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As a teacher with very little actual teacher training I found this article very encouraging.  It showed me that there are very effective ways to teach CTE courses remotely.  I've been struggling with the idea of not having that "hands on" time with my students this Fall and now I'm seeing that there are really lots of tools and strategies out there.

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As a teacher with very little actual teacher training I found this article very encouraging.  It showed me that there are very effective ways to teach CTE courses remotely.  I've been struggling with the idea of not having that "hands on" time with my students this Fall and now I'm seeing that there are really lots of tools and strategies out there.

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-Maria deCorpo
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/05/remote-career-technical-school-covid-19-pandemic/611047/

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(www.kqed.org/mindshift)
Covid 19 has thrown education on its heels no matter if you are teaching K-12 or higher education.  The problem seems to be that a lot of higher education instructors do not have formal educational training and therefore the switch to online teaching has been challenging to say the least.  I am fortunate that I have an education degree.  I not only get great training from RTC but also through the school district.  We must change our mindset of traditional teaching methods to effectively teach our students.
- Corinne Hawkins

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I have long been an advocate of the value of community and tech schools in our communities. I started at community college and I wouldn't trade my education for anything! I am also all for accessibility for all, especially those who struggle financially and see higher education as their only way out of poverty. I believe community college tuition should be free, and I am happy to hear this issue getting some traction on the national stage.

Amy Murray

https://otherwords.org/the-value-of-community-college/

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Choosing trade school over traditional college

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Choosing trade school over traditional college

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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/choosing-trade-school-over-college/584275/

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Is Adult Learning really that different?

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Is Adult Learning really that different?

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https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/adult-learning-theories

So often I believe that there are assumptions surrounding what it means to be an "adult learner" and how that shapes the content and presentation that we as educators presume necessary. There's a broad spectrum that all learners sit on and an even broader perspective that we as educators SHOULD sit on. Learner can be fun in a lot of ways if the learned - those who have the power of knowledge - use wisdom and grace when producing prodigies. As a generality, the educator has the power to enlighten and illuminate, we must do so circumspectly. -Ty

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KNEE-JERK REACTIONS:  A SHORT CRITIQUE OF SOME POINTS OF

SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING WITHOUT KNOWING COMPLETELY

OF WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT

Submitted by Clif DeWitt

"Self-Directed Learning” (“SDL”) is one of several currently-used theories of how adults learn and how to leverage such knowledge to best assist adults to succeed in the learning process.  The Teal Center (“Adult Learning Theories”) article featured in the course module “Adult-Learning:  Self-Directed, Competent, and Connected” (upon which this short discussion is based) quotes Malcolm Knowles in defining SDL:

SDL is a process in which individuals take the initiative without the help of others (italics mine) in planning, carrying out, and evaluating their own learning experiences...the learner makes decisions about content, method, resources, methods, and evaluation of the learning...determining their needs, setting goals, identifying resources, implementing a plan to meet their goals, and evaluating the outcomes.

It is also suggested that the Instructor assist the learner to “conduct a self-assessment  (again italics mine) of skill levels and needs to determine appropriate learning objectives” and, among other suggestions, “negotiate a learning contract (ibid to above) that sets learning goals, strategies, and evaluation criteria.”

I have chosen the portions of the definition of the theory that raises issues of concern upon my initial consideration. It is clear as established through articles such as the one consulted in this discussion, course evaluations, and my own in-person experience as a course facilitator that the time has long passed (if it was ever here at all) where captive students bereft of input in their education process is force-fed knowledge by droning professors in a “Paper Chase” scenario who apparently drone to listen to themselves drone, stroking their own egos with little thought if students are benefiting and/or inspired by what they are droning on about.

However, I have the following concerns about the definitions and suggestions presented above. In no particular order of importance (all roughly equal in raising concerns from my perspective):

1. First, SDL as addressed in the article gives almost no credence or attention to the importance of accountability or superior performance in meeting assigned tasks.  Giving a student excessive control (as differed from considered input) insufficiently prepares a student for life in the professional world in which one is evaluated based on established requirements the employee has little control in originating. In the best-case scenarios, the employee is given relative freedom of choice in selecting processes that are in their view the most efficient in completing the assigned task according to given specifications usually involving quality, time, and cost considerations. The employee will be rewarded for meeting and/or exceeding such expectations and will be punished in some manner for failing to do so.  Input is a good thing; “the inmates running the asylum” is not.   There is no absolute self-direction in the workplace. The workplace is not (as the classroom setting shouldn’t be) a democracy per se; the closest situation in the best industries and organizations is where the employee works under the direction, guidance, and assistance of the one they are accountable to—a ‘benevolent despotism,’ in a manner of speaking.

