Practical Magic: Using Metacognition to Connect DEI Work and the Writing Center

by Gina Evers, M.F.A., Director of the Writing Center and First-Year Experience Coordinator

Metacognition as Recursion

One of my refrains as a writing teacher is “everything is connected, and it’s your job to figure out how.” Of course, the process of identifying connections between seemingly disparate ideas is a metacognitive one: writers must cultivate an awareness of how they think about a particular concept in order to think about it differently. And through this reconsideration, this intellectual quest to discover parallels, translations, or evolutions among ideas, new meanings are made and beautiful thesis statements are born!

While the process of birthing knowledge from chaos may seem magical, composition scholars have articulated it in many articles defining the writing process as recursive rather than linear. My favorite definition of recursion, because it is both practical and magical, comes from the work of Sondra Perl (1980/2008). In order to write recursively, Perl advises us to engage in three tasks. The first she terms “retrospective structuring,” or a looking back to what a writer has already written while reconciling it with their present thoughts and compositions (p. 145). Perl names the second task “projective structuring,” or a looking forward to predict the responses and questions of readers (p. 146). Again, writers use those anticipations to inform how they compose in the present. And here comes the magic: “felt sense,” a term (Perl attributes to philosopher Eugene Gendlin) and uses to describe a writer’s intuition about what feels right to them (p. 142). Perl argues that engaging in felt sense is crucial for both effective retrospective and projective structuring.

I argue metacognition is at the heart of felt sense; metacognition is the practical key needed to unlock the magic of that writerly intuition. And because that writerly intuition is crucial for recursive writing and thinking, engaging in metacognition is a recursive process while, likewise, writing recursively is inherently metacognitive. These theoretical connections became clear to me throughout my Writing Center work in the Spring 2022 semester, when I focused my tutor training program on anti-racist tutoring practices.

Connecting the Writing Center to DEI Work: A Beginning

To open our first staff meeting that focused on anti-racist tutoring, I asked my undergraduate writing tutors to compose and share a six-word memoir describing the first time they became aware of race. Here is mine:

I wanted braids; Mom said no.

And here are two from my team:

Middle school history class.
No one else looked like me.

The first and third memoir show personal confrontations with difference, while the second shows a more removed interaction, where difference is explained in an academic setting. This diversity is relevant as we consider how we think about our roles as educators with a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Each student brings with them distinct personal and academic histories of race and racism, and those histories take up space in our classrooms — even if we do not see or acknowledge them.

Examining this writing activity through the lens of a recursive metacognition / a metacognitive recursion, we see that in the present moment of the staff meeting, tutors were asked to look back to their earliest memories of learning race (retrospective structuring). For me as the educator, learning about the background knowledge of my students allowed me to look forward and tailor the forthcoming activities and lessons to the needs of my specific audience (projective structuring). The felt sense – what I argue is actually recursive metacognition / metacognitive recursion – then emerged through our sharing and discussion. In conversation, we reconciled those early learnings of race with what we know now.

Seeing the Metacognitive Recursion in my Own Process

The six-word memoir activity came from “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (2019) – a piece of scholarship authored by peer writing consultants at Oklahoma State University. In it, the authors describe the six-word memoir as a part of the anti-racist training they created for writing center staff at OSU. The authors articulate three goals of their training:

Cultivate a “willingness to be disturbed,” to disrupt our own individual ways of thinking and being that have continued systemic racism, which demands “a tireless investment in reflection, openness, and hope for a better, more fulfilling future for us all” (Diab et al. 20).
Create (brave) spaces where people are able to discuss issues and concerns surrounding race and racism with a willingness to be wrong, to call out with compassion, and to seek mutual understanding.
Enact mindful inclusion practices that support diverse writers and resist the writing center’s historical role in gatekeeping and assimilating for academic institutions. (Coenen et al., 2019, p. 14)

Looking Back

These goals – then and now – strike me as particularly metacognitive. The intentional awareness that engaging in anti-racist training will cause disturbance demonstrates a tutor’s willingness to take risks in their thinking and learning. Similarly, creating space for conversation within this plane of disturbance and “mindfully … resist[ing] the writing center’s historical role [of] assimilating” students into the academy both demonstrate contemplation about the ways of knowing we have all participated in.

Looking Forward

In order to honor Coenen et al’s goals in my own tutor training, I concluded my first staff meeting that focused on anti-racist tutoring by asking tutors to anonymously contribute to a staff Padlet. On it, they described ways a writing center – any writing center – could participate in, support, or condone racism. After doing this work, my tutors then contributed to a working document that listed ways our Mount Saint Mary College Writing Center could combat racism and resist complicity with racism.

Recursive Metacognition and Anti-racist Tutor Training

But what of Perl’s magical ingredient? Where does felt sense – recursive metacognition – appear in my facilitation of this first anti-racist tutor training? I knew my tutors needed a structure, so I adapted the six-word memoir activity. I knew my tutors needed to feel empowered with agency to create change, so I chose an article authored by their contemporaries: other peer tutors. I knew my tutors needed to understand how a writing center could contribute to institutional racism without blaming or shaming their tutoring practices, so I created an anonymous Padlet as a forum for this conversation. I knew my tutors needed to be included in creating solutions to correcting racial injustice on campus, so I allowed them to generate a list of action steps we could take as a Writing Center and helped us achieve them.

This knowing I am describing is more than an intuition, a “felt sense”: it is metacognitive awareness I have cultivated as an educator. And put into recursive practice, metacognition becomes a mighty pedagogical tool that can unlock thinking and writing processes for students and educators alike.

References

Coenen, H., Folarin, F., Tinsley, N., & Wright, L. (2019). Talking justice: The role of antiracism in the writing center. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 16(2), 12-19.

Perl, S. (2008). Understanding composing. In T. R. Johnson (Ed.), Teaching Composition: Background Readings (pp.140-148). Bedford/St. Martin’s. (Reprinted from “Understanding composing,” 1980, College Composition and Communication, 31[4], 363-369, https://doi.org/10.2307/356586).

Practising reflection with cognitive text-based activities

by Associate Professor Agnes Bosanquet, Macquarie University

This is the third post in the Reflection for learning develops metacognition series.

The aim of this series is to support educators and learners with their reflective practice as a foundational skill in developing metacognition.

The blogs in the series each focus on a different mode of reflection, with the aim of introducing a spectrum of approaches to reflective practice spanning analytical,

personalistic, critical, and creative. Each blog provides the scholarship underpinning the practice and shares a reflective activity to engage readers experientially.

There are many meaningful ways to engage with, and practice, reflection and a focus of this series is engaging the reader in a range of experiential activities.

The authors of this series are members of the Reflection for Learning circle. We have experimented, practised and researched Reflection for Learning for over ten years.

The question

This post asks: Where is a good place to start with reflection?

Reflection and Metacognition

Reflection is a learned skill and an ongoing process.

In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) describes reflection as a process whereby individuals try to understand “some puzzling or troubling or interesting phenomenon” (p.50). Those who are new to reflection can start with a form that sits comfortably within the cognitive domain: writing.

Written activities such as journals, diaries, and learning portfolios are well-established for documenting and assessing reflection (Brookfield, 2017; Harvey et. al., 2016). Written reflection is an expansive pedagogy – simple to resource, easy to adapt, and flexible in form. With scaffolding, students can develop their written reflection literacy (Chan & Lee, 2021; Chan, Wong & Luo, 2021; Cheng & Chan, 2019).

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Text-based reflection is a way of ‘thinking through writing’ or ‘writing along the way’. Thomson and Kamler (2010) call it “writing that is intended to sort out what we think, why, and what the implications of a line of thought might be” (p. 149). Students and teachers can articulate learning in progress – including “musings, unproven hunches, and still-forming hypotheses” – in a “relatively informal and conversational way” (Cook-Sather, Abbot, & Felten, 2019, p. 15).

What does this look like in practice?

Having students engage in written reflection can support their metacognitive development. Educators can also practice written reflection to enhance teaching and career development.

‘Seeking clarity’ is a cognitive text-based exercise that asks learners to respond to a single question. Ask the question: What was the most significant (useful, meaningful, surprising, etc.) thing you learned? Clarity of thought is a metacognitive aim and this reflection question is a strategy to achieve this. It is also important to make the purpose of the activity explicit to students.

This version of the activity adopts a strengths-based approach (Harvey, 2014) that supports students’ development of their metacognitive skills as they reflect on what they know and what they need to know after a learning experience.

Other examples of written reflection practice include: minute papers, five main points, the application list and one word at a time. Details and a template for these practices can be found in our guide and demonstration videos are available on our YouTube channel.

How can I learn more?

For more information, and to discover other practices please see our reflection for learning scholarly practice guide.

The online Reflection for Learning video series provides further demonstration of written reflective practices such as:

References

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd edn). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Chan, C. K. Y & Lee, K. K. W. (2021). Reflection literacy: A multilevel perspective on the challenges of using reflections in higher education through a comprehensive literature review. Educational Research Review, 32, 100376 .https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100376Chan, C. K. Y, Wong, H. Y. H. & Luo, J. (2021) An exploratory study on assessing reflective writing from teachers’ perspectives. Higher Education Research & Development, 40 (4), 706-720. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1773769

Cheng, M. W, T. & Chan, C. K. Y. (2019). An experimental test: Using rubrics for reflective writing to develop reflection. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 61, 176-182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2019.04.001

Cook-Sather, A., Abbot, S., & Felten, P. (2019). Legitimating reflective writing in SoTL: ‘Dysfunctional Illusions of Rigor’ revisited. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.7.2.2

Harvey, M., Walkerden, G., Semple, A. L., McLachlan, K., Lloyd, K., & Baker, M. (2016). A song and a dance: Being inclusive and creative in practicing and documenting reflection for learning. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 13(2), 3.

Harvey, M. (2014). Strengths-based theory and practice. In D. Coughlan and M. Brydon-Miller (Eds), the SAGE Encyclopaedia of Action Research. Volume 2 (pp.732-735). London: SAGE.

Harvey M, Lloyd K, McLachlan K, Semple A-L, Walkerden G (2020). Reflection for learning: a scholarly practice guide for educators. AdvanceHE, York (UK). https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/reflection-learning-scholarly-practice-guide-educators

Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books.

Thomson, P., & Kamler, B. (2010). It’s been said before and we’ll say it again – Research is writing. In P. Thomson & M. Walker (Eds.), The Routledge doctoral student’s companion: Getting to grips with research in education and the social sciences (pp. 149–160). Routledge.

The role of reflection for learning and metacognitive development

by Honorary Associate Professor Marina Harvey, PhD, Macquarie University, Series guest editor

This is the first post in the Reflection for learning develops metacognition series.

The aim of this series is to support educators and learners with their reflective practice as a foundational skill in developing metacognition.

The blogs in the series each focus on a different mode of reflection, with the aim of introducing a spectrum of approaches to reflective practice spanning analytical, personalistic, critical, and creative. Each blog provides the scholarship underpinning the practice and shares a reflective activity to engage readers experientially.

photo of a woman sitting at a desk and writing — *Image by Mario Hernandez from Pixabay*

There are many meaningful ways to engage with, and practice, reflection and a focus of this series is engaging the reader in a range of experiential activities.

The authors of this series are members of the Reflection for Learning circle. We have experimented, practiced and researched Reflection for Learning for over ten years in diverse contexts: including most disciplines, at undergraduate and graduate levels, and with students and teachers. Each month we gather and play with a new reflective practice. Those that work we further research, workshop, and practice and now share with you dear reader of the blog. We have found that you need to know your learners and adapt the delivery of the reflective practice to your learners’ needs. The story of our learning circle can be read in our guide (Harvey et al., 2020, pp 8-10).

The question

This post asks: “What is the role of reflection for learning and metacognitive development?”

Reflection and Metacognition

Reflection for learning develops metacognition

Reflective practice is incorporated into university curricula worldwide, and this is because reflective practice supports learning. Three key roles of reflective practice for learning have been identified: academic learning, lifelong learning and skills development (Harvey, et al. 2010).

Academic learning

Reflection can play many roles in supporting academic learning with a key role being praxis, as it enables learners to apply and build connections between theory and practice. Reflective practice can also underpin authentic learning experiences as it enables learners to make connections between their subject or course, their learning activities and their future work. The diverse range of modes of reflective practice and its documentation provide a variety of ways in which learners can document, or evidence, their learning.

Lifelong learning

Last century it was unusual for universities to talk about lifelong learning. In contrast, today graduate capabilities or attributes espoused by universities and higher education institutions make reference to their graduates being lifelong learners (Winchester-Seeto, et al. 2012). Reflective practice can engage learners in transformative, whole person and career development learning, and achieve unintended or spontaneous learning outcomes all aligned with lifelong learning.

Skills development

Communication skills can be developed through reflective writing or journalling and through creative expressions of reflection. Of significance to this blog series, reflection contributes to the higher-order cognitive processes of self-regulation and metacognition (Harvey, Coulson & McMaugh, 2016). Reflection plays a pivotal role in the process of self-regulation (Lyons & Zelazo, 2011). The relationship between reflection and metacognition is synergistic, reciprocal and complementary (Harvey, Coulson & McMaugh, 2016). The development of metacognition is supported by reflective practice by “making formerly unconscious, intangible, or reflexive processes or events explicit” (Desautel, 2009, p. 2001).

What does this look like in practice?

Having students engage in scaffolded reflective practices can support their metacognitive development. Educators can practice reflection to enhance their teaching and career development. There are multiple practices to choose from in our practice guide.

The “Minute paper” is a cognitive based practice closely aligned with metacognitive development. This quick reflective activity asks students two questions:

What was the most significant (useful, meaningful, surprising, etc) thing you learned during this session?
What question(s) remain in your mind at the end of this session?

These questions prompt students to actively monitor their cognitive processes, identifying what they know and what they don’t know. Details and a template for this practice can be found on pp. 40-42 of our guide and the video demonstrating the practice is on Youtube.

How can I learn more?

For more information, and to discover other practices please see our reflection for learning scholarly practice guide.

The online Reflection for Learning video series provides further demonstration of text- and cognitive based practices:

References

Desautel, D. (2009). Becoming a thinking thinker: Metacognition, self-reflection, and classroom practice. Teachers College Record, 111(8), 1997-2020.

