knowledge—what we are able to do with our knowledge base: for example, to describe, to generalize, to infer, and to hypothesize.

Engagement: the manner and extent to which students engage in a topic/task.

Representation: the way the student takes in, stores and retrieves information; the ways a student demonstrates where she/he is in relation to the target destination.

Tentativeness: willingness to consider all of the relevant information before deciding on a response or completing a task or project.

Number: how man “pieces” of information the learner can attend to simultaneously (working memory).

Strategy: ability to use and manage the series of steps needed to carry out or complete a task.

The basic idea of this framework was to observe children as they “learn” and note if the learning seemed to be breaking down relative to the level of demands on conceptualizing , thinking abstractly, how the information was represented, and so forth. If the teacher could identify the nature of the breakdown, then he/she could: change the task objective, change the standard for judging “success”, provide support by facilitating the learner’s ability to carry out the task or “change the learner” by changing the student’s level of performance on one of the 7 characteristics: for example, learning to be more tentative or more strategic, finding representations that work for the learner, addressing working memory (number) issues. Since this was to be done on a task by task basis, the teacher could determine whether the “weakness” was in a particular skill (conceptualizing, abstracting, remembering, etc.) or the particular task. After making these “CAERTONS”* observations across several tasks and types of tasks, the teacher could see patterns. Teachers across grade levels K through High School and school districts in Vermont demonstrated the ability to use the framework.

My ultimate goal was to help students take charge of their own learning by recognizing when and why learning broke down, and to identify which processing factor/skill needed to be developed. If a student could recognize, for example, that he/she didn’t have a strategy that was working, he/she could change that strategy (initially with the teacher’s help if needed). If a student recognized that number (working memory) was regularly exceeded during a teacher’s lecture or class discussions, the student could ask the teacher for help in “controlling for number.” If a student knew that it was difficult to generalize a concept, he/she could ask or additional examples or check with the teacher about his/her level of understanding.

Chapter 2 in the Learning and Individual Differences text is “Strategy”, is introduced in the following way.
Strategic knowledge is the knowledge students have and use to carry out tasks. Generally students develop a strategy–series of steps–in order to carry out a task more efficiently, to make the task more manageable by simplifying it (Keil). When the “how to” of a task becomes routine, the student is able to focus more attention on the content. All learners have strategies; they differ in the efficiency, appropriateness and awareness with which they use strategies.

The chapter goes on to describe factors that influence strategy use and strategy management (metacognition).
The bottom line in these two frameworks is: How do we teach children to be metacognitive, to use “executive function” to take control of their learning and address breakdowns in learning. Of course the teacher must be tuned in to the affective and cognitive factors that lead to breakdowns in learning (Meta Foundation 4: Learning is most successful when it addresses both the strengths and challenges of individual learners). But that is only the first step. The second step is teaching children to use that same knowledge.

*CAERTONS. I inserted the O to make the acronym pronounceable, and to give myself the option of adding an “Other” factor.

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