2.  Students without prior knowledge or experience in a discipline do not have the needed

qualifications to effectively determine their own learning goals and specific methods to

obtain such. In my discipline of Economics, all learning is cumulative; each subject and

skill has as a foundation the subject and skill previously considered.  One a basic

fundamental general understanding is attained, then the door opens up with the

student having a sufficient skill set to gravitate to specific interests within the
discipline.

3.  Again, acknowledging the benefit of giving the student input and a relative measure of

choice in the progression of the course (the focus upon the individual), the article, as far              as I could see, gave little or no emphasis in the importance of working in teams, where

The team is itself accountable to meet assigned tasks AND the individual within the

team works under a dual accountability, both collectively as a team member to the

party issuing the task to the team, and to the team itself in shared responsibility for the

team meeting the assigned tasks.

4.  And finally, the student “negotiating a learning contract with the Instructor” implies an                 equal standing between student and that does not and should not exist in a classroom                 setting and again does not prepare students for what they will be meeting in their                         future professional life.  Any professional Supervisor worth their position of oversight

will be open to and will welcome suggestions and feedback in the goal of improving

employee morale, which will lead to more efficient and successful production. A

productive employee’s suggestion will carry weight; it may even incrementally adjust

processes and procedures. However, such rarely or ever set organizational policy.

To my way of thinking, the student is automatically covered by as learning contract in

the form of the course syllabus. If it can be made better from the individual’s

perspective without adversely impacting the class collectively, any suggestion from

the individual will be given due consideration. IF the course procedure and standards

as specified in the syllabus are unacceptable to a student, they are free to choose a

course with standards and procedures more to their liking.

These, as stated at the beginning of the discussion, constitute my initial reactions to what I have read in the TEAL Center article. I look forward to seeing if my understanding and/or opinions adjust over the progression of the course.

https://padlet.com/message/teachingtakeways

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The stigma of choosing trade school over traditional college 

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The stigma of choosing trade school over traditional college 

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A simple article, but nonetheless impactful. It focuses on highlighting an aspect of trade schooling that as an instructor I am rather unfamiliar with that many students may be challenged with. Growing up for me, the trades were emphasized as a valuable highly skilled industry. I wasn't aware of the prominence of such bias were so common.

Although this article was written before our current pandemic, I think a quote that hit me deeply was,  “Perhaps we are in an era where that formula of rising out of trades through education doesn’t make sense?” I think that the subtext of this article as a whole relates to the changing times. By holding such a described bias, we create unrealistic expectations for students about their current or future classes. As the world moves online, the educational discrepancies between a traditional university and a technical college are dramatically minimized through a limited medium to deliver and receive educational content. As such, many unexpected challenges are presented to students that challenge not only their expectations, but their fundamental learning styles.

-Sam Schmidt

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/choosing-trade-school-over-college/584275/

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The word that came to mind for me while working through this module was relevance. Adults want their learning to be relevant to their current needs and goals in life.

This article leads to other mini-articles about adult learners at community colleges and things educators can do to help them succeed.

https://eab.com/insights/daily-briefing/adult-learner/adult-learners-who-they-are-what-they-want-from-college/

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What Adult Learners Really Need (Hint: It's Not Just Job Skills)

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What Adult Learners Really Need (Hint: It's Not Just Job Skills)

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I found this article very interesting and important especially since it talks about adult learners or those coming back to school. What came out to me is that all students even the adult learners need support from their teachers but also we need to embrace a strong "horizontal" support system which is peer to peer support. I need to think about this when I teach and emphasize group collaboration and support for one another. These are skills that important not only at school but in the workplace as well. This article has a lot of good points and what they have found that works for the adult learners.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/18/600855667/what-adult-learners-really-need-hint-its-not-just-job-skills

~Justin Ellis

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I found this article from Hybrid Pedagogy quite interesting: https://hybridpedagogy.org/tiny-maneuvers-on-changing-our-instincts-as-teachers/.

Weaver spoke of “tiny maneuvers” that she is using to pivot to remote learning. The main aspect of which is understanding hidden curriculum, or unspoken expectations of interactions between staff and students, and then making it explicit.

Our department has really been taking a closer look at our interactions with and outreach strategies towards students, and this article explains exactly why it is important to reexamine our behaviors.