Harvey, M., Coulson, D., & McMaugh, A. (2016). Towards a theory of the ecology of reflection: reflective practice for experiential learning in higher education. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 13(2). http://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13/iss2/2

Harvey, M; Coulson, D; Mackaway, T., & Winchester-Seeto, T. (2010). Aligning reflection in the cooperative education curriculum. Australia Pacific Journal of Co-operative education, 11 (3), 137-1 https://www.ijwil.org/files/APJCE_11_3_137_152.pdf

Lyons, K.E., & Zelazo, P.D. (2011). Monitoring, metacognition, and executive function: Elucidating the role of self-reflection in the development of self-regulation. In J. B. Benson (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior (pp. 379-412). JAI, Volume 40. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386491-8.00010-4.

Winchester-Seeto, T., Bosanquet, A., & Rowe, A. (2012). Smoke and mirrors: graduate attributes and the implications for student engagement in higher education. In I. Solomonides., A, Reid, & P. Petocz (Eds.), Engaging with learning in higher education (pp. 413-438). Oxfordshire: Libri

Student Well-Being Through Reflection and Metacognition in a First-Year Writing Course

by Ti Macklin, PhD, Department of Writing Studies Lecturer; Lilly Crolius, graduate student (Texas A&M University-Commerce); Harland Recla, first-year writing student; and Natalie Plunkett, first-year writing student, Boise State University.

This is the 2nd post in the Guest Editor Series, Metacognition, Writing, and Well-Being, Edited by dawn shepherd, PhD, Ti Macklin, PhD, and Heidi Estrem, PhD

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photo of a bubble floating in front of a blurred background — Image by dsjones from Pixabay

In summer of 2020, it was clear that business as usual was not going to work in terms of preparing graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to teach first-year writing (FYW) and for FYW students entering Boise State University. Students would likely be coming to class still in pandemic isolation and their needs would be unlike anything we had experienced as teachers. As FYW administrators, dawn shepherd and Heidi Estrem worked with Ti Macklin (an experienced instructor and teacher of the GTA pedagogy course) to develop a fully online course specifically designed to support both of these student populations.

This blog post examines the experiences of Ti Macklin, Lilly Crolius (graduate student and teaching assistant in the course), Harland Recla (FYW student), and Natalie Plunkett (FYW student).

Metacognition Through Reflection

For Ti, building the online FYW course, English 101 (ENGL 101), centered on metacognition as a means of supporting the well-being of all of the students involved in the course; both graduate and undergraduate. Her pedagogy focuses on the notion that improvement as writers comes from self-awareness, so reflection was built into every module of the course, with students working to answer the overarching question of “how do we improve as writers instead of simply improving individual pieces of writing?” The table below highlights the deliberately reflective elements of the course:

Class Activity	Reflection
Four Unit Course Structure	● Unit 1 – reflect on who they are as writers/what their relationship is with writing ● Unit 2 – reflect on how they became the writers they are ● Unit 3 – reflect on and identify the transferable skills they developed through the course ● Unit 4 (the final portfolio) – reflect on their learning in the course, examine their growth as writers and students, and look ahead to the next FYW course
Weekly Self-Assessment Journal	Students reflect at the end of each module on what was most helpful, what they learned, what they’re struggling with, and what adjustments they might make for future modules
Weekly Writing and Rhetoric Activity	Students are introduced to a new concept/term each week and, at the end of the lesson, are asked to reflect on how they might use this concept in the class and outside of the class
Weekly Course Readings and Discussion Boards	Course readings are designed to encourage students to reflect on their own writing processes, literacy experiences, and experiences with transfer
Final Portfolio Reflection	Students reflect on the culminating activity at the end of each unit and consider what changes they would make if they were to include this piece in the final portfolio.

All three students (graduate teaching assistant Lilly, Harland, and Natalie) were unaware of the concept of metacognition at the beginning of the semester. However, as the semester went on, they all realized that the focus on reflection was impacting both their writing and their well-being. Lilly noticed changes in the FYW students’ writing as the semester progressed. Through examining themselves and their abilities, and being encouraged by the support of creativity and personal interests in their assignments, their writing showed evidence that they were able to see connections between writing for our class and other situations (both academic and non-academic) thus cementing the concept of metacognition as a transferable learning and life skill.

The FYW students’ experiences were similar to Lilly’s. Harland began to understand the concept of metacognition about mid-semester when he realized that dedicating a large amount of time to reflection wasn’t something he was accustomed to, so it began to stand out as the course went on. Natalie found that, because the instruction on metacognition was subtle, it took a few weeks for students to fully understand that they were consistently doing metacognitive work whether they realized it or not.

Harland and Natalie also recommend that, even though it would mean adding more terminology to the course, it would be worth making metacognition even more explicit. Harland suggests that describing the purpose of metacognition in the course would demonstrate to students that metacognition can yield helpful adjustments in both learning and behaviors, thus making the concept and its function more obvious. Natalie adds that pointing out the overtly metacognitive work that students did at the end of each module in addition to the subtle work throughout the module makes this deeply reflective and challenging work seem much more manageable and possible.

Metacognition and Well-Being

When asked how their learning/thinking/writing processes changed as a result of ENGL 101, all three students indicated that their well-being was positively impacted. For example, for Harland, this style of learning shifted his life outside of class because he spent time reflecting upon the methods he used to think and learn. He specifically noticed that the metacognitive focus of the course boosted his well-being as it gave him a sense of control over the knowledge he absorbs.

Likewise, for Natalie, the focus on metacognition impacted her well-being by fostering and supporting her self-confidence in her writing skills and ideas. This boost largely came from when she realized that she was thinking of the concepts in the ENGL 101 course in her spare time and found herself applying them to other courses and areas of her life.

For Lilly, the experience as a graduate instructor within this class and learning about these ideas encouraged her to apply her learning in much more thoughtful ways. It made learning more engaging and highlighted how meaningful and valuable it could be, giving her clarity. Her job as a GTA became less stressful once she realized that there was a clear purpose for everything done in the English 101 class that she could use elsewhere.

All three students believe that their writing processes evolved significantly as a result of the course. Natalie went from quickly completing assignments within the due date to soaking in what was being taught and feeling more fulfilled and confident in her learning. Harland echoes this and adds that he became more comfortable with his own process, which resulted in a boost in his overall well-being.

As a student, Lilly found that reflection helped her to see that her writing was part of a bigger picture. No matter what is being written, she felt like there was a place for it in the world. Even if it never sees the light of day, it’s an opportunity for improvement and growth.

The Takeaway

In the midst of the isolation of the pandemic, people were turning inward and hiding from the world, which became a cycle of solitude and stagnation. The consistent reflective opportunities of this English 101 course introduced and amplified the notion of metacognition, thus pulling both the GTAs and the FYW students back into the world. By reflecting on themselves as writers, these students were able to connect to various places in their lives where they hadn’t previously made associations.

It is worth noting that this productive introspection took place in a class of 300 students in an asynchronous, fully online course. The students worked in semester-long groups of 10, each with an assigned GTA, in order to provide as much educational and human support to both the GTAs and the FYW students as possible. The reflection that Heidi, dawn, and I mention in the introduction to this blog series allowed us to rethink the size and shape of FYW classes while holding on to the essential elements of the course, like metacognition, that make a class a writing class.

Student Readings on Reflection, Metacognition, & Transfer

Allen, Sarah. “The Inspired Writer vs. the Real Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, https://writingspaces.org/essays

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165–185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358929. Accessed 13 July 2020.

Carillo, Ellen C. “Writing Knowledge Transfers Easily.” Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball & Drew M. Loewe, p. 34-37.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn and Roger Powell. “States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond.” Composition Forum, vol. 34, 2016. Accessed 21 July 2020.

Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980, pp. 389–401. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/356589. Accessed 1 June 2020.

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Source.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, https://writingspaces.org/essays

Robertson, Liane, Kara Taczak, and Kathleen Blake Yancey. “Notes toward A Theory of Prior Knowledge and Its Role in College Composers’ Transfer of Knowledge and Practice.” Composition Forum, vol. 26, 2012. Accessed 21 July 2020.

Tomlinson, Barbara. “Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting: Metaphorical Stories Writers Tell about Their Composing Processes.” Metaphor & Symbolic Activity, vol. 1, no. 1, Mar. 1986, p. 57.

Teaching and Learning Writing Together in a Pandemic

by dawn shepherd, PhD, Ti Macklin, PhD, and Heidi Estrem, PhD, Boise State University

This is the 1st post in the Guest Editor Series, Metacognition, Writing, and Well-Being, Edited by dawn shepherd, PhD, Ti Macklin, PhD, and Heidi Estrem, PhD

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It is not hyperbolic to say that “The Pause and The Pivot” of March 2022 has irrevocably changed the three of us (dawn, Ti, and Heidi). In particular, the pause, pivot, and subsequent rethinking of nearly every aspect of our professions has deeply affected how we approach our colleagues and the classroom. The three of us have extensive experience administering large first-year writing programs, as well as decades of teaching behind us. Still, the unprecedented changes brought about by the pandemic shook loose many of our previously held beliefs about quality writing instruction.

Throughout this intensive and extended pandemic period, the three of us have met regularly to commiserate, plan courses, brainstorm ways to support our first-year writing students and instructors, and develop new approaches to teaching. Our collegial, challenging, and deeply supportive professional conversations have enabled us to use the unsettled ground of this time period to prompt new growth for all of us. This professional growth has, in turn, enabled us to develop pragmatic and humane classrooms and relationships with colleagues. To be sure, we would have said our classrooms were humane prior to 2020, and they were – but we attend to the well-being of self, colleagues, and students now like we never have before. One of our richest strategies for calling attention to well-being is through metacognitive discussions that take place in our co-writing and collaborative pedagogical work.

Metacognition has long been recognized as a deeply valuable and critically important practice for first-year writing students and for learning about writing more generally (Hayes, Jones, Gorzelsky, and Driscoll 2018). Indeed, one of the most important aspects of a rich first-year writing course is not only content about writing and practice doing writing but also extensive reflective work on how, when, and why writing changes across contexts (see Gorzelsky, Driscoll, Jones and Hayes 2016; see also Moore and Anson 2016). It is in the thinking about writing that novice writers gain sensitivity to changing rhetorical demands. So, as the three of us have collaborated over the past three years, employing these reflective practices ourselves has been fundamentally important. As program directors (dawn and Heidi) and innovative course designers (dawn and Ti), and as colleagues and friends (all three of us), we constantly and critically approached all of our curricular and pedagogical practices through a lens of metacognition and with a steady eye on making decisions that promote well-being.

This has been layered, intensive, and exhausting work. It has also been one of the richest periods of growth and collaboration of our professional lives. In brief, here are some of the grounding principles we returned to and perspectives that enabled us to thrive in these times:

We can enable, enact, and model healthy decisions. As program directors, dawn and Heidi were keenly aware of the need to encourage healthier work-life choices but sought to make it explicit in crisis times. It was top of mind for us to encourage our colleagues – to give them permission – to scale back assignments, to cull their courses for anything that wasn’t essential, to honor their need for breaks in fully online/remote semesters. Our approach to leadership has always been reflective, iterative, and in service to others. We also tend to work more than we should. This moment required us to enact healthy decisions related to our own workload and self- care, serving a model for others as well. We quickly set up google drive folders for sharing ideas for moving online in late spring 2020 to immediately encourage informal collaboration; we sent regular emails throughout the pandemic designed to both acknowledge the deep challenges of teaching in this time and offer hope and strategies for instructors.
We can change course. We all learned to be differently flexible in this time period, and meeting regularly to check in with each other helped us make visible things that were and weren’t working – and that might need to be adjusted. For example, the three of us were excited about a potential second course innovation for the spring 2022 semester. But as the fall unfolded, we realized together that it wasn’t the right semester for it. So, we adjusted. And let go.
We can learn to live and even thrive in an environment of productive discomfort. Nothing felt comfortable in 2020-2022. We know that learning is uncomfortable, and we strive to help our students to remain resilient when things are hard, and we were forced to face both productive discomfort and trauma, by experiencing them in our own lives and witnessing them in the lives of colleagues and students. In teaching and learning environments as well as workplaces, we don’t always make a distinction between the two. Discomfort can bring growth.

With these ideas in mind, we brought together a number of other colleagues who have also been thinking deeply about the interplay of writing, well-being, and cognition. In the next post, Ti Macklin and three students from her Fall 2021 first-year writing course examine their experiences with a metacognitively-focused English 101 course. Lilly Crolius (graduate student and teaching assistant in the course), Harland Recla (first-year writing student), and Natalie Plunkett (first-year writing student) provide insight into the student experience by discussing how reflection and a focus on transferable writing skills impacted their well-being.

The third post, written by Matt Recla, Associate Director of University Foundations at Boise State, discusses how reflective practices and assessment improved his students’ sense of self-efficacy and well-being. He specifically details how incorporating “ungrading” and metacognitive reflection practices into his required first-year course provides students with a framework to see themselves as life-long learners.

The series ends with a final post from a former Boise State University undergraduate student, Mariah Kidd, who explains how reflective journaling helped her to track her growth as a writer throughout her undergraduate career.

Works Cited

Hayes, Carol, Ed Jones, Gwen Gorzelsky, and Dana Driscoll. “Adapting Writing About Writing: Curricular Implications of Cross-Institutional Data from the Writing Transfer Project,” WPA: Writing Program Administration, 41.2, Spring 2019, pp. 65-88.

Gorzelsky, Gwen, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Joe Paszak, Ed Jones, and Carol Hayes, “Cultivating Constructive

Metacognition: A New Taxonomy for Writing Studies,” in Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, eds Jessie Moore and Chris Anson, Utah State University Press, 2016.

Moore, Jessie and Chris Anson, Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, eds Jessie Moore and Chris Anson, Utah State University Press, 2016.

Metacognitive Discourse—Final Course Presentations that Foster Campus Conversations about Learning

by Gina Burkart, Ed.D., Learning Specialist, Clarke University

Prior to the pandemic and now since returning to campus, there has been a shift in students’ use of group study and ability to learn and work in groups. When I began my position as Learning Specialist 10 years ago, it was not uncommon to find 30 students at group study sessions at 9 pm in the evening. Now, one group study session remains, and 2-3 students might attend the sessions (unless they are teams’ sessions required by athletic coaches). Colleagues have also shared in conversations that they have found it problematic that students avoid interacting with one another in the classroom and are not able to work and learn in physical groups. Further in my learning resource center year-end reports, data have shown a steady decline in group study attendance and a steady increase of students relying on support from me, the Learning Specialist. They want to work one/one with adults. In conversations with students and in online discussion blogs, students’ have shared a lack of inter- and intrapersonal communication skills as affecting their ability to work with their peers. In simple terms—overuse of electronic communication pre-pandemic and during the pandemic has left them unable to communicate interact with their classmates. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. In terms of learning, pedagogy is clear—learning is social (Bandura, 1977).

