Metacognitive Tactics

Ideas from the Thursday morning brainstorming session:
Tactics that support Self-Regulated Learning

Goal Setting and Monitoring

• Scientific article, looking at your own pre-knowledge; factors that influence what you accept as evidence
• Give students rubric at time of assignment, give student standard for comparison
• Work on understanding scientific method...

Strategy Implementation and Monitoring

• Small group observation (students observe experiment); seeing, observing, talking about, reflecting, modeling, communicating
• Reading newspaper, choosing strategies about how to read, looking for pre-conceptions, bias, point of view of authors, comparing preconceptions of students with author, extending into political arena, read and summarize, identify data and evidence, jargon
• Students summarizing what everyone else says, report back to class... Need to be aware to compare their own understanding with the group consensus
• Checking the rubric during the writing process

Strategic Outcome Strategic Planning

• Look at a piece of writing and evaluate from a strategic point of view; how is this helping me learn?
• Provide with outcome of final product, getting grade, feedback from rubric scoring
• Make comparison of what students come up with accepted geologic models; explicitly note that they are using the scientific method

Self Evaluation and Monitoring

• Routinely use JiTT, submit brief reading reflections, what they thought they learned or didn't and why
• (Perhaps use Moodle.... quick to read); textbooks have comprehensive questions but they don't do a good job asking "why"? Is this content important or not and why?
• Self-evaluation: why did I get the grade I did and what are the differences, misunderstandings, expectations; this is your opportunity to come to talk with me about how to improve
• How are the student results different or same from accepted geologic models; use this to self-evaluate
• Use teams to self-quiz; immediately following, teams do the same quiz, team has to agree on answers; coupling of internal and observation of peers doing same quiz
• Ask students to follow up with a reflective component; what they thought they were doing, why they got it wrong... Need opportunity to reflect on what the activity has shown
• Self-talk; model self talk for students then ask them to do the same
• Multiple choice test and justification of answer.... have some higher order Bloom questions within; provides insight into their understanding of the question

Further Discussion

• Self-evaluation should lead to different goals; how might we change the rubric to better reflect what you think the goals are? Cycle must be complete.
• Puts the responsibility back on the student...
• Elevator speech: here's a new method, it will take a lot of time, and I don't have much evidence that it works.... Need to come up with short speech about why we should do this to convince colleagues?
• Take away points: it takes proximal goals [baby steps] to reach distal goals [large-scale change]; it's easy to be intimidated by whole topic, what one new thing can you implement? New ideas and strategies that we didn't have when we came?
• Getting from hostility to grudging acceptance to "gee, maybe we should do this": bring in guest speakers, so that it's not just you telling your colleagues that they are crappy teachers....
• Co-teach with others; get over sense of stealing.... share with colleagues.... Evolution not revolution
• Seek allies... even only one or two colleagues can make a difference
• Topic for Friday: What is our "elevator speech"
• Large classes—how to incorporate techniques in large classes.
• Team teaching—all faculty show up to all classes; small group discussion session only responsible for subsets... writing intensive large lecture classes, required two revisions...
• Role of technology to open up metacognitive space; use a discussion board to step back and analyze postings on web. Talk about results in the 3^rd person, introduce a meta-thread of discussion, think about questions that are asked out of personal space, make that public, what are the questions we want to ask? Use separate space outside of classroom to think about thinking.