Sara Cordes

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There is a scene in the movie Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould where Gould (played by Colm Feore) sits down at a diner and we begin watching him listen to the conversations around him. As the conversations shift, the camera shifts with them, and we see incremental little movements of Gould's hands, following and reacting to the conversations.

But it soon becomes clear that Gould is predicting, almost conducting, the sound: it's not that the interlocutors are reacting to his conducting, but he is predicting the rhythm and flow of the conversations in the diner around him, almost appearing to produce this flow. The sounds and conversations happen too fast for him to just react to conversations. Viewers can see that his hands are moving with, and in some cases, slightly ahead of, the next beat, the next line, the next sentence.

How does he do it? Experience, instinct, deep listening.

What do you do when a student comes in late? How do you react? What is your instinct in that situation? I used to react internally with offense: how dare she come late? Doesn't he know he's being rude? Outwardly, I might not not have done more than take an obvious pause while the person got settled, just long enough for all of us in the room to get right up to that edge of uncomfortability.

On Twitter late last semester, there was a conversation about what we do when students arrive late: how do we respond in compassionate and generative ways? Jesse Stommel asked about what he calls the "tiny maneuvers" of teaching - how do we use small and quick maneuvers to keep doing the work of the class and not to shame students? I know now that students arriving late understand damn well that they're late (and don't like it any more than I do). I know that they are up against a lot and that they have already sacrificed a great deal to be in the class at all. I've come to believe that drawing attention to their entrance isn't about good teaching, it's about power. Now, I just try to make eye contact or welcome them in with a quick friendly wave.

I've had to change and re-train my experience, instincts, and how I listen. I need to continue changing my tiny (and large) maneuvers: I come from a tradition much like Catherine Denial describes in "A Pedagogy of Kindness": a grad school training that emphasized not letting students "get away" with things, that assumed students would do classwork only under compulsion, and that unless we surveilled them constantly, they would cheat, lie, "slack off," and so on.

Denial's piece eloquently lays out the consequences of these tiny maneuvers of suspicion: "Students didn't communicate with me easily, since many of them didn't see the point. They knew (I realize now) that I approached them with suspicion, and so returned that sentiment in kind." The consequence is absence: absence of relationship, of trust in the work of the class. This becomes dangerously amplified in the kind of school where I now teach, an "access college" where many of our students come from social, cultural, and economic locations that don't necessarily trust institutions and don't have the benevolent/beneficial relationships with them that might (at least partially) ameliorate the lack of student-teacher trust. But like many of my grad school and current colleagues, I didn't attend an access school as an undergrad, and my PhD program actively discouraged us from applying to community colleges. The schools were not seen as "desirable" places to work for a number reasons based on strong, but mistaken, presumptions: the common feeling was that the teaching load was too high, the students were not good enough to mentor, the students lacked familiarity with the "hidden curriculum" of college and were therefore harder to teach, potential colleagues at these schools were professional washouts or failures, and so on. God help those who actively chose to work at one of these schools - the prevailing assumption was that our dissertations must not be that good, we were tired, or maybe we just gave up trying for a "real" academic job, involving mostly research and publishing in the "best" journals. While coordinators of my department's job placement efforts started to shift approaches in later years, these beliefs are still quite common.

Despite these attitudes, my PhD program had comparatively good training for graduate assistants, through cohorts and seminars where we talked about teaching undergraduates. I was lucky to have a teaching mentor who guided my cohort away from the worst of the possible pre-professor training. The common sentiment was that if students were always trying to get away with something, or would never do the reading, then we could at least build and develop pedagogical skills which disincentivised "bad studenting" and which helped students do well. We had good discussions about active learning, building and scaffolding of writing assignments, and building equity in the classroom.

Yet, in a deeply telling example of pedagogical dissonance within a department, I was learning and applying some good pedagogy in my role as a pre-professor and teaching assistant, while at the same time, I saw that good pedagogy undermined regularly in the classes I was taking myself. The worst teaching I ever saw was in my PhD program, a traditional literature PhD in a dysfunctional and compartmentalized department. I witnessed three different professors insult graduate students, and even one grad student's mother. I witnessed cruelty, bullying, snobbery, technophobia, and outright incompetence (in even the most basic functions and courtesies of professional, pedagogical, or administrative habitus). Much of the "teaching" I encountered as a grad student was lecturing. Only rarely did I get that experience so valorized about graduate education, and so exalted as the primary model to emulate: the seminar where a small group of students sits with a professor and has a great conversation about a shared reading. Too often, the conversations in class were very emphatically not great: a prof might start with the day's reading, but then go off on self-centered, boring, useless, or confusing tangents, as though the educational benefit to us would be just sharing a room with them, simply being in their presence, or being one degree of separation from the "great theorist / scholar" they studied under, grew up near, ate dinner with, or yelled at during a conference.