An Assignment to Reinforce Social Learning and Metacognition

In response, this semester, to reinforce social learning and metacognition, I changed the final assessment for the College Study Strategy course to be a final presentation that embedded metacognition and social discourse. The College Study Strategy course is metacognitive in nature in that it begins by having students reflect on their prior learning experiences, assess themselves and their skills, and set goals for the semester. It is a 1-credit course open to any student below 90 credits and can be retaken. However, in the second semester, it is almost entirely filled with students placed on academic probation or warning who are required to take the course. Curriculum includes theorists such as Marzano (2001), Bandura (1994), Ducksworth (2013), Dweck (2014), and Covey (2004) and requires them to begin applying new motivation, emotional intelligence, learning, reading, time management, study, note-taking, and test-taking strategies to their courses. In the past, students created a portfolio that demonstrated the use of their new strategies and presented their growth to me in a midterm and final conference. This year, I wanted them to share their new growth with more than me—I wanted them to share their growth with the entire community.

By changing the final project to be more outward-facing, the assignment would still be metacognitive in nature—requiring students to reflect on past learning, show how they made adjustments to learning and applied new methods and strategies, share in conversation how they made the adjustments, and finally explain how they will continue to apply strategies and continue their growth in the future with the new knowledge and strategies. Again, it would require students to share with more than me. They would need to envision a larger audience and needs—the entire campus community (administrators, students, Athletic coaches, staff, professors, recruits) and create a presentation that could be adjusted to the audience. They would practice inter and intra-personal skills as they made adjustments to their presentation over the course of 2 hours while they remained at station in the library, prepared to share their presentation as members of the campus community approached. This also allowed for the campus community to benefit from the students’ new knowledge and growth of the semester. And, being on a small scale, it re-introduced students to the art of in-person, face-face conversation between each other and the value of seeking information from each other. This is something that has been eroding due to a heavy use of electronic communication and isolated learning that occurred during the pandemic.

Students were introduced to this assignment in week one of the semester. They were told that in week 6 they would choose any topic from the course curriculum that they felt they needed to focus on more intently based on their semester goals. Once choosing the curriculum they would focus on (ex: motivation, reading, procrastination, time management, studying, growth mindset), they would then research a different article each week related to their chosen topic (weeks 6-12) and apply the new critical reading strategy taught in class to create journal entries that would be used to prepare content for the final presentation. In weeks 14 or 15, they would present in the library at a table (poster session style) during a time of their choosing (two-hour block) to the campus community about their topic. The presentation needed to include some type of visual and the content needed to include all of the following metacognitive information about the topic:

past struggles
reasons for choosing the topic
strategies learned in class
information learned in their research
recommendations for other students struggling
strategies for continued growth

Positive Impact and Take-Aways

While students were nervous and hesitant prior to the presentations, during and after the presentations, they admitted to having fun sharing about their growth and learning. Staff, faculty, and students were also appreciative of the presentations and made a point of attending. Some future students/recruits even attended as they were touring. Not surprising, most students chose to present about motivation, time management and procrastination. A few students chose to present about growth mindset, Bloom’s Taxonomy as a study strategy, and reading. A surprising take-away was that in the metacognitive process of the presentation, many students connected improved reading strategies to increased motivation and reduction in procrastination.

While observing the presentations, it was encouraging to see students learn to adapt their presentations as people approached. Since they were stationed at a table for two hours, they needed to present the material many times to different types of audiences—and they had to field questions. As they presented and represented, they learned how to interact and present differently based on the needs of the audience. This adaptation required the use of metacognition and rhetorical analysis. It also built inter- and intrapersonal communication skills. It also came at a good time in the semester, as students were authentically seeking many of the strategies and skills to prepare for finals, conclude the semester, and look forward to the next semester. Many of the presenters had friends and team members, coaches, and faculty come to hear their presentations (as I had advertised the presentations to the campus in advance). In conclusion, metacognitive presentations that engage the entire campus community in discourse about learning may be a helpful step toward rebuilding learning communities post-pandemic. Next semester, I will continue this assignment. Additionally, next semester, I am working on embedding group reading labs into targeted courses to improve learning, motivation and reduce procrastination in the classroom.

U.S. Army Cadets and Faculty Reflecting on a Metacognitive Assignment from a General Education Writing Class

by Brody Becker, Jack Curry, Charlie Gorman, Caleb Norris, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Erik Siegele

We offer an assignment from a general education writing class that invites students to hone their metacognitive knowledge by, oddly enough, writing about writing. Before we turn to this assignment, we need to detail who we are. We are a six-person author team. Five of us are first-year U.S. Army cadets. All five plan to commission into the U.S. Army following graduation. One of us is a civilian, tenured professor in the English Department.

During the Fall 2021 semester, we met in English 1102, a general education writing class offered at the University of North Georgia (UNG). Our university is a federally designated senior military college, like Texas A&M and The Citadel, tasked with educating future U.S. Army officers. Civilians also attend UNG. At our school, roughly 700 cadets learn alongside roughly 20,000 civilian undergraduate students. These details are important to what we want to describe in this post: not only a metacognitive writing assignment for this specific class but also the perspective of cadets who completed this assignment and the value of such metacognitive work for cadets. We write as a six-person team and offer collective ideas (as we do in this paragraph). However, we also value individual perspective. Author order is alphabetical and does not signal one writer contributing more than another writer.

An Overview of this Metacognitive Assignment

I (Michael) regularly teach this general education writing class. One writing assignment opened with the following prompt: “For this second paper, I invite you to reflect on a previous paper you wrote during your college or high school career. Through detailing when and where you wrote the paper, the processes you undertook to write the paper, and the feedback or grade you received on this paper, you will make a broader argument about the importance of reflecting back on writing and lessons one learns from undertaking such reflection.” This assignment is a modified version of a similar writing assignment in Wardle and Downs’s (2014) popular textbook Writing About Writing.

To prepare to write this paper, we read the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” a national consensus document outlining, as the title suggests, a framework for students to succeed at college level writing. This document offers eight habits of mind essential for student-writers to hone: one of these habits of mind is metacognition. We also read through portions of Tanner’s (2017) “Promoting Student Metacognition.” Tanner provided a table of metacognitive questions instructors can ask students before, during, and after the course.

Students then wrote a 1,500 word essay in response to this assignment. All student co-authors for this blog post enrolled in this specific class and completed this assignment. I now turn to my co-authors, cadet Charlie Gorman and cadet Brody Becker, to hear their perspectives on this assignment.

Cadets’ Reflections

Charlie’s reflection on this metacognitive assignment

I found that this assignment was beneficial to grow as a writer. Reflecting back on activities or assignments is a great way to improve in any aspect of life. I would have never thought about writing a paper about a paper until I was given the opportunity to write this assignment. As a future leader in the military, my writing will consist of educating material, reports, and special directions. Completing this assignment has set me up and taught me how to use past failures and successes to improve upon a future performance.

Brody’s reflection on this metacognitive assignment

This paper on metacognition was difficult for me because I had never done anything along these lines in a writing aspect previously. However, I soon found it to be helpful because of all the things I could learn from and look for in future writing. I had never thought about how looking back at previous writing could be helpful to me, so I always disregarded any past assignments and never thought about them again. This was a teaching moment for me, and I always take chances to learn new things. This assignment was one of the more beneficial things that I have done that I will continue to use for future assignments and will carry over to other things in life.

Why such an assignment is particularly helpful for cadets

In this section, Cadet Jack Curry considers why such a metacognitive writing assignment is particularly helpful for cadets who, after graduation, will commission as officers in the U.S. Army.

As a cadet, metacognition is an important step for our future progress. Being able to review and learn from our mistakes and our successes, helps us become better leaders. After any exercise or training, we conduct After Action Reviews (AARs) to find out how we can either improve upon or continue upon our training. As future officers, our job is to continue improving the skills we will use to lead future soldiers. The U.S. Army’s publication Training Circular 25-20: A Leader’s Guide to After Action Reviews (1993), states “the reason we conduct AARs are in order to find candid insights into specific soldier, leader, and unit strengths and weaknesses from various perspectives, and to find feedback and insight critical to battle-focused training.”

Concluding words of hope for more faculty-student partnerships

Our partnership started as a teacher-student one. Michael designed writing assignments and led classroom activities, and Charlie, Caleb, Jack, Brody, and Erik completed writing assignments and completed classroom activities. Near the end of the semester, our partnership shifted into one of co-authors where we wrote this blog post together over Google Docs, bounced ideas back and forth in-person after class, and coordinated further over email. We use the noun partnership intentionally to signal our commitment to pedagogical partnerships, an international and interdisciplinary movement to re-see the student-faculty relationship as one in which both serve as active agents in curriculum design, implementation, and assessment (e.g., Cook-Sather et al., 2019). As readers of and contributors to Improve with Metacognition continue to explore the benefits of structured metacognitive tasks throughout higher education, we hope that undergraduate students are at the forefront of this exploration. Partnerships between faculty and students are one productive step to ensuring that our classroom practices and processes best serve all our students.

References

Cook-Sather, A., Bahti, M., & Ntem, A. (2019). Pedagogical partnerships: A how-to guide for faculty, students, and academic developers in higher education. Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning Open Access Book Series. Retrieved from https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/books/pedagogical-partnerships/

Council of Writing Program Administrators et al. (2011). “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” Retrieved from http://wpacouncil.org/files/framework-for-success-postsecondary-writing.pdf.

U.S. Department of the Army. (1993). Training Circular 25-20: A Leader’s Guide to After Action Reviews. Army Publishing Directorate. Retrieved from https://armypubs.army.mil/productmaps/pubform/details.aspx?pub_id=71643

Tanner, K. (2017). Promoting student metacognition. Life Sciences Education, 11(2). Retrieved from https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033

Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2014). Writing About Writing: A College Reader. 2^nd ed. Bedford.

Using Learning Portfolios to Support Metacognition

Dr. Sarah Benes, Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Nutrition and Public Health, Merrimack College

Over the past four years, I have been exploring the concept of metacognition. In many ways, I think metacognition has been a large part of how I work as a practitioner both in my personal practice of reflection and in how I practice the art of teaching. However, it wasn’t until I switched faculty positions that I really started to dive into intentional research and practice around metacognition.

As noted in the “Finding Your People” blog post, this was largely because I had difficulty adjusting to new students at a new school. The challenges that arose prompted me to find ways to meet the needs of my new students in order to support their growth as learners and as people. One of the strategies that quickly arose as a strategy that could help was metacognition.

I am the kind of teacher who likes to try things. I have done a number of different activities (both research based and more “practice based”) over the past 4 years and have learned much from all of them. However, one practice in particular that stands out to me as having a significant impact on student learning and in the overall experience of the course was the use of learning portfolios. I have used similar strategies previously in both graduate and undergraduate courses, but never with an intentional focus on metacognition. The books, Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (New Pedagogies and Practices for Teaching in Higher Education) by Kaplan et al., (2013) and Creating Self Regulated Learners by Nilson (2013), were resources I used (along with other research) to put the pieces together to design and develop the learning portfolio.

I primarily teach two courses: Introduction to Public Health (mostly first-year students) and Health Behavior and Promotion (mostly sophomores and juniors). Both courses serve students in the School of Health Science. I first integrated the learning portfolio into my Health Behavior and Promotion course with great success. I plan to create a learning portfolio for my Introduction to Public Health course this fall and am excited to see how it works!

Overview of the Learning Portfolio

The learning portfolio was a “deliverable” that students worked on for the whole semester. The learning portfolio was connected to a course “e-book” in which I introduced weekly topics and objectives, outlined the class preparation & included prompts for the learning portfolio (more on the “e-book” below). Students kept notes, reflections, and responses to other assignments in their portfolios. In order to support student success, students submitted the portfolios 4 times over the semester (about every 3 weeks). Each time students submitted the portfolio they received a grade based mainly on completeness. I considered “completeness” the extent to which they addressed all prompts.

I should note here that not all of their reflections are necessarily connected to metacognition. However, in most sets of prompts given, the majority of the prompts related to metacognition. Students were asked to reflect specifically their experiences in the course, how their experiences were impacting their learning, connections they are making to the content, their perceptions of the usefulness and applicability of content in their lives, their use (or lack of) metacognitive and self-regulation strategies, etc.

E-Book

One component of the learning portfolio involved responding to prompts in the “e-book”. The “e-book” included the following three “components”: 1) an introduction to the content for each week (and how it connects to previous learning), 2) guidance on what to focus on in the class preparation, and 3) metacognitive reflective questions.

The introduction to the content included connections to the learning objectives (which were also presented in the syllabus), described why they were learning the material and how it connected to previous learning. I hoped that the introduction would help them monitor and evaluate their understanding of the course content week to week and within the broader context of the whole course.

With the class preparation guidance, I was hoping to help students develop task oriented skills. I have often found it a challenge to get students to complete class preparation. Students have also been honest and shared that my concerns around the lack of class preparation completion were not unfounded. I thought that providing some guidance on what to focus on and look for might help increase the number of students completing the class prep and also increase students’ ability to retain the information and be ready to use the content in class. I also hoped that the guidance might also help them with task oriented and evaluative skills.

While I don’t have any specific data about the impacts, I definitely noticed a positive difference in student participation during this semester compared to others. Students also seemed to have a stronger grasp on the content. Of course, there are many reasons that I could attribute to these improvements, but my teaching itself didn’t change that much and the one variable that was definitely different was the “e-book” and learning portfolio.

The final component of the “e-book” were the reflective questions. Questions varied week to to week. Sample questions::

How does what you read and watched for today connect to your prior knowledge learning? How does it connect to the reading from Monday?
Review the syllabus and assignments posted in the Assignments folder, what assignments do you feel align with your strengths as a student? Which might be more challenging? Why? What are strategies you could use to help you to be successful?
What are 3 key points from these readings and the video that you think are important for college students to know?

