by Dr. Gina Burkart, Assistant Professor of First-Year Studies, Department of Liberal Arts, Clarke University

My motivations

The emergence of AI in the writing classroom has reinforced the importance of using a mirrored practice of metacognition in teaching and learning. When and why would a professor engage or not engage in the use of AI for curriculum formation? Why would a student turn to AI for writing? When could it be harmful to do so? These questions have been on my own mind for quite some time.

I have always found writing to be more than a product. It is a tool for thinking; it helps me better understand ideas and who I am and what I think about in relation to those ideas. For this reason, writing has brought me a sense of freedom, release, joy and identity. I began teaching writing to help students experience this process and never-ending journey of discovery.

In teaching writing for the past 25 years, I have found that students come to college believing there is one way to write and to read—and that they are terrible at both reading and writing. They have fear, anger, dread, and a bit of hostility about their experiences. It has been my mission to undo all those negative messages in the first-year writing classroom. With AI whispering over their shoulder that they can conveniently solve all their writing problems and save them time—I must convince them that before they turn to AI as a collaborative tool in the process, they must first know their own voice and who they are as writers and thinkers.

AI can turn into a misleading, bad friend quickly. To disarm a bad friend and make ethical decisions, one must first know the rules, ethics, and have a solid sense of who they are, what they believe in and have a confident voice. This has reinforced my use of metacognition in the writing classroom—in my teaching, creating curriculum, and assessment practices.

Here are some of the theorists that guide me in my practices:

• Gee (2013)—Discourse leads to a better understanding of each other​
• Foucault (1988)—Self is formed through discursive practices​
• Bandura (1977)—self-efficacy is formed through several factors​
  • Mastery Experiences: positive and negative​
  • Vicarious: Observation of others​
  • Verbal Persuasion: Positive Affirmations from others​
  • Physiological and Affective States: Interpretation and understanding of physical & emotional reactions to situations​
• Marzano (2007)—3 systems of learning: Self, metacognitive, cognitive

The Classroom Activity

What does this metacognitive pedagogy look like in practice? In the Spring 2025 semester, I was more intentional about facilitating reflection in writing and creating discourse about this reflection in order to engage students in these self-reflective and social reflective discourse practices, which calls them into metacognitive awareness. For example, I began the first day of classes by reading the poems: “The Journey” by Mary Oliver and “A Way of Writing” by William Stafford. Students were then asked to free write for 10 minutes after each poem about any line of poem that triggered a thought, ideas, memory.

The free write was not about interpreting the poem or summarizing the meaning of the poem but rather about what connections they made to the poems. What was bubbled up in them by the poem? They were to write nonstop on paper—stream write—without editing themselves. I then asked them to identify themes from their free writes—ideas or words that emerged that they had not planned on or been aware of before reflecting upon the poems. I listed the themes on the whiteboard, and we talked about what the themes showed about our class identity. In so doing, students became aware of their thinking individually and collectively. They were being metacognitive. Interestingly, the two themes that most appeared in all three classes were freedom and voice.

Students described the experience as cathartic and as a release. They enjoyed the physical act of writing on paper. The experience was enjoyable and eased anxiety. This was an especially interesting discussion as the class was about to embark on reading together The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (2024), which makes the case that the use of technology has led to an epidemic of anxiety in the generation of students in my writing classroom. Could metacognitive writing and discussion of writing be a solution?

Following is a synthesis of how the theorists mentioned above guided my teaching. This simple exercise reinforced discourse as an effective way of understanding themselves and each other (Gee, 2013). It allowed self to emerge and form in the discursive practice of listening to and thinking in writing about the ideas of the poets in relation to themselves and then hearing and seeing what ideas emerged from their classmates’ free writes (Foucault, 1988). Importantly, it created self-efficacy, as the students let go of editing their ideas and writing, and in turn, found a release that led to a positive, affirming experience with their classmates where they observed and interacted with each other in discourse that was both emotional and physical (Bandura, 1977). Together, we used writing, reading, and metacognitive thought to arrive at communal understandings of self and other. The students learned about writing by reflecting on themselves, their own writing, and how it related to their classmates’ writing and the poet’s ideas expressed in their poetry (Marzano, 2007).

This first day of class experience began a writing journey that was repeated—as each class started with a 5-minute free write that reinforced the curriculum for the day and also called them to metacognitively reflect on self and other in relationship to the curriculum. Class writing workshops and assessment of writing in one-on-one, in-person conferences reinforced curriculum. They also reinforced progress toward growth rather than a perfect product. The result was a class that reported in final conferences a new sense of joy and freedom in writing and value for voice, humanity and community found through writing. Hopefully, these experiences equipped them with a strong voice and identity that helps them better respond and interact with their new friend AI.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. ​Psychological review, 84(2).​

​Foucault, M. (1988). The history of sexuality (Vol. 3): The care of the self. New York: Vintage.​

​Gee, J. (2013). Discourse v. discourse. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell.​

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. New York: Penguin Press.

Marzano, R. J. (2007). The new taxonomy of educational objectives (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.