Initial Publication Date: August 6, 2020

Book Club: Teach Students How to Learn

Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation, by Saundra McGuire

Overview

Before each synchronous meeting, we ask each participant to reflect on what they are learning from the book and how they have implemented, or plan to implement, new strategies. We use these asynchronous reflections as jumping off points for the synchronous discussions.

Discussion series goals

The goal of these meetings is for each participant to find strategies that they can implement to make the learning process transparent to students. The book has many practical examples.

Structure and format

We arbitrarily divided the book into four sections for the sake of the discussions, with one synchronous session for each section of the book.

Before each meeting:

Each participant reflects on these two questions and posts an answer to one or both on the discussion board:

What have you tried in your teaching this past week that you have not done before and that was inspired by the reading?
What are you planning to try in your teaching that you have not done before and that was inspired by the reading?

Participants are strongly encouraged to read and comment on each other's posts before the synchronous meetings.

During each meeting:

Participants share what they have done or plan to do with respect to the strategies described in the reading for that session. For example, during the first meeting, discussion includes how participants teach their students about Bloom's taxonomy.

Timing

We had four synchronous sessions for this book club, with the meetings at one-week intervals. In retrospect, longer intervals between meetings would allow more time for participants to digest information and implement new strategies.