Each class prep assignment had these kinds of reflective questions for students to activate and connect to prior learning, to monitor and evaluate their learning, and to help them identify their strengths and areas for improvement.

Lessons Learned

Using a learning portfolio in my course taught me many things:

I have learned that students communicate their thoughts, reflections and experiences in many different ways. Some responses are brief and concise, some are more “stream of consciousness”, and some provide extremely thoughtful and thorough, more polished responses. I learned to focus more on the purpose of the activity (to think about themselves and their learning), rather than the “quality” of their reflections. I felt that my my bias of what I believe a quality reflection “looks like” might impact students’ learning and growth.
I experienced the value of being able to have a “dialogue” with students through the portfolio though my feedback. Sometimes the feedback was a question, my perspectives, a connection to course content, etc. I saw the learning portfolio as a dialogue between me and the students more than a gradable assignment (though assigning points helps with motivation and completion). Student responses to these questions helped me to connect with students more deeply and provide feedback to support their learning and also add different perspectives than we may have been able to cover in class. I feel that I was able to get to know students a lot better through this model, that I was able to engage differently with each student (which I don’t always get to do in a course) .
The learning portfolio was also a place where students recorded responses to in-class discussion prompts. Sometimes I would have students respond to discussion prompts before the discussion in class to allow students to gather their thoughts, and sometimes it was after discussion to allow for processing time. I learned that this was a great way to be able to receive responses from all students as I often can’t get around to hear from students when discussing in class and students don’t always feel comfortable speaking up but it is often not because they don’t have valuable contributions. The learning portfolio structure allowed me to “hear from” each student.
I learned that it takes a little work to get “buy in” from students, which is why I spend about 2 weeks at the start of the semester talking about learning and metacognition. That way, students have a foundation to understand the “why” behind the learning portfolio (and other aspects of the course). However, I believe the time is well spent and that the content and skills they gain from both the class content and the learning portfolio are as important (maybe for some students even more important) than the course content itself.

Conclusion

Adding the learning portfolio to my class has been one of the more impactful strategies I have tried. It is a lot of upfront work and a decent amount of work during the semester if I respond to all students, but I saw a significant improvement in student engagement and student learning. I also felt that I connected more with students and got to know them better. I am looking forward to trying this approach with my first-year students this fall (perhaps another blog post will be in order to share how it goes)!

Learning Philosophies of Teachers and Students: Two Neglected Metacognitive Catalysts for Success

by Dr. Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities (retired)

Hmmm… COVID year… what a trip. If I slept through it, there were nightmares—lots of ’em. Where did I leave off last April (Nuhfer, 2020)? Oh yeah, we ended with a question: “How might teaching students to write their learning philosophies improve their learning?” Well, OK…let’s continue that… by first realizing that professors’ teaching philosophies are their learning philosophies, and those who do write them come to recognize how keeping such a written record enhances success in teaching.

Philosophies are reflective; they record the results of a metacognitive conversation with oneself. The results articulate the plan for practice disclosing what one wants to do, how one chooses to do it, and how to know the chosen practices’ impact. Philosophies focus on learning about process, which is too rarely the stuff of college education, where the emphasis is on learning content—the disciplines’ products. Even “student-centered-learning” structures too seldom involve directly teaching students to be reflective about how to learn.

$Illustration of components (thinking, teaching, learning) in the fractal generator for faculty and students (by Ed Nuhfer)$

Six critical components of a teaching philosophy appeared in the graphic of the fractal generator above (and also shared my April 2020 blog). An informed teaching/learning philosophy considers all six components. Three crucial components describe internal strengths enlisted during learning: affect, levels of thinking, and metacognition, and three more are competencies mainly built from external sources: content, pedagogy, and assessment.

For nearly twenty years, I led week-long faculty development retreats in which each faculty arrived with a written one-page document that they had constructed as their teaching philosophy. A faculty member rarely arrived at a retreat with a written philosophy that addressed more than three of the six components.

Through the retreats, participants revisited and edited their philosophy a bit each day. Our final exercise of the retreat was sharing the revised philosophies in groups and polishing them more for use. No participant left without awareness of the vital role that each of the six components played. Participants’ written philosophies of practice were probably their most valuable tangible takeaway.

Why written philosophies?

Consider the advantage a written plan confers to constructing anything complex. Architectural design requires written blueprints and strategies because the challenge is just too complex to address well by acting spontaneously from what one can carry around in one’s head. Construction contractors avoid working without a written plan because doing so produces disappointing results.

Learning and teaching are challenges as complex as any construction project. A teaching/learning philosophy acts as the equivalent of an architectural design plan and encompasses the big picture of what we intend to do. Students need learning philosophies for the same reason professors need them, but acting spontaneously without any written philosophy is probably the norm in higher education. How many of your students approach learning with a written plan?

The six components that are so essential for professors to consider also confer similar value to students. It really is up to professors to mentor students to craft their first informed learning philosophies. An excellent way to start students toward constructing their personal learning philosophies is to give each a nearly blank paper with the six components’ names at the top.

Beginners must begin to incorporate the six as a checklist by asking self: “Where are awareness of affect, levels of thinking, etc. in my practice?” After they internalize these six through at least a year of practice, they become cognizant of how all six are interconnected, and awareness occurs that developing one component awakens new insights about the others’ roles. Some authors of philosophies later employ visualization and supplement their philosophies with graphics.

Years ago, the fractal generator shown above became my graphical philosophy. I produced fifty articles under the title “Educating in Fractal Patterns…” for The National Teaching and Learning Forum, as that graphic philosophy helped me more deeply understand and grow from my experiences. Those who maintain a written philosophy and reflect on it regularly will almost surely have similar “Aha moments.”

Essential Components

Let’s see how we can help students become reflective and increase their capacity to learn from the six components.

Affect

We can help students to appreciate the importance of affect by reflecting upon whether the affective mode in which they find themselves is “I have to do this” or “I want to do this.” (See assignment shared in Nuhfer 2014.) Wanting to learn enlists more brainpower to drive learning. Finding ways to make learning fun for ourselves, to want to do it—such as making a party of it by studying with others, can become our most valuable asset. Quantitative courses elicit the most negative affective responses from students (Uttl, White, Morin, 2013). Yet, the book I recommend as the most inspirational book ever written to learn to reverse negative feelings for specific content is Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing. A particular quote I like from p. 11 follows: “When some people ask, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’ what they are really asking is ‘When am I ever going to value this?‘”

Pedagogy

Teachers employ “active learning” pedagogies (Univ Wyoming resources) to increase learning through engagement. One principle underlies all “active learning:” the more of the brain invoked during learning, the better the learning. But another principle is seldom addressed: the longer the time spent in learning with significant portions of the brain activated, the greater the understanding.

Students can apply the same principles to enlist more of their brains. Writing to learn along with reading invokes more of the brain than only reading to learn. Revision of written products, multiple revisions, is one of the most powerful learning strategies known, at least as powerful as any modality on the “Active Learning Spectrum” linked above. For developing their learning philosophies, instructors should assign students to write, revise, and record at the end of each revision how doing revision improved their understanding. Learning to enlist active learning by writing to learn for oneself does not require doing a thesis. Simply writing and revising how to solve a word problem or an evaluative assignment offers sufficient capital through which to develop an appreciation for the power of writing to learn.

Content

Writing (Didn’t we just mention its power?) a knowledge survey builds understanding of the course content that faculty quickly appreciate (Nuhfer & Knipp, 2003). Watch these two very short videos to get a sense of what knowledge surveys are and their impact.

Screen shot of Dr. Ed Nuhfer talking about what knowledge surveys are and their benefits — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENW51282Bwk

screenshot of opening slide stating "Faculty reflect on the value of knowledge surveys" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWbw8buSXIo

With each knowledge survey item that a professor writes, they should follow that with the thought, “What do students need to know to respond with understanding?” That will lead to writing several additional items to build the scaffold needed to address the former item. While students lack the expertise to construct course-based knowledge surveys from scratch, instructors can direct students to share in scaffolding their learning. They can let students build a knowledge survey in small pieces by frequent assignments such as: “Given the content we covered today, replace the knowledge survey’s items about that content with your own authored items to address the equivalent content.” An additional brief helpful exercise to help students to build their own learning philosophy can be: “How did writing your own knowledge survey items change your understanding of the content material? Why might writing such items be a useful learning strategy for learning in other subjects and courses?”

Levels of Thinking

We have already covered developmental levels in a prior post (Nuhfer, 2014), and we showed the connection between levels of thinking and affect (Nuhfer, 2018). Nearly all students misperceive becoming educated as learning skills and content. They have heard of “critical thinking” or “higher-order thinking,” but almost none can really articulate what either looks like. They will not know about such developmental levels of thinking unless the faculty teach them. We earlier provided a module with which instructors can do so (Nuhfer & Bhavsar, 2014). If you are unfamiliar with such developmental models and levels of thinking, which is likely, go through the same module for yourself. Then, guide students through it.

Metacognition

Is it surprising that this component should receive a mention on this blog? What would be truly surprising is if any personal learning philosophy sentence was not a product of metacognitive reflection. A written philosophy archives the portions its writer valued that came out of purposefully directed conversations with self. It expresses the current state of the author’s focus at a specific stage of development. It will change with additional experiences and reflections.

Assessment

The assessment portion of the philosophy likely considers three questions. The first is “Did I really practice my philosophy—did I do what I planned to do?” The second is “What happened as a result?” The third is “Based on what I learned from what happened, what will I focus on next?”

When one develops the ability for “fractal thinking,” one is constantly considering what would result if a pattern of action taken at one scale were enacted at different scales. If these three assessment queries give valuable substance to building an individual’s expertise, what might result if we nurtured such happening at the scale of a program or an institution?

For years, I had hoped to convince an institution to replace the practice of using student ratings scores as the highest stakes criterion for the annual review of instructors with professors’ written philosophies instead. Review committees would examine each philosophy and ask correlatives to the three questions above. It seems easy to see why encouraging metacognitive reflection on improving practice offers a superior option to thinking instead of raising student ratings’ scores. Sigh! I’m still hoping for just one institution to try it.

In summary, writing, revisiting, and revising learning philosophies scaffold us to higher proficiency. Addressing the same six components offers professors and students common ground on which to come together to understand learning and the process of becoming educated.

Learning. Design. Analytics. Post 3: Scripting Asynchronous Lectures: A Metacognitive Process

By Eleri Syverson, MA, Joe King, Yiran Sun, MA, Yianna Vovides, PhD, Georgetown University

In this post we’ll look at the process of scripting in the context of metacognitive awareness by walking through the processes and considerations we recommend for scripting. When we talk about scripting in this case, we are referring to the writing process of reflecting on a subject and drafting — as a word-for-word script, or at minimum a very detailed outline — a lecture to be delivered to a class of students. Most of our own experience with scripting is in developing asynchronous lectures for online courses (or similar online format) that are either entirely new or are being redesigned into an online format from an existing face-to-face course, and this is our focus in this post. However, many of the principles and practices we consider can be useful in designing face-to-face presentations and interactions too. We first address the conundrum of whether to script, and then we offer a script of our own in relation to how we guide faculty through the process of scripting.

To Script or Not to Script? Script, script, and script some more….

When we first meet with an instructor who is working to design an online course, one of the things we talk about is whether they have any plans to develop new content, such as a video, audio or text lecture, for the course. For the most part, the answer is yes. We recommend the instructor script out their lecture materials before we begin to record or build them for an online course. This might sound like the last thing an instructor wants to do for several reasons:

Perhaps they have been delivering lectures on this topic, maybe even for this very course, for many years. They may know these lectures very well, even without notes.
Perhaps they rely on spontaneity to keep the experience fresh and therefore fear they would lose that if they scripted.
Perhaps the time and effort commitment required to produce scripts seems daunting.

While these are valid concerns, a well-designed script will not take away from their inherent expertise on the subject or remove those elements of personality that make their lectures engaging. In fact, we emphasize that the value of scripting is less in the final product, but in the process itself which can help them plan, monitor, and evaluate their approach to each lecture anew.

During the design and development process for online courses we approach scripting, especially when working from existing materials or lectures, as a metacognitive act that relies on planning, monitoring, and evaluation about one’s own areas of expertise. By approaching scripting as a process that supports instructors in deepening their metacognitive awareness of how they teach and how their students learn, we encourage increased efficacy, coherence, and accessibility of lectures. By the end of the design and development process, instructors have accounted for the thinking of their students as well as their own and in fact have developed a lasting metacognitive practice.

A Script of our Own

Schematic of a spiral illustrating loops of before, during, after — Figure 2. Spiral – Before, during, after Model

In the first blog post of this series Yianna Vovides described a simple model we share with instructors to recognize the iterative process of design (see figure 1). When we think of the Before phase, we think of pre-production efforts, for During, we think of production efforts and for After, we think of post-production. Scripting is part of our pre-production efforts.

This section highlights the script we use in our process to guide instructors and we explain the thinking behind the process, our reasoning.

Script

Reasoning

If you are not sure whether or not to script your materials, you might start with a test recording to see how the lecture goes without a script.

In our process, we will often give faculty a rough cut of this initial test recording to give the instructor a chance to review this initial product and go over any concerns with them.

A common observation from instructors after this initial test recording is that lecturing to a camera or microphone can be a very different experience than lecturing to a classroom full of students.

In the classroom, students nod, ask questions, and make facial expressions that signal as to their engagement and understanding. Even the lack of such signals in the classroom would, itself, be a significant sign about the lecture, your students, or something else in the environment that is impacting your teaching.

This presents a unique opportunity to reflect on one’s own thinking while teaching, and to reflect on the experience of the learner. When lecturing in class, which moments typically brought about questions (or even were confusing to you as you learned it the first time)? Which examples do you find particularly impactful? What is essential to understanding the material? Scripting allows instructors to address these questions and plan the presentation of materials in the most helpful and more meaningful way, because it allows instructors’ time to reflect on both past and future deliveries of a lecture.

Through this writing process of reflection, planning, and drafting lectures as text, instructors can carefully consider meaning they intend to leave with their students, and work to ensure that their learning goals for a particular lecture are met. Writing itself is applied metacognition. “Every act of writing is an act of meaning production. Reading, re-reading, reflecting, and reviewing — processes traditionally associated with writing — serve as monitoring strategies to ensure that the production of meaning is in conformance with the author’s goals for writing…” (Hacker, Keener, Kircher 157). In scripting a lecture, instructors are not merely replicating a previously delivered lecture, but improving and adapting it for a new format. Keep in mind the following tips (and their reasonings) for writing for that new format.

