The Role of Metacognition in Learning and Achievement

The Role of Metacognition in Learning and Achievement

MindShift

Excerpted from “Four-Dimensional Education:
The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed,” by Charles Fadel, Bernie Trilling and Maya Bialik. The following is from the section, “Metacognition—Reflecting on Learning Goals, Strategies, and Results.”

Metacognition, simply put, is the process of thinking about thinking. It is important in every aspect of school and life, since it involves self-reflection on one’s current position, future goals, potential actions and strategies, and results. At its core, it is a basic survival strategy, and has been shown to be present even in rats.

Perhaps the most important reason for developing metacognition is that it can improve the application of knowledge, skills, and character qualities in realms beyond the immediate context in which they were learned. This can result in the transfer of competencies across disciplines—important for students preparing for real-life situations where clear-cut divisions of disciplines fall away and one must select competencies from the entire gamut of their experience to effectively apply them to the challenges at hand. Even within academic settings, it is valuable—and often necessary—to apply principles and methods across disciplinary lines.

Read it all at the link below:

ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/08/10/the-role-of-metacognition-in-learning-and-achievement/

This is a book that I am looking forward to reading!

Reviewed in the New York Times "Well" Blog

 

What American Parents Can Learn From Chinese Philosophy

By CHRISTINE GROSS-LOH

 

Christine Gross-Loh is the co-author, with Michael Puett, of “The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” from which this essay is adapted.

Here’s the conventional wisdom about raising kids in modern-day America. Teach them to know who they are. Encourage them to think big and to aim high. Show them how to play to their strengths and plan a route to future success.

But there is a better way to turn a child into a flourishing adult, one based on just about the opposite of everything we think we should do. This “new” way is actually very old – over 2,000 years old — and is inspired by the wisdom of Chinese philosophers including Mencius, Confucius and Laotzu.

Consider what they might say if they were raising today’s children:

Stop Looking For Your Passion...

...read it all HERE...

In a wonderful article that he wrote in January, Adam Grant argues that for us to develop creative children, we need to back off - not the easiest thing these days, but an essential one to do.  I think his discussion of "gifted" kids relates pretty well to those of us who teach and work at schools where there a large number of hard-working and driven kids.  As great as the regimented educational process can be, Grant argues that we need creative and artistic young adults, and to encourage creativity, a different approach is needed.

How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

Adam Grant in The New York Times - Jan 30, 2016

THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential.

Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.

What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.

The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own.Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep.

Read it all HERE

Article: The Drill vs. the Hole: The Importance of Being a Relevant Educator

The Drill vs. The Hole: The Importance of Being a Relevant Educator

By Tom Whitby - Teach.com

In the earlier 20th century, educators had very few tools to use to accomplish their goal of educating students. Pens, pencils, markers, blackboards, notebooks, and construction paper were staples in every classroom. Eventually, technology evolved and better teaching tools emerged: overhead projectors, record players, filmstrips, movies, VCRs, tape recorders, Xerox printers, and four-function calculators. Each educator made a personal decision as to how much, or how little, they would use the aforementioned tools. Those were the same tools, although very primitive by today’s standards, that society used for curation, calculation, communication, collaboration, and, the ultimate goal of education.

Read it all HERE

From The Guardian: How PowerPoint is killing critical thought

How PowerPoint is killing critical thought 
Andrew Smith in The Guardian

Bored students is the least of it – the bullet point-ization of information is making us stupid and irresponsible

I still remember the best lecture I ever attended. It was part of a joint series offered by the English and philosophy departments in my first term at university and, given that the subject was Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, should have been the dullest event in Christendom that night. But it wasn’t. The lecturer, Thomas Baldwin, had a deceptively simple style: he would write a proposition on the blackboard facing us and gaze at it for a moment, like a medium beckoning a spirit. Then he would turn and smile, and start to explain.

Baldwin paced the room – but slowly. On occasion he would stop altogether, appearing lost, a moment in which all the world’s logic seemed at stake, before somehow refinding his path to a second thrilling proposition. At one point he stood with his forehead in his hand for so long we almost called for a medic. He was so engaged, so present, that you could almost feel the motion of his mind – and through his, your own. I doubt if fewer words have ever been spoken in the course of an hour-long disquisition, and yet we all tripped to the bar buzzing with excitement afterwards. To this day, if I’m feeling blue I think back to Baldwin’s explication of the logical transition from anguish to nausea, and invariably I feel better.

Baldwin’s talk came to mind recently when I listened to a debate, on Radio 4’s Today show, about lecturing standards at British universities. I have two children at uni who have both have found lectures frustrating, so the contention of the education minister Jo Johnson that quality in this area was “highly variable” came as no surprise to me. What’s more, during sample orations on open days, I had the same experience of being bored to tears by things I felt I should have enjoyed. So when my daughter reported an exception to this rule, I knew what my first question would be.

“Did the lecturer use PowerPoint?”

“Hm. No, he just spoke,” she said....

Read it all HERE at THE GUARDIAN