Reflections on Teaching Metacognition

For professional development, my colleagues and I are reading McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn, a book about strategies for helping students learn to be successful students. McGuire brings years of experience teaching and learning, and this book demonstrates her expertise.

I have found similarities between McGuire’s teaching philosophy and my own, particularly around her idea of teaching students the metacognitive aspect of learning. For the past few years, I have focused my instruction around helping students understand and name structures and strategies in addition to practicing them, particularly around peer review and annotation. The students’ metacognition of the type of comment they make on a peer’s draft, for example, helps them to offer more constructive criticism to help their peers improve. For most students, they have not moved beyond surface-level suggestions to peers. They also do not feel they are “expert” enough to offer more meaningful critique, so the exercise becomes a “check the box” situation. (I use the term “check the box” as a “going through the motions” exercise.) Many students see peer review as minimally helpful because they generally only offer one another some generic praise and a few proofreading suggestions (ex. the addition of a comma or capital letter). The student has checked the box: completed the assignment without finding much value in it and without offering much valuable feedback to the peer. The addition of having students categorize the type of comments and suggestions they leave on their peers’ essays has helped them to move beyond a check the box response to offering helpful and constructive feedback to peers in addition to helping to develop their self-editing skills. The meta-awareness creates an expectation of a variety of comments that are critique and help the peer develop the essay.

McGuire discusses teaching students about Bloom’s Taxonomy as a way to help student contextualize and develop a meta-awareness of the course material. I have been experimenting with this suggestion. At the start of this term, I completed a few of the recommended activities to reinforce the value of ePortfolio in addition to helping students to understand the way in which their college learning experience will differ from their high school experiences. I liked using the “Count the Vowels” activity on the first day of classes. Also, we frequently refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy, and students categorize course activities, noting the activities or projects that are most challenging to them. I am also trying to encourage them to recognize the difference between a skills-based course and one that is more content-based to highlight the uses of Bloom’s in their learning.

McGuire suggests teaching Bloom’s after the first test results are shared, because students are more interested in hearing strategies to improve at that point. Although I see the reasoning here, I do not like that McGuire places the focus on grades as the main measure of progress. I understand that this the language that students and teachers universally use, but it reinforces the idea that the external measure (boiled down to one number) is the “finish line” for the learning. Based on the way McGuire explains this, I know that is not the way SHE sees it, but I think the way we frame the value of learning is also an opportunity for metacognition. When we highlight the value in terms of “making grades,” we diminish the greater value of comprehension of the course material and application of skills. The focus should be on understanding the information in context. Students may then begin to think about all their courses in a new light, and they consider the value of not only the grade but also their understanding of how this course work fits with their goals and within their college experience.