Script	Reasoning
Keep your script brief and connected to learning objectives.	Remember that attention spans behave differently in the online environment than they might in face-to-face conversations. An ideal length for videos in online learning environments is 6-10 minutes, which comes out to about 2-4 pages of written text, single spaces. Audio only lectures can typically be longer, around 40 minutes to an hour. Consider the length of a typical Youtube video vs the length of a typical podcast.
Identify key terms or questions in advance. Include graphics in your script to illustrate key points. Please include the references! Once you send us the draft, we will then discuss with you how we pull all the pieces together.	By following these recommendations, post-production will be easier. It can also help you make sure that you are, in fact, addressing all of your learning objectives and covering all of the necessary topics in the video. This kind of metacognitive planning and evaluation of your student’s thinking increases the efficacy and coherency of your lectures.
In the same vein, this planning allows you to choose the most appropriate format for lectures.	You might script a lecture you have been giving face-to-face in the classroom for many years, only to realize that in the online format, the lecture may be more suited to a podcast format than a video. Different formats present other advantages to students as well — for example, an audio-only podcast lecture would allow students to listen on a walk around their neighborhood, as opposed to at home with the distractions of noisy family or roommates. Presenting content in a variety of formats, while letting the content direct the format chosen, provides students with additional flexibility. And choosing a format after planning the content, rather than as a first step, allows you this flexibility to present the content that is most suitable for the format itself.
Scripting and preplanning lecture materials not only forces you to consider the needs of your students and how they might interpret lecture material, it inherently addresses some of those needs by making materials more accessible	Transcripts not only benefit students with hearing impairments, but also students who may be listening to materials in their non-native language, students who are experiencing poor internet connectivity and cannot stream the video, students with learning disabilities who may need more time or alternate formats to process the lecture, or students who simply prefer to read or take notes on the transcript while listening along. Producing a transcript of a lecture can itself be time consuming or, if you outsource the effort, costly task. By creating a word-for word script and drafting it with your audience in mind, providing your script to students as a transcript eliminates the need to produce a separate transcript to address the accessibility concerns noted above.
It is important that you include your sources in your script to be incorporated into the video.	While a lecture video isn’t a peer-reviewed paper, it is more formal and more lasting than a face-to-face lecture or conversation, and it takes some additional effort to communicate corrections of any errors. Including sources also gives you an opportunity to review the sources and correct any errors, and gives interested students the opportunity to engage more deeply with the subject by exploring these sources.

Scripting lectures is a multi-layered metacognitive process. It requires the writer to think about their own thinking in reflecting on their own understanding of the material and past deliveries lectures. It also requires them to think about the experience of their audience, both in who they are and the context and channels which will affect the composition of their experience. Successful lecture scripting means making sure the material feels like it is for these students in this course.

Who are the students?
What they have already learned, what you hope they will learn, and where they are now?
Where might they be listening to these lectures?
How can the writer best facilitate their understanding?

These questions should be considered not just in regards to a specific group of current students, but future students or others who may view the lecture in a different context. A lecture might be relocated to a different part of a course, or sometimes a different course entirely. The social and historical context in which a lecture was recorded can change in just weeks. While the process of scripting might seem daunting, it should be thought of as a reallocation of efforts rather than an additional one: the metacognitive processes of reflection on self and audience, as well as the product of the script itself, contribute to a more robust and longer-lasting lecture that better addresses the needs of the audience.

Reference

Hacker, D. J., Kircher, J. C., & Keener, M. C. (2010). Writing is Applied Metacognition. In 1132034699 853417179 D. J. Hacker, 1132034700 853417179 J. Dunlosky, & 1132034701 853417179 A. C. Graesser (Authors), Handbook of metacognition in education (pp. 154-176). New York: Routledge.

Identity Matters: Creating Brave Spaces through Disputatio and Discernment

by Marie-Therese C. Sulit, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program, Mount Saint Mary College

Six months ago, colleges and universities across America—and the world—shut down in an effort to curb the COVID-19 Pandemic even as the unjust deaths of Black Americans likewise instigated a call-and-response from administrators. Calls for racial awareness, couched within various campus initiatives under the banner of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” [DEI], have been issued to address and investigate variegated forms of institutional racism. As we follow social-distancing protocols on campus, how can those of us particularly invested in DEI continue to create a space for healthy and honest discourse within our diverse and divergent campus communities?

CREATING A SPACE FOR DISPUTATIO

In the opening piece of this mini-series, I bridge reflection with metacognition in order to address the place of the affective, and contemplative, pedagogy within the teaching and learning climate of a classroom amidst this pandemic. In this closing piece, I seek to highlight disputatio as a contemplative practice particular to Dominican colleges and universities like Mount Saint Mary College. “A method that seeks to resolve difficult questions and controverted issues by finding the truth in each,” the strengths of disputatio reflect its conceptual complexity in accounting not only for one’s “talents” and “abilities,” particularly in rigorous argumentation, but also in addressing “urgent questions of justice and peace” (A Vision in Service of Truth 5). In other words, the contemplative nature of self-examination inherent in disputatio is synonymous with metacognitive reflection or reflective metacognition.

The focus on “urgent questions of justice and peace” affirms disputatio as a tool for answering the call of the Black Lives Matter movement on our home campuses. More so, the cultivation of disputatio, as a “rigorous exploration of multiple ways of resolving a question,” necessitates a process of discernment of “the truth” in “truth-seeking endeavors” predicated on understanding multiple and disparate perspectives (A Vision in Service of Truth 5). This is to say, disputatio, by design, honors those diverse and divergent stakeholders on our campus communities–voices that must be at the table as we move forward with DEI initiatives at the college.

PRACTICING DISPUTATIO THROUGH READING LITERATURE

How we represent ourselves and our situations, in and out of the classroom, is both an interpretive and political act when we consider how we, as people, in particular situations, can be re-presented and/or mis-represented through our institutional structure and through our use of language within the teaching-and-learning environment. As a multicultural practitioner in literature, I teach literature through the prisms of history, culture, and society. I deploy the following steps that ascribe forms of literacy to the reading process with the understanding that the subject matter can reveal one’s conscious and unconscious biases as participants listen, reflect, and respond; one can only know one’s own position through understanding the positions of others.

Basic Literacy, or Reading the Lines: discerning the basic plot of a story on your terms (based on our personal experiences and responses) and articulating the “who, what, when, and where” of that story in our speech and prose, via in-person and computer-mediated communication.
Critical Literacy, or Critically Reading between the Lines: discerning the deeper meaning of the story on its terms and articulating the “how and why” of that story through the background of the story itself and our present historical, literary, and political moment.
Multicultural Literacy, or Reading Critically against the Lines: discerning the gaps and omissions of that story on its and our own terms and articulating ways of filling in these gaps and omissions by posing alternative readings.

Of course, understanding the multiple truths in this reading process is predicated on students feeling safe enough to honestly share the lenses through which they read. If we consider our classroom and our campus as “safe,” then that “safe space” can be fraught as both the common and the contested ground on which all of us stand.

FROM A “SAFE” PLACE TO A “BRAVE” SPACE: ENTER … DISCERNMENT

To further the contemplative practice of disputatio, I begin the processes of reflection cum metacognition utilizing “Crosswalk Prompts,” created by fellow multicultural practitioner, Dr. Paul Gorski. These prompts run the gamut in inquiring about all components of one’s identity: race and ethnicity, socio-economic class and education, to gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality. Students and the instructor respond to questions by either standing or raising a hand to self-identify. For example, “If you worry semester to semester whether you’ll be able to afford your college tuition” or “If an educator, counselor, or other authority figure ever discouraged you from pursuing a particular field of study or profession.” Students and the educator are required to look around the room to see who among them are standing or sitting. Thus, each individual’s subject positions are established from the onset for ensuing lively, and at times challenging, dialogues to be held throughout the semester. Given the sensitive nature of some of the questions, it is important that participants feel safe so they can be brave and share with the class. Thus, in contradistinction to the word “safe,” the word, “brave,” conceptually allows for one’s vulnerability and exposure within and throughout the classroom.

Applying the contemplative, cum argumentative, practice of disputatio, disciplinary parameters provide the structure to discern “the truth” and “truth-seeking endeavors” within a specific classroom through its course content. Metacognition constitutes both disputatio and discernment, thus including both a form of argumentation and a means by which multiple and/or disparate perspectives can be brought to light. Thus, the processes of reflective metacognition, or metacognitive reflection, provide the methodology for one and all in a particular site to discern the components of their own “baggage” between and among others.

CONCLUSION

Currently, the Mount stands poised on its own DEI Initiative, integrated into its Strategic Plan for 2020-2025, which includes objectives and focus areas guiding the establishment of Implementation Teams and their respective leaders, for the curriculum, the institutional structure and organization, and the students. Various co- and extra-curricular initiatives are underway to encourage and promote awareness about DEI, including a Knight Reading Initiative centering Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi’s Tell Me Who You Are (2020), a set of personal narratives centering on race, culture, and identity.

As this college-wide reading initiative unfolds this fall, it is up to each discipline to determine for themselves how to integrate these components into their curriculum. To facilitate this process, I offer tools for teaching multicultural literature through the steps of the reading process and identifying the subject positions of all classroom participants as readers. In moving forward, it is my hope that disputatio and discernment will guide debates and discussions of any particular narrative. It is also my hope that metacognitive reflection, or reflective metacognition, at the heart of disputatio will guide all our campus’s conversations as we continue to discern who and what is at stake in our larger work of cultivating justice and peace.

WORKS CITED

The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education: A Vision in Service of Truth. Dominican University. 2012.

Gorski, Paul C. PhD. “Crosswalk Prompts.” 11 September 2012. Hand-Out.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues—Megan Morrissey, Gina Evers, and Charles Zola—for supplementing my lone voice with theirs. I would also like to thank our editors, Lauren Scharff and John Drager, for giving us the opportunity to share our work at Mount Saint Mary College with the readers of “Improve with Metacognition.”

Training Tutor-Learners in Contemplation: Reflection in the Writing Center

by Gina R. Evers, M.F.A., Director of the Writing Center, Mount Saint Mary College

REFLECTION AS BENCHMARK

An institution that foregrounds “contemplation” as one of its core Dominican values, Mount Saint Mary College is no stranger to conversations around metacognition. I chime in as the founding director of our on-campus Writing Center. Our mission is to provide supplemental writing instruction, which we do through one-on-one, peer-facilitated consultations. I train and mentor a staff of seven undergraduate writing tutors, who conduct an average of 614 consultations every academic year.

As peer tutors, my team moves fluidly between learning and teaching as they participate in ongoing tutor training while simultaneously advising their writers. This makes training complex, as their roles as tutor-learners shifts to those of tutor-teachers the moment they sit down for an appointment.

So how do I know whether I’ve effectively trained my tutors to not only navigate their dual roles but also to be successful in the one-to-one teaching of writing? My benchmark has become reflection itself. While I certainly equip my team with the necessary grammatical concepts, rhetorical awareness, and writing process theory, I’ve designed this writing instruction within pedagogically reflective structures. Anyone can train in comma usage – no doubt a valuable communication skill – but training in reflection allows the tutor to determine whether and how a lesson on the comma might benefit their writer. When my tutors engage in authentic and honest self-observation, reflection, and ultimately metacognition during our staff meetings, they demonstrate the requisite skill to be effective teachers of writing.

TUTOR-LEARNERS REFLECT ON WRITING CENTER WORK

I asked my tutors for their insights on the role of reflection in tutor training during a recent staff meeting. During our meeting, we discussed assessment scholars Elizabeth Barkley and Claire Major’s comparison of student-learning outcomes to archery. Barkley and Major say a learning goal is an archer seeing their target; a learning objective is an archer aiming for their target, and a learning outcome is an archer hitting their target.

Applying this to the Writing Center, my tutors were quick to extend the analogy. The archer is one of our writers, who comes to us for assistance wielding the bow of writing skills. With our training on how to use the bow, the writer is able to hit their target: a “good” paper. But, as my tutor Leanna astutely noted, if all we do is teach writers to produce “good” papers, once they’re in a new environment they won’t be able to use the bow independently, making the target suddenly elusive and strange.

In his foundational 1984 essay, Stephen North notes that a writing center “represents the marriage of … [writing] as a process … [and] that writing curricula need to be student-centered” (North 49-50). In the Writing Center, it’s the tutors who tailor our writing curricula to every individual writer who walks through our doors. We understand that the writing process is distinct for every individual writer and for every individual writing project they undertake.

North understands this too, and that understanding fuels his dictum that writing centers create “better writers, not better writing (50, emphasis mine). That is to say, because curricula is tailored to each individual, and because that individual’s process varies based on their current project, we have to focus on the individual and their skill set – the archer and their technique in using the bow – in order for them to be able to navigate any future writing project that might be coming their way. In order for the Writing Center to truly support our writers in this, its tutors must be equipped with tools to assess and reflect on what each individual writer needs before teaching them that content.

REFLECTIVE PEDAGOGIES IN WRITING TUTOR TRAINING

For tutor training, my staff and I meet for a two-hour seminar each week. During these meetings, I structure reflection on writing center scholarship, reflection on the tutors’ own writing and writing process, as well as reflection on tutoring skills. The common denominator is clear:

Writing Center Scholarship. No tutor training program would be complete without covering foundational theories in the one-to-one teaching of writing, and discussions of the readings ask tutors to thoughtfully reflect on their own tutoring practices in light of the scholarship, thereby connecting writing center theory to writing center practice.
Writing Instruct-shops. A term of my own invention, the writing instruct-shop blends three modes of writing instruction: in-classroom instruction, the writing consultation, and the writing workshop. Using one of the tutor’s pieces of academic writing as the text, I facilitate these instruct-shops to simultaneously practice tutoring skills (borrowing from the writing consultation model), improve tutors’ writing skills (borrowing from the writing workshop model), and gain fluency with the identification and application of components of the writing process, rhetorical concepts, and grammatical conventions (borrowing from the traditional classroom model). Because the tutors’ works are at the center of these conversations, reflection on the duality of their roles as tutor-learners and tutor-teachers emerges.
Triumphs & Challenges. As a regular agenda item, tutors share the details of one recent writing consultation that left them feeling triumphant as well as one that was particularly challenging. We spend about an hour hearing these reflections and discuss how to revise tutoring techniques for future consultations.