No wonder students in traditional grad programs learn bad lessons about teaching and replicate those when they become professors.

This is especially true with syllabi. In reading Jakob Gowell's piece on the syllabus as metaphor, I'm struck by the fact that my own metaphors for this odd document are both unstable and confused. For years, I tried to navigate some middle way, some compromise between the conflicting messages I got from grad school about teaching, and the lessons from experiences teaching in a range of institutions (access schools, art schools, SLACs, and state universities). This ambivalence, the grand and tiny maneuvers, got baked into my syllabi.

How many of us closely read our own syllabi, not for typos but for pedagogy? How many of us think about the subtle and overt messages they send to our students? (For a necessary student voice here, read this take on what students hear in their class syllabi). What are the tiny and large maneuvers embedded there? What curriculum is hidden there? New grad students are given syllabi to emulate, policies to copy and paste into our own. As new professors, we see these templates as part of the new job, and we continue to dutifully copy and paste. If we're adjuncts, we don't often have a choice but to fully adopt departmental syllabi. As I've moved from school to school, these patches of language got pasted in, overlapping with other patches, a palimpsest of intergenerational finger-wagging.

In the "Social Justice and the Curriculum" class at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2019, taught by Jesse Stommel and Sara Goldrick-Rab, my cohort did an exercise where we read our own syllabi critically, and people volunteered to put theirs up on the screen. We commented on our colleagues' syllabi and then turned to our own. We practiced reading a statement out loud and recited "because I said so" after each policy directive. The experience of reading my syllabus, which is (like many) an exquisite corpse of lines from official departmental or school policies and statements, as well as administrivia / legalese designed not for readability but for covering-your-ass, was sobering, as I tweeted: "Redoing my syllabus to align more with my open & critical pedagogy: every few minutes, I whisper softly to myself 'God, I'm an ASShole.'"

The pedagogy reflected in my syllabus was not open, not critical, and not kind. It was heartbreakingly reminiscent of my grad school experiences. It was reflective of what I've come to see as a sad truth about graduate education: in its traditional forms and modes, as so many including Lee Skallerup-Bessette have shown, it's not a sustainable model for good pedagogy. I'll say it plainer: traditional graduate degrees encourage their graduates to see surveilling students, complaining about them and their writing, shaming them, and lecturing to them as good "teaching."

It is hard and labor-intensive to overcome those instincts, experiences, and listening habits. To do so in ways that give up my own power as an expert or as a judge of excellence goes against much of my early training - training that I now reject, yet which is still ingrained in me. An important part of my teaching now is making the hidden curriculum of college explicit for my students, even though that unearthing of buried assumptions about mine and my students' academic selves is very difficult. But what I risk by not retraining, by not checking my beliefs, is so much more: I risk the absence of relationships with my students, I risk the absence of trust in our work together, and I risk undermining all of my other compassionate, student-focused pedagogies with a few unconsidered habits (or cut and pasted patches) so many of us have picked up from our own educations. Given how much I know now about what college students have to deal with to be students (more of them are first-generation, are caretakers, are working, are dealing with reduced access to services, and are dealing with the new economics of college) my tolerance for that risk is getting lower and lower.

So how have my tiny maneuvers changed? (I drafted this piece in Winter 2019 before the "pivot" to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 and am finishing edits on it during the "pandemic pivot," so this question is even more urgent. I now try to reply to each student who emails/chats/vids with me: "How are you doing? How is your family? What do you need?") Like there is no writing in general (see Elizabeth Wardle's great essay on this), there is no classroom in general, and part of rehoning my instinct is to get to know - to experience - each class in particular. We have to listen to our actual students: what's going on with students, their children, or their families? With students who are consistently late? What's going on in terms of traffic or weather? When is it good to extend one's patience? What is the lived experience of getting to class each day, especially for my students at my school? What do they need to be good students? What do they hear in our syllabi? Finally, how can we train our own experiences, instincts, and listening so that we can work with and enjoy the particular musics of conversations with our students?