It is pedagogical nomenclature to say that teaching, like writing, is a “reflective practice”; however, I can say with certainty that tutor training is an environment where the rubber meets the road. My tutors concurred: “It’s the reflection that allows us to become better tutors.” Even if you have a challenging session, reflecting on it and asking for help will give you the skills to do something differently next time.

TUTORS AS THE FIRST LINK: A CHAIN OF REFLECTING

The ability to reflect before proceeding is the benchmark of an effectively trained writing tutor. Returning to Barkley and Major, this means that, at least in my work, the target is teaching my students how to reflect before charging through the challenge at hand. Armed with insights from their reflection, the tutors are able to more effectively choose individualized pedagogies to teach their writers. In other words, tutor reflection evolves into tutor metacognition as they adapt skills they’ve learned as tutor-learners and then put them to use as tutor-teachers. My tutor Leanna calls this evolution “a chain of reflecting.” I build reflection into tutor training, my tutors think metacognitively as they transform insights they’ve learned into teaching strategies, and writers then have tools of reflection at their disposal for both their writing projects and the challenges of everyday life. Reflection is the ultimate transferrable skill.

WORKS CITED

Barkley, Elizabeth F. and Claire H. Major. Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, Jossey-Bass, 2016.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, Edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Fourth Edition, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 44-58.

Want to Kick Start a Conversation about Metacognition? Assign the Blind Draft

by Amy Ratto Parks, Ph.D., University of Montana

Although many of us feel held in suspense about the state of teaching and learning in the fall, there is one thing I know for sure: I will still be using the Blind Draft assignment. The Blind Draft is a homework assignment that requires students to compose a short draft into a completely blackened computer screen; without any visual cue from the writing, they quickly become aware of their thinking. This single assignment builds classroom community, grounds students in their own minds and bodies, introduces them to a new way of understanding themselves as learners, and kicks off a course-long conversation about metacognition.

Right now, teaching and learning are happening in a remarkably distracting set of circumstances. National and global issues lead us into internet news and social media cultures that have had wide-ranging and varied impacts on teachers and students in Western cultures. Through the visually dominant world inside our screens we are propelled forward (Brockman, 2011) away from our own minds and bodies and into carefully sculpted Instagram lives, snappy Twitter feeds and sharp info graphics. But in order for teaching and learning to happen well, our minds have to move away from the glossy surface and focus on the task at hand. We know that students who are able to monitor their attention by developing skills in attention literacy (Brockman, 2011) also demonstrate strong meta-cognitive awareness and are positioned for a productive learning experience (Tarricone, 2011).

The Blind Draft offers students an initial small step into meeting their own minds as learners. It creates a unique and memorable composing and revision experience that provides a platform for experience-based reflection and conversation about how differently individual student’s minds might respond to novel learning challenges (Yancey, 1998). Those conversations provide an opening into a discussion about how metacognitive concepts help us understand how to navigate writer’s block, writing anxiety, and other common writing barriers. Supporting a sustained conversation about how students respond to writing challenges will help athleticize their attention (Caldwell, 2018), build personal understanding, and help them develop an increased sense of agency (Negretti, 2012) over their own identities and abilities as writers.

The Assignment

One of the most beautiful things about the Blind Draft is the simplicity of its design, however, it does work best with a bit of set up at the start because students immediately question the simplicity.

The set up

Because students focus so carefully on their grades, there is an underlying sense of risk in any work assigned in a class. Therefore, it is important to frame the assignment as an experiment where the goal is to participate in the experiment so that you all will have something interesting to talk about during the next class. You will also want to think of a very (very) general writing prompt such as, write about “you and food” or “you and happiness” for students to respond to in their drafts.

The directions

In general, the work happens in three parts: 1) Students type in response to the prompt without being able to see what they’re typing for 15 minutes. 2) They revise the messy blind draft. 3) They reflect briefly on their own writing behavior You might offer them the following directions:

Step 1: Compose (Note: The blind drafting process works best when typing on a computer)

Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Open and save a blank document. (Note: Saving the document before typing is important because sometimes typing blindly leads one to delete the entire document!)
Make a mental note of the writing prompt.
Turn off or cover the screen.
Type without stopping for 15 minutes.
Print or save document as “blind draft.” (Note: This will be your preference depending on whether you are collecting hard copy or electronic versions. The important thing is simply that they specify which draft was the blind draft and which was the revision. It seems as though that would be obvious, but sometimes it isn’t.)

Step 2: Revise

Revise the draft into 1-2 page essay. (You can keep everything from the first draft or nothing at all and rearrange as you please.)
Print or save document as “revised blind draft.”

Step 3: Reflect

List the kinds of changes you made between drafts.
Did you like this exercise? Hate it? Something in between?
Where did you rest your eyes without a screen to study?
Print or save document as “reflection.”

These instructions often cause laughter or anxiety — or both. Students need reassurance that yes, that first draft will be a terrific and spectacular mess, and that yes, that is the goal; they also appreciate a reminder that the second draft allows them to share a stronger more controlled version of their writing.

Student Responses

It turns out that students either love or hate this assignment; there is very little in between. I begin the discussion of the drafts by asking people to raise their hands if they hated this assignment, then if they loved it, and this initial question is often enough to begin a robust conversation about how differently they engaged with the writing. Why would some people feel constrained by this and other feel liberated? Right from the start, they are plenty baffled by anyone who had an experience that differed from their own.

Specifically, students say similar things about the assignment. Mostly, they notice everything their minds were doing besides writing. The often found themselves asking:

How long is 15 minutes? They report that they fixate on wondering how much time has passed and whether or not they are writing quickly. (In other words, am I doing a good job?)
How much am I writing? They report fixating on how much they have written, even when there is no assigned length requirement. (In other words, am I doing a good job?) They also realize that while they were distracted by the blind writing, they didn’t notice how much they were writing. Some students report writing less than they imagined, but most write more (and often report that they had no idea how often they’re thinking about page length rather than the topic of the writing).
Why did I try to fix the errors? In every class, students will laughingly recount trying to backspace and delete an error – even when they are not sure they made an error. They describe trying to count backward the correct number of letters to fix a spelling mistake even when they realize that it is unlikely that they will have actually corrected the error. (In other words, am I doing a good job?)

Take-away Messages

In a mini-lecture afterward, I explain that:

The human cognitive processes are messy and unpredictable (Flavell, 1976). Therefore, we need to expect a certain amount of confusion or chaos in the learning process. Reinforcing this early in a class helps students normalize challenge and difficulty.
The cognitive processes that inform writing of any kind are also are messy and unpredictable (Flower & Hayes, 1981). Therefore, we also need to leave room for some confusion and chaos in the writing process! This idea normalizes the fact that writing is always challenging and pushes back against the myth that writing is just easy for some people.
The process of writing is not linear – it’s recursive. We don’t just write; we write, re-read, write, re-read (Olive, 2014). Therefore, though we all want to sit down and “hammer out” an essay, strong writing doesn’t happen that way.
Our eyes don’t stay on the words we’re typing; they are skipping back and ahead (de Smet, M. J. R., Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2018). Therefore, if you’re on a first draft and haven’t written much, your eyes keep looking back and ahead at nothing which can induce panic and mental paralysis.
It is important to sometimes “write badly” (Ballenger, 2018). Leaving space for chaos in drafting allows us to become aware of our own mental processes, thoughts and ideas – and can make space for new connections and ideas to come forward.

You might wonder what I do after collecting this assignment since it produces a lot of material at once. Since the goal was the experience of the work, I do not line edit their writing or respond to each draft; instead, I thank them for investing in the experiment and I reinforce how beautifully messy their blind drafts were. The students really do take quite a risk by just turning in something as messy as a blind draft and it is nice to remind them that by turning it in that have confronted the chaos of their own writing minds, and therefore, have already done a good job.

Perhaps more importantly, the Blind Draft assignment helps them develop a sustained awareness of how their minds are working while writing and for many students that extends into their ability to monitor their thinking and behavior while completing other academic tasks (i.e. metacognition).

Works Cited

Ballenger, B. P. (2018). The curious writer. Boston: Pearson.

(2011) Is the internet changing the way we think? The net’s impact on our minds and future. Brockman, John (Ed.) New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

Caldwell, C. (2018). Bodyfulness. Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

de Smet, M. J. R., Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2018). Exploring the Process of Reading During Writing Using Eye Tracking and Keystroke Logging. Written Communication, 35(4), 411–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318788070

Olive, T. (2014). Toward a parallel and cascading model of the writing system: A review of research on writing processes coordination. Journal of Writing Research, 6(2), 173-194. doi:10.17239/jowr-2014.06.02.4

Negretti, R. (2012). Metacognition in student academic writing: A longitudinal study of Metacognitive awareness and its relation to task perception, self-regulation, and evaluation of performance. Written Communication, 29(2), 142–179.

Tarricone, P. (2011). The taxonomy of metacognition. New York: Psychology Press.

Yancey, K.B. (1998). Reflection in the writing classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press.

The Power of Social Discourse While Teaching Online during a Pandemic: Using an Online Discussion Board to Engage Metacognition

by Gina Burkart, Ed.D., Learning Specialist, Clarke University

The recent shift to online learning has resulted in class discussions taking place on an online discussion board; while some may not realize it, the discussion board can be a strategic resource for facilitating metacognition in the classroom (Burkart, 2010). This practice is supported by a range of pedagogical research. Eflkides (2008) reminded us of the interrelatedness of self and social within the workings of metacognition. And, research shows that metacognition grows based on the continuous flow of information through cognitive systems of self and other. This growth is further enriched through the use of language for reflection upon and communication of these processes with others (Efklides, 2008; Burkart, 2010; Ruffman, Slade, & Crow, 2002). Additionally, assigned discussion on the online discussion board fulfills the criteria that VanZile-Tamsen and Livingston (1999) found to increase positive motivation in students: self-efficacy, sense of control, relevance, emphasis on learning.

silhouette image of 4 people with one talking and the others listening

Creating Metacognitive Prompts

Key to the success of this approach is the creation of effective discussion prompts. Fostering metacognitive awareness and self-regulation begins with a reflection of self within the context of the course curriculum and then calls for a reflection of self through the lens of others by prompting for a response to a classmate’s discussion post (Burkart, 2010). In a literature course this might look something like:

“Which character of the story did you relate with most? Why? Also, respond to one of your classmates using text from the story for support.”

In responding to another student’s post, students see themselves through the lens of other. Crossley (2000) reminded us in her explorations of narrative analysis that reflection of self is also social. How we see ourselves “relies on the feedback and evaluations we receive from others” (p. 12). Crossley (2000), like Bogdan and Biklen (2003), used George Herbert Mead’s (1962/1934) research on self. She referred to Mead’s (1962/1934) metaphor of “the looking glass self” (p. 12) to illustrate our tendency to see ourselves through the eyes of others. To further this metaphor, one might imagine the online discussion board as “a looking glass self.” This provides instructors and students with a useful tool for not only examining how students perceive their selves and their learning, but also for how students interact with others and influence each other as they engage in the reflexive behavior of learning (Burkart, 2010).

Looking at students’ responses to each other allows students to use their classmates’ experiences to frame their own experiences. For example, consider the following student’s response to a classmate:

I’ve struggled with my anxiety as well and test taking has always been my weakness. Maybe if you try to relax and take deep breathes in and out before a test it can help with your test anxiety. This has helped me in the past, by doing this I realized that I was more calm than usual especially when I try to get my mind off things.

By sharing awareness of their own anxiety and struggles, the student is reflecting upon herself in relation to the other student’s experience. The student then reflects upon strategies that she has tried and offers the other student guidance. This online sharing allows the student to find value in strategies that she has already tried and also reinforces to both students (and the entire class) that they are not alone in their struggles with anxiety.

In this reflexive and reflective behavior, students are metacognitively making choices about their behaviors and their classmates’ behaviors without realizing they are engaging in metacognition. This shows that curriculum can seamlessly embed metacognition into learning, and the online discussion board is a useful tool for doing so.

Student Discussion as a Tool for Monitoring Metacognitive Processing

As a professor, the online discussion is also a tool for monitoring students’ metacognitive processing. It allows teachers to adjust teaching based on the needs of the class, i.e. engage in metacognitive instruction. For example, after seeing several posts and responses regarding anxiety, I often choose to focus on anxiety and resources for dealing with anxiety and test anxiety in the next class period. In this regard, the discussion board also becomes an important tool in meta-motivational monitoring (Miele & Scholer, 2018). It allows the professor to oversee the accuracy of the students’ “self, task and strategy knowledge” (p. 3) and intervene or reinforce through responses to the students on the discussion board or in shaping and/or reshaping of curriculum in the classroom.

For example, in an introductory literature course, the discussion board was used to help students reflect on self and how self unfolded in their narratives while they used literary techniques and strategies to shape their narratives and connect with an audience. They also were to reflect specifically on the writing and revision process. After students wrote their creative nonfiction narrative, they were asked to respond to the following question in 150 words and then to a classmate’s post in 50 words:

“What new self-epiphanies emerged for you while writing and revising your narrative?”

The student responses to the prompt revealed that the creative nonfiction narrative assignment was a powerful tool for metacognition in that it made them think about their writing choices more intentionally. In the revision and editing processes, the students had to rethink self and rethink the shape of their narrative and how they told it based on feedback they received from their audience. This online activity guided students in a powerful metacognitive reflection while they commented on how their story connected or did not connect with an audience, revisions they would make in the use of literary devices to better connect with their audience, and revisions they needed to make in writing technique.

With each reading of their narrative and reflection of comments from classmates in regards to their narratives, the students reflected on self and perception of self. Additionally, students reflected on self while they read each other’ posts and comments. As mentioned previously, this reflexive, mirror effect also results in a metacognitive reflection of self. When students read about how other students are changing and growing, they are prompted to reflect on and make similar changes of self. Thus, self, revision of the narrative, revision of technique, revision of the narrative, and revision of writing all became intertwined on the discussion board and prompted metacognitive growth.

References

Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods (4^th ed). Boston: Pearson Education Group, Inc.

Burkart, G. (2010, Dec). First-Year College Student Beliefs about Writing Embedded in Online Discourse: An Analysis and Its Implications to Literacy Learning. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA.

Burkart, G. (2010, May). An analysis of online discourse and its application to literacy learning, The Journal of Literacy and Learning. Retrieved from http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/uploads/1/3/6/8/136889/jlt_v11_1.pdf#page=64

Crossley, M. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology: Self, trauma, and the construction of meaning. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

Efklides, A. (2008). Metacognition: Defining its facets and levels of functioning in relation to self-regulation and co-regulation. European Psychologist, 13 (4), 277-287. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232452693_Metacognition_Defining_Its_Facets_ad_Levels_of_Functioning_in_Relation_to_Self -Regulation_and_Co-regulation

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist.

Miele, D. B. & Scholer, A. A. (2018). The role of metamotivational monitoring in motivation regulation, Educational Psychologist, 53(1), 1-21.

Ruffman, T., Slade, L., & Crowe, E. (2002). The relation between children’s and mothers’ mental state language and theory-of-mind understanding. Child Development, 73, 734-751.

VanZile-Tamsen, C. & Livingston, Jennifer. J. A. (1999). The differential impact of motivation on the self-regulated strategy use of high- and low-achieving college student. Journal of College Student Develompment, (40)1, 54-60. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net /publication/232503812_The_differential_impact_of_motivation_on_the_self-regulated_strategy_use_of_high -_and_low-achieving_college_students

Fractals and Teaching Philosophies (Part 2): Some Reflection on the Value of Metacognition

by Dr. Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities (retired)

Our previous blog contribution introduced the nature of fractals and explained why the products of intellectual development have fractal qualities. Our brain neurology is fractal, so fractal qualities saturate the entire process of intellectual development. Read the previous blog now, to refresh any needed awareness.

The acts of drafting and using a written philosophy are metacognitive by design. Rare use of philosophies seems symptomatic of undervaluing metacognition. When we operate from a written philosophy, each day offers a practice of metacognition through asking: “Did I practice my philosophy?” That involves considering where we might not have exercised one of the fractal generator’s six components (Figure 1) and then resolve to do so at the next opportunity. Doing so instills the habits of mind needed to do what we intended. Such metacognitive practice is very different from engaging challenges as separately packaged events, without using the “thinking about thinking” needed to understand how our practice was consistent with what we wanted to do. In teaching, we find some of our most significant difficulties appear when we find ourselves doing the opposite of what we most wanted to do. We get into those difficulties by not being aware of the decisions that brought us there.

One possible application of metacognition lies in a large-scale challenge that affects all schools – the annual evaluation of faculty for retention and promotion often reveals chronic problems. How might the standard practices faculty typically experience differ from a practice in which faculty employed written teaching philosophies as a way to address this annual challenge?

WHY Do We Do Annual Review of Faculty?

A metacognitive approach would start with a reflection of the reasons WHY schools go through the prickly annual ritual of evaluating faculty and the outcomes that they hope to attain from doing it. A recent discussion on a faculty development listserv showed that almost no institutions have satisfying answers to “WHY?” For many, an unreflective approach to annual review commonly defaulted to ranking the faculty according to their scores from student ratings forms, sometimes from just one global item on the forms. Asking “WHY?” resulted in the following personal email from an accomplished faculty member: “The main rationale seems in practice often to be simply ‘We have to determine annual merit scores to determine salary increases, and so we have to generate a merit score for teaching (and for research and for service).’”

Given such an annual review process, the faculty will focus on becoming “better teachers” by focusing on raising their student ratings scores, but is that the primary outcome that institutions want? Would we write that “to obtain high student ratings” as a reason that we teach in our teaching philosophies? If we sincerely want effective teaching and student learning, is there a better answer to “WHY?”

Employing Written Philosophies – An Alternate Approach

More specifically, consider which outcome of the following you would choose to expend efforts for yourself or your colleagues: 1) to try to achieve higher student ratings or 2) to improve their mastery of some things labeled in Figure 1 that are known to increase student learning? For example, if a faculty member chose for one year to produce better learning by expanding his knowledge of pedagogy to permit the matching of different kinds of instruction to specific types of content, could that be preferable? Suppose another faculty member discovered that particular stages of adult thinking existed. What if she aspired in the coming year to gain an understanding of this literature, and she focused in the coming year on designing some lessons that helped students to discover the level of thinking they had reached and what their next higher stage might be? Might that be preferable to trying to achieve higher ratings?

Illustration of components (thinking, teaching, learning) in the fractal generator for faculty and students (by Ed Nuhfer)

Figure 1. We repeat the graphic from Part 1, Figure 2 here. This representation of a philosophy as a fractal generator is somewhat analogous to a stem cell in that it contains all the essential components to produce whatever we need. Metacognition allows us to identify something of value to our current practice. Then for a year, we articulate a philosophy that includes a focus to develop that area.

When we begin to be metacognitive concerning WHY we should want to do annual evaluations and how we should use student input, things should emerge that differ from merely sorting faculty into categories in order to dispense rewards and penalties. Some positive outcomes might be enhancing awareness of how we could design our annual evaluations to help make our institutions more fit places in which to teach and learn, or to provide our graduates with better capacity for life-long learning. In such cases, the nature of annual review changes from an inspection of each faculty member’s popularity with her or his students at the end of their courses into a metacognitive process designed to produce valued outcomes. Management expert Edwards Deming warned particularly about trying to “inspect in” quality at the end of an event or process. Deming’s 14 principles can be condensed into just one concept: “Be metacognitive.” Remain aware of what you most wanted to do when you take any actions to do it.

Changing the Annual Review Format: Embed Metacognition

“Be metacognitive” represents a significant change in most institutional thinking. So, how might we enact this change? One approach would be to design the annual review more like a self-directed contract for practice. Faculty write the philosophies that they intend to practice. A graphic generator like Figure 1 can assist understanding what one now does lots of and too little of. They pick a specific area that they want to do more of and articulate their intent to develop some additional strength in that area. They also articulate WHY they chose this emphasis and what outcome they seek to achieve.

When faculty start their term, they share with their students the emphasis and the outcome through the written syllabus of each class. During the semester, their practice now achieves a metacognitive quality. They regularly reflect on their practice and monitor themselves on whether they are practicing as intended. Their annual review of teaching then becomes a report with parts somewhat like the following.

Did they practice their stated philosophy?
How did their students respond?
How did their practice change, and did that contribute to revisions in their philosophy?
What is their written contractual plan and philosophy for the coming year?

Weighing the Alternatives

Of the two models of annual evaluations shared above, over-reliance on student ratings for faculty evaluation answers the WHY question with: “We maintain universities so that students can rate the faculty and so that faculty will strive to be rewarded for higher ratings.” Such absurdities arise whenever we practice with no better answers to “WHY?”

As a final thought, consider how an end-of-the-course grade for a student is analogous to annual evaluation for a faculty member. How might teaching students to write their learning philosophies improve their design for learning?

A ‘New Ear’ for Student Writers: Building Awareness of Audience

by Michael Young, Robert Morris University

Downloadable

Motivation and Background:

A fundamental hurdle for most inexperienced writers is gaining a sense of their audience, and how a different consciousness may interpret the words, the organization, and the presentation that they (the writers) use to share ideas. It is different than knowing rules, techniques, or traditions of writing. It requires more than knowledge of the topic about which they are writing. Writers must be aware of their own individual thinking, their own choices, their motivations, and how these could be interpreted or misinterpreted by other people’s ways of thinking. This need for awareness of their own thoughts that could then support their writing efforts, i.e. metacognitive writing, led me to develop a new pedagogical process for the writing classroom that uses active presentations by others to convey audience interpretation.

I used this process for three years in creative writing courses, partially because students were already pursuing genres that often are interpreted orally, but believe it could be applicable to any writing course, especially with the following course characteristics: 1) upper division/at least sophomore level so the students are already somewhat experienced collegiate writers and 2) class size is small, ideally 20 or fewer students. No special materials, other than imagination and the means to convey ideas, are needed for the in-class exercises.

Nuts and Bolts:

This pedagogical process has several steps. To first prepare the students and get them thinking about how an audience might interpret their work, the students are given an initial survey on their then-current process of writing and concept of their potential audience. Consistently, three out of five agreed that they had a “mental picture” of their reader, but it was often no further developed than their college peers or even themselves. Most could not describe their readers any further and some said they had not considered a concept of a readership. Perhaps, for them, they had written only and ever with the teacher, and so a grade, in mind.

The second step involves having canonical examples of their genre, fiction or poetry, interpreted by others. During this step those others give a presentation / reading of the work in a manner that conveys their interpretation of the writing. Those others can be classmates or a more external audience. For example, the first two years I used this process, the others were members of the Forensics Team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, then led by Professor Ann Burnett.

A third step, which has evolved over the years, was to have others present the students’ own writing back to them. This third step was implemented as a cycle. The students wrote their piece (either individually or as a group) and then gave it to others (classmates or external individuals) for interpretation with no additional input from the writers. The presenters would convey their interpretation, which then could be used by the writers to guide their revisions based on a better understanding of possible audience interpretation. If revisions were made, then the cycle of interpretation could be repeated.

Outcomes:

When this was done at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a project funded by a grant from the university’s Teaching Council, 80% of the collaborative groups elected to revise their texts after hearing them interpreted. They noted the experience of hearing their stories being told by someone else, someone who was sharing their own understandings and insights into the words, heightened an awareness of qualities like the “flow and rhythm” of words or of “trying to make a picture in my head”, and an overall greater attention to what their drafts were able to communicate. For example, the potential hollowness of easy clichés might not have occurred to the writers or a lack of descriptions they had had in mind but which were not articulated were now more evident. Further, the majority of the class reported being much more aware of their own thinking (an aspect of metacognition) and the thinking of others.

By hearing, and sometimes seeing by the use of movements, how another person re-created the writer’s intentions, each writer had the opportunity to perceive how their audience understood what had been written down – in a way, to hear their own thinking – and to questions themselves. Is that what they had wanted someone else to feel, to think or had their expression fallen short of their conception? In other words, the process allowed them to “hear it (their work) with a ‘new ear’” and some of them realized they “should have found another way to get that (sic) message across.” That “new ear”, hopefully, was them more carefully listening to and questioning their own thoughts, i.e. being metacognitive about their own writing.

Participatory Pedagogy: Inviting Student Metacognition

by Nicola Simmons, Brock University, nsimmons@brocku.ca

Downloadable

Background

I teach higher and adult education, including adult developmental psychology, and like to invite my students to be aware of their cognitive processes. I see this as central to being an adult learner. One strategy I have developed is engaging students in creating course outcomes and content. I hope to help students become more aware of, more involved in, and better assessors of their own learning; in short, to examine their learning through a metacognitive lens.

This example is from a Masters of Education class, Exploring Approaches to Professional Development. The class is typically quite small (up to 20 students) but I have used it in groups of 50 students at the undergraduate level as well.

The Approach

The course follows Siemens’ (1984) participatory pedagogy (see syllabus excerpt) to invite students to co-construct the course process, including choosing course readings and creating grading rubrics:

As Biggs (2011) notes, student course co-ownership helps engage students in deep learning; it also builds their awareness of their learning processes. The first assignment, for example, asked them to:

Articulate your intended learning during this course, including a focus for personal and professional development. What will your development focus be? What will you do to realize your plan?

This engages students metacognitively as they take responsibility for their learning path and prepares them for the final assignment, a reflective ‘portfolio,’ in which they synthesize their learning over the term:

Create a creative and critical summary of your changing perspectives and reflections throughout the course, integrating readings (both assigned and others). Discuss your key learning, referring to course and outside experiences. Exemplary projects demonstrate critical analysis, synthesis, and self-evaluation. Can be any format (paper, song, performance, art; format negotiable). Addresses:

What theories help you?
What have you learned?
How can you use that?
How have you changed?
How do you know?

Each of these prompts invites consideration of the learning and development process and supports students in acquiring habits of mind that will allow them to approach future courses with a metacognitive lens. This has also led to their growth as scholars: One year, many of the students engaged in a self-study that included conducting a literature review and creating questions to guide our reflections. The result of that work was several conference presentations and a peer-reviewed paper (Simmons, Barnard, & Fennema, 2011) that outlined the transformative learning resulting from the student co-constructed course.

What was fascinating to me were the ways the course process built not only students’ metacognition about their learning, but also about their teaching. One wrote

I told my colleagues the story of this course and they were moved to consider new ways of doing culminating projects. Why isn’t there more choice? Why do we tell students what they must produce to demonstrate their own learning? Why don’t we add the additional layer of asking students to find the best way to demonstrate their learning?

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Developing metacognition is not a pain-free process! One student described the transformation during the process from fear to increased confidence.

Activities were out of my comfort zone and there were times that I struggled with the unknown … I was able to see the value once I moved beyond the frozen fear of uncertainty to ask myself “What did I want to gain from this course? How did I learn when pushed out of my comfort zone?” I had to be transformed into a student who was open to this new concept and new territory for learning…[where] mistakes … would not be judged but instead used as stepping stones toward learning.

Instructors should be mindful of the importance of support throughout the process. Just as the students are invited to be metacognitive about their processes, it helps if the instructor is transparently metacognitive about the overall course path. For me that looked like saying things like “this may be new for you, but I’d like you to consider trying it” and reassuring them that discomfort was a sign they were onto something good!

The course format continues to unsettle students but also transform them into metacognitive learners, and I finish with one student’s illustrative words:

I remember thinking at the time that the final project was the most difficult task that I had encountered … I really had to ponder … how my journey through the course could be effectively captured and conveyed … It continues to personify my journey through work/life, the choices we make when we meet resistance or the paths we take … how we travel the road is for our choosing.

References

Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at the university: What the student does. Maidenhead, UK: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911.

Siemens, G. (2008). New structures and spaces of learning: The systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning. Paper Presented for Universidade do Minho, Encontro sobre Web 2.0, Braga, Portugal, October 10. Available online at http://elearnspace.org/Articles/systemic_impact.htm

Simmons, N., Barnard, M., & Fennema, W. (2011). Participatory pedagogy: A compass for transformative learning? Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 4.