Hybrid Pedagogy is run by a volunteer staff who work many hours each week to develop the articles and educational partnerships the journal is known for. Hybrid Pedagogy is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that operates on a small budget yet has lofty goals. We rely on support from readers like you to keep our lights on, our presses running, and our editors happy. Donations are tax-deductible and easy to make. Click here to support the journal to the extent you are able.

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Tiny Maneuvers: On Changing Our Instincts as Teachers

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There is a scene in the movie Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould where Gould (played by Colm Feore) sits down at a diner and we begin watching him listen to the conversations around him. As the conversations shift, the camera shifts with them, and we see incremental little movements of Gould's hands, following and reacting to the conversations.

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"We must regularly ask, not only ‘What are you learning?’ but ‘How are you learning?’ We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches.”

I enjoyed this article because it helps to remind me not only to remember what I am teaching adult learners but how I am teaching adult learners.  I've worked with many students in the past on discussions of 'how they are learning' and I find it is then that they realize that they 'just got through high school' and perhaps didn't learn the study techniques that they needed in order to be successful.  Utilizing Reading Apprenticeship techniques in the classroom, or teaching students to think about how they think/learn has been helpful for me as a 'I don't know I just know' type of learner to explain how I got to the answer that I did, and then walk students through a way to approach situations.

Sarah Hoaglin

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Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One's Thinking

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). In How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences' synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a "'metacognitive' approach to instruction" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18).

Metacognitive practices increase students' abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991). They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts. When Pintrich (2002) asserts that "Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them" (p. 222), notice the students must "know about" these strategies, not just practice them. As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a " conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]" (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognizing the limit of one's knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to "actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003). They found that "people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence," lacking "insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills." They identified this pattern across domains-from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters' knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians' knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84). In short, "if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong" (p. 85). This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities-to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them-is needed in many contexts.

Putting Metacognition into Practice

In " Promoting Student Metacognition," Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):

Preassessments-Encouraging Students to Examine Their Current Thinking: "What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?"

The Muddiest Point-Giving Students Practice in Identifying Confusions: "What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?"

Retrospective Postassessments-Pushing Students to Recognize Conceptual Change: "Before this course, I thought evolution was... Now I think that evolution is ...." or "How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?"

Reflective Journals-Providing a Forum in Which Students Monitor Their Own Thinking: "What about my exam preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?"

Next are recommendations for developing a "classroom culture grounded in metacognition" (p. 116-118):

Giving Students License to Identify Confusions within the Classroom Culture: ask students what they find confusing, acknowledge the difficulties

Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work: integrate short reflection (oral or written) that ask students what they found challenging or what questions arose during an assignment/exam/project

Metacognitive Modeling by the Instructor for Students: model the thinking processes involved in your field and sought in your course by being explicit about "how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you are done" (p. 118)

To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:

Questions for students to ask themselves as they plan, monitor, and evaluate their thinking within four learning contexts-in class, assignments, quizzes/exams, and the course as a whole (p. 115)

Prompts for integrating metacognition into discussions of pairs during clicker activities, assignments, and quiz or exam preparation (p. 117)

Questions to help faculty metacognitively assess their own teaching (p. 119)

Weimer's " Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference " (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students' metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills:

"[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only 'What are you learning?' but 'How are you learning?' We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches." (emphasis added)

She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into " cognitively passive" ("I previewed the reading before class," "I came to class," "I read the assigned text," "I highlighted the text," et al) and " cognitively active study behaviors" ("I asked myself: 'How does it work?' and 'Why does it work this way?'" "I wrote my own study questions," "I fit all the facts into a bigger picture," "I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered," et al). The specific focus of Stanger-Hall's study is tangential to this discussion, ¹ but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett's advice (2013) by assigning "exam wrappers," which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like.

As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be "designed according to a knowledge construction approach," or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, "and it needs to take place over an extended period of time" (Zohar & David, p. 187). This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates' and make more informed choices, and render learning "less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students 'get' and learn and others struggle and don't learn" (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223).

Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is "not generic" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students' abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she's thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción's " Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition " (2004) includes his detailed "How to Read Philosophy" handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:

What to Expect (when reading philosophy)

The Ultimate Goal (of reading philosophy)

Basic Good Reading Behaviors

Important Background Information, or discipline- and course-specific reading practices, such as "reading for enlightenment" rather than information, and "problem-based classes" rather than historical or figure-based classes

A Three-Part Reading Process (pre-reading, understanding, and evaluating)

Flagging, or annotating the reading

Linear vs. Dialogical Writing (Philosophical writing is rarely straightforward but instead "a monologue that contains a dialogue" [p. 365].)