Make It Stick in Cognitive Psychology

by Jennifer A. McCabe, Goucher College,
jennifer.mccabe@goucher.edu

Downloadable

Motivation and Background: I am a cognitive psychologist with a research program focused on metacognition and applied memory in education. I decided three years ago to structure my Cognitive Psychology course around the principles described in the book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014). Many memory-improvement principles are discussed in this book, including: practice retrieving new learning from memory, space out your retrieval practice, interleave the study of different problem types, elaboration, and reflection. Other topics include the fluency illusion, getting past learning styles, and developing a growth mindset. Adopting this book as required reading, and structuring the course to reflect these principles, dovetailed with my increasing commitment to prompt and support students’ metacognitive growth. I hoped that this would both enhance student learning on objective tests (in a notoriously challenging course), and also explicitly support a course learning outcome: Improve your metacognitive skills (knowing what you know, learning how to learn).

Context in which the activity or process has been used: This has been included in three sections of Cognitive Psychology, a 200-level course offered at Goucher College, a small liberal arts institution in Baltimore, Maryland. The class size is 25-30 students, and I have been teaching this course for 13 years.

Description of activity or process methods: The description of the activity is in my Cognitive Psychology syllabus (available through Project Syllabus: http://teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/otrp/syllabi/JM16cognitive.pdf). On the first day of class, I describe the Make It Stick” Reflection Papers. For each class period in which a chapter is assigned, students prepare and bring to class a 1-page, single-spaced reflection. Content and style is open, but they must demonstrate deep and careful thinking about the topic, and explicit connections to life experiences, habits and plans/intentions, and course material. They can also include questions and/or other personal reactions to the chapter. I note that this assignment requires elaboration and reflection, two effective learning strategies discussed in the book. Students submit 8 reflection papers during the semester (one per chapter), each worth up to 5 points. Out of a 500-point class, this assignment is worth up to 40 points (8%).

The first reflection paper is due early in the semester, typically the second week, then the subsequent seven chapters/papers are due approximately once per week. We take time in class on those days to engage in small- and large-group discussion. Most of these discussions are framed in terms of metacognition, particularly in light of research suggesting that college students do not always understand how learning works, and cannot always predict which memory strategies lead to the best retention (e.g., McCabe, 2011). I encourage them to consider their lives as learners, and how they can use information from the book to adjust their strategies.

We also talk about how this course is structured to reflect “best practice” learning strategies. For example, students take a self-graded “retrieval practice” quiz at the start of most class periods, because research shows that frequent, effortful, low-stakes, cumulative, spaced (distributed) retrieval practice: (1) produces the most durable learning; and (2) improves metacognitive accuracy of what you know. I strive to be transparent in the purpose for all course elements. In a sense, then, I see Make It Stick as a framework for the entire course – core content and topics for discussion, rationale for course design, and hopefully motivation for students to engage and feel empowered in their own learning.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned:

Since implementing this assignment, I believe that students’ knowledge about effective learning strategies has improved. They seem to enjoy the book as a required course component – on an anonymous questionnaire, 88% agreed that Make It Stick should be included in future classes. When asked whether this course had supported the learning outcome of improving metacognitive skills, 100% agreed or strongly agreed (71% strongly agreed). And when asked about one way this course has changed the way they think or behave in the world, 78% included a statement relating to metacognition. Some examples include:

“I now analyze the way I am absorbing and encoding information. I have never thought about the way I learn but now I am so grateful to accept the study strategies that work and throw away the ones that don’t.”

“It has helped me to develop a better understanding of effective study/learning strategies. Improved my metacognitive skills!”

“When I study and am overconfident in my skills, I think about metacognitive skills and test myself. This class helped me study better.”

Of course the major challenge with teaching students metacognition is that it is only half the battle to acquire knowledge about how learning works. I still struggle with motivating students to actually implement these strategies. Many are desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994), feeling effortful and error-prone (and even frustrating) in the short term, and only showing benefits due to this initial challenge at a later time. I encourage students to use the strategies regularly, so that they become habits of mind, but I’m not convinced they consistently do so after one semester of exposure to this material. Yet the fact that they make statements such as the ones above gives me hope that they are integrating the Make It Stick ideas about metacognition into their lives.

Though this assignment has been part of a highly relevant course, Cognitive Psychology, the book Make It Stick (or selected chapters) could enhance a number of courses in and outside of psychology – as well as first-year seminars and similar courses that focus on student skill development, with the goal of teaching them how to be better learners.

References

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings.

In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

McCabe, J. (2011). Metacognitive awareness of learning strategies in undergraduates. Memory & Cognition, 39, 462–476. doi:10.3758/s13421-010-0035-2

Metacognitive Time Capsule Assignments for Reflection on Writing Skills

by Sarah Robinson*, U. S. Air Force Academy
sarah.robinson@usafa.edu

Downloadable

Motivations and Context:

I teach upper level Geoscience courses on Remote Sensing and Imagery Analysis—essentially using satellite imagery to study earth surface materials and processes. In addition to the course objectives on imagery analysis, I also have a course objective on communication. Specifically, I want my students to be able to construct a convincing, clear, and concise written argument that communicates their analysis choices and subsequent results. Using imagery to analyze a geospatial problem is not enough; students also need to be able to write a convincing technical summary that communicates their analysis and results to others.

One of the challenges with communication course goals is that writing is often approached with a fixed mindset (Dweck, 2007), meaning it is viewed as some innate quality that you either have or you don’t. With a fixed mindset, it simply doesn’t make sense to expend effort on writing (ex. write drafts or read feedback) because there is no clear path for improvement—it is a fixed skill regardless of effort. However, if students alternatively view writing with a growth mindset they see writing as a skill that can be improved with practice and use of specific actions/strategies to make progress. Engaging in a growth mindset requires reflection on abilities and progress (self-awareness) and identification of strategies for improvement (self-regulation). In terms of writing, this translates into effort expended on practice in multiple assignments/drafts, reflection on progress and feedback, and identification of strategies to improve future writing assignments. Course design and assignments that promote metacognition through self-awareness and self-regulation can help students develop this growth mindset. Specifically, I incorporate systematic practice, actionable feedback and a time capsule reflection assignment in my course design.

Nuts and Bolts:

Systematic Practice:

Students have 3 lab assignments and a final project where they are asked to analyze geospatial problems using imagery and then summarize their analysis and results in 1-2 paragraphs. Each lab assignment has different geospatial problems, but the writing expectations and format are the same—for each geospatial problem, students write a summary that includes an introduction to the research problem, an explanation of their analysis choices in solving the problem, and an evaluation of their results. By having the same format (but different topic) for each writing assignment, students get systematic practice in writing a convincing, clear, and concise written argument.

Actionable Feedback:

The consistent format and expectations across writing assignments allows me to use the same rubric for every assignment. While the content changes with each assignment, students can reflect on their progress by looking at their rubric scores across the semester. For the first assignment, the rubric is the same, but a multiplier is applied to the score to compensate for their initial lack of familiarity with the format. In addition to rubric scores, I provide comments in the text (students submit electronic copies of their assignments) that provide actionable feedback on how to improve the next submission. Because the comments are relevant to a future assignment, students report that they engage in self-regulation by reading and using the feedback to improve their next assignment.

Metacognitive time capsule assignment

To support student self-awareness of their progress over the semester, I created a time capsule assignment where students compare their writing on the first lab with their writing on the final project. This assignment supports student metacognitive development because it asks students to develop self-awareness by reflecting on the changes they see in their writing. As all of their submissions are digital, students have copies of all their assignments and feedback across the semester. This assignment asks students specific questions to guide their reflection and asks them to provide example text from their assignments to support their statements. I am very clear in class that they receive full credit for participating in the assignment—they are not graded on what is in their answers, only on whether they provided complete answers.

There are two keys to this assignment for effective student reflection: the “time capsule” aspect and the consistent assignment format. Having students preserve and read their actual first writing assignment is critical—this first assignment essentially captures who they were at the beginning of the semester and preserves it, as in a time capsule, to be revealed intact at the end of the semester. The time capsule aspect allows for unfiltered, direct comparison by students of their skills then vs. their skills now that is not overwritten by their experiences during the semester.

The other key component is having a consistent assignment format to make comparison easier. This assignment would not have worked as well if students were comparing writing assignments that had very different formats or expectations. By keeping the format/expectations consistent, students are better able to see and explain their progress.

Outcomes:

I had trepidations about giving this time capsule assignment the first time I used it—I honestly didn’t know how students would respond. I was pleasantly surprised to see how engaged they were—instead of just writing their answers during class time, they were sharing with each other their comparisons between their first paragraphs and what they were then able to write for their final project. Their written answers documented their reflection on the changes they saw in their technical writing skills (self-awareness) and identified writing habits that they could continue/change in future classes (self-regulation).

Lessons Learned and future directions:

This type of time capsule assignment is something that I will continue to build into my courses. The planning required to design a consistent format and preserve early assignments is a small cost for the benefits of having students develop self-awareness and self-regulation and supporting a growth mindset.

Reference

Dweck, Carol S. (2007). “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” New York: Ballantine Books.

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.

Meaningful Reflections for Improving Student Learning

by Ashley Welsh, Postdoctoral Teaching & Learning Fellow, Vantage College

I am a course coordinator and instructor for a science communication course (SCIE 113) for first-year science students. SCIE 113 focuses on writing, argumentation and communication in science and is part of the curriculum for an enriched, first-year experience program for international, English Language Learners. Throughout the term, students provide feedback on their peers’ writing in both face-to-face and online environments. The process of providing and receiving feedback is an important skill for students, however many students do not receive explicit instruction on how to provide or use constructive feedback (Mulder, Pearce, & Baik, 2014). In order to better understand my students’ experience with peer review, I conducted a research project to explore how their use and perceptions of peer review in their writing developed over the course of the term.

Many of the data collection methods I used to assess students’ perceptions and use of peer review in SCIE 113 this past term incorporated acts of reflection. These included in-class peer review worksheets and written reflections, small and large group discussions, an end-of-term survey about peer review, and my own researcher reflections. Periodically throughout the semester, I paired up the students and they engaged in peer review of one another’s writing. They each had a worksheet that asked them to comment on what their partner did well and how that person could improve their writing. During this activity, my teaching assistant and I interacted with the pairs and answered any potential questions. Afterwards, students independently completed written reflections about the usefulness of the peer review activity and their concerns about giving and receiving feedback. Before the class finished, we discussed students’ responses and concerns as a whole group. Students’ worksheets and written reflections, as well as classroom observations, offered insight into how my pedagogy mapped to their use of and reflections about peer review.

As of late, I have been more deliberate with designing pedagogy and activities that offer students the time and space to reflect and record their strengths and weaknesses as learners. The term reflection, is often used when discussing metacognition. As Weinert (1987) describes, metacognition involves second-order cognitions such as thoughts about thoughts or the reflections of one’s actions. With respect to metacognitive regulation, Zohar and Barzilai (2013) highlight that an individual can heighten their awareness of their strengths/weaknesses and evaluate their progress via reflection. This reflection process also plays a key role in metacognition-focused data collection as most methods require students to reflect upon how their knowledge and skills influence their learning. Providing survey responses, answering interview questions, and writing in a journal require a student to appraise their personal development and experience as a learner through reflection (Kalman, 2007; Aktruk & Sahin, 2011).

While the act of reflection is an important component of metacognition and metacognitive research, its use in the classroom also presents its own set of challenges. As educators and researchers, we must be wary of not overusing the term so that it remains meaningful to students. We must also be cautious with how often we ask students to reflect. An extensive case study by Baird and Mitchell (1987) revealed that students become fatigued if they are asked to reflect upon their learning experiences too often. Furthermore, we hope these acts of reflection will help students to meaningfully evaluate their learning, but there is no guarantee that students will move beyond simplistic or surface responses. To address these challenges in my own classroom, I attempted to design activities and assessments that favoured “not only student participation and autonomy, but also their taking responsibility for their own learning” (Planas Lladó et al., p. 593).

While I am still in the midst of analyzing my data, I noticed over the course of the semester that students became increasingly willing to complete the reflections about peer review and their writing. At the beginning of the term, students wrote rather simplistic and short responses, but by the end of the term, students’ responses contained more depth and clarity. I was surprised that students were not fatigued by or reluctant to complete the weekly reflections and discussions about peer review and that this process became part of the norm of the classroom. Students also became faster with completing their written responses, which was promising given that they were all English Language Learners. As per John Draeger (personal communication, April 27, 2016), students’ practice with these activities appears to have helped them build the stamina and muscles required for successful and meaningful outcomes. It was rewarding to observe that within class discussions and their reflections, students became better aware of their strengths and weaknesses as reviewers and writers (self-monitoring) and often talked or wrote about how they could improve their skills (self-regulation).

Based on my preliminary analysis, it seems that tying the reflection questions explicitly to the peer review process allowed for increasingly meaningful and metacognitive student responses. The inclusion of this research project within my class served as an impetus for me to carefully consider and question how my pedagogy was linked to students’ perceptions and ability to reflect upon their learning experience. I am also curious as to how I can assist students with realizing that this process of reflection can improve their skills not only in my course, but also in their education (and dare I say life). This research project has served as an impetus for me to continue to explore how I can better support students to become more metacognitive about their learning in higher education.

References

Akturk, A. O., & Sahin, I. (2011). Literature review on metacognition and its measurement. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 3731-3736.

Baird, J. R., & Mitchell, I. J. (1987). Improving the quality of teaching and learning. Melbourne, Victoria: Monash University Press.

Kalman, C. S. (2007). Successful science and engineering teaching in colleges and universities. Bolton, Massachusetts: Anker Publishing Company, Inc.

Mulder, R.A., Pearce, J.M., & Baik, C. (2014). Peer review in higher education: Student perceptions before and after participation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 15(2), 157-171.

Planas Lladó, A., Feliu Soley, L., Fraguell Sansbelló, R.M., Arbat Pujolras, G., Pujol Planella, J., Roura-Pascual, N., Suñol Martínez, J.J., & Montoro Moreno, L. (2014). Student perceptions of peer assessment: An interdisciplinary study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(5), 592-610.

Weinert, F. E. (1987). Introduction and overview: Metacognition and motivation as determinants of effective learning and understanding. In F. E. Weinert & R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 1-16). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Zohar, A., & Barzilai, S. (2013). A review of research on metacognition in science education: Current and future directions. Studies in Science Education, 49(2), 121-169.