What would such a handout look like for your discipline?

Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts. Salvatori and Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle. Their "difficulty paper" assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9). Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses. In " Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses" (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations. The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to "clear the obstacles and move away from" oversimplified thinking about race and racism "to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms" (p. 14).

Ultimately, metacognition requires students to "externalize mental events" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what's required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes.

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1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam.
References

Adams, Maurianne, Bell, Lee Ann, and Griffin, Pat. (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge.

Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Baker, Linda, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In Paul David Pearson, Michael L. Kamil, Rebecca Barr, & Peter Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of research in reading: Volume III (pp. 353-395). New York: Longman.

Brown, Ann L. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer, (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 453-482). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chick, Nancy, Karis, Terri, and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009). Learning from their own learning: how metacognitive and meta-affective reflections enhance learning in race-related courses . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1). 1-28.

Flavell, John H. (1985). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Hatano, Giyoo and Inagaki, Kayoko. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In Harold Stevenson, Azuma, Horishi, and Hakuta, Kinji (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Lovett, Marsha C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In Matthew Kaplan, Naomi Silver, Danielle LaVague-Manty, and Deborah Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty. New York: Pearson-Longman.

Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1991). On mathematics as sense making: An informal attack on the fortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In James F. Voss, David N. Perkins, and Judith W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311-344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Weimer, Maryellen. (2012, November 19). Deep learning vs. surface learning: Getting students to understand the difference. Retrieved from the Teaching Professor Blog from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/deep-learning-vs-surface-learning-getting-students-to-understand-the-difference/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Nancy Chick Print Version Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice Thinking about One's Thinking Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess...

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Effective Methods to being a good welding Instructor

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Effective Methods to being a good welding Instructor

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This article was really interesting because as a welding teacher its easy to fall into the "you just have to weld a bunch" to get good at it trap. As a new (ish) teacher this article really helped give me ideas on how to help some of my older students to get engaged and excited about learning.
https://education.lincolnelectric.com/arced-online-resources/resources/education-resource-center/process-and-theory/the-six-habits-or-traits-of-highly-effective-welding-instructors/
-Elisa S

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Horace Mann was one of the major influences on education. He was also at one time the President of Antioch College ( Later to be renamed to Antioch University of which Seattle's campus is a part).  I find that Mr. Mann has two quotes that not only inspire but are relevant to teaching:

“Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.”

I find this true, because one of the ways to improve ourselves is to learn.  The other is:

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

This quote adorned the entrance to Antioch Seattle's campus until their move a couple years back.  But I think as educators ( either formal or informal )  we  struggle to gain that victory by helping others reach their full potential. Both of these quotes inspire me to be a better educator in and out of the classroom.

For more information about Horace Mann and his influence on education  click the image / link below.

~Tj Scharlau

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Horace Mann was born on May 4, 1796 in Franklin, Massachusetts. His father was a farmer without much money. From ten years of age to twenty, he had no more than six weeks' schooling during any year, but he made use of the town library.

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How learning emotional skills can help boys become men

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How learning emotional skills can help boys become men

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I chose this article https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/56268/how-learning-emotional-skills-can-help-boys-become-men
Because it really hit home with me because in his own way my shop teacher did this practice with us students in the 80's. And I did it when I taught high school and even now with my college students. If you teach and individual how to become emotionally open it will help them become better learners and deal with the stresses in school and their own lives. I always try and connect with my students on a personal level and that way it gives me insight on how to help that student achieve their best. And it also makes me a better instructor.

Chuck Hegsted

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What I am most surprise about this article is the learning pyramid because the average retention rate of lecture is only 5%.  I give a lot of lectures in my class :-) I must rethink.
https://www.leadingagemn.org/assets/docs/15_Workforce_103_CreatingEffectiveOrientationPrograms-CRasmussen.pdf
- Van Tran

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I chose to read an article from Hybrid Pedagogy (https://hybridpedagogy.org/the-human-work-of-higher-education-pedagogy/). I was shocked to see that only 12% of people that have gone to school for higher ed and even grad school graduates have taken a formal course on pedagogy. I come from purely a trades background so I thought that I was behind the curve on learning about all the types of pedagogy styles but it turns out that maybe I'm not..
When it comes to quotes one that I often use is "Any fool can know, the point is to understand" Albert Einstein.
- Marshall Link

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- Liz