Posts Tagged ‘meta-cognition’

I don’t know about you but the break over summer is always a time of reading and often a time of reflection.  Whilst most of my reading is fictional (a summer habit that I have had since I was a kid when I read an average of 5 books a week) my work year normally starts with clearing out my email in-boxes of all the RSS feeds I get from the educational websites I follow – ASCD, David Didau, Teach Thought, New York Times Education, etc. My normal process is to have a brief read of each one and if I find it valuable and related to the areas that we as a consulting business are interested in then I curate it to one of our our Scoop.It pages. In this way I can keep track of a wide range of thinking and discussion about educational research and ideas. The most impactful articles I print out for possible use in future themed newsletters (like this one) or pass it on to schools as we work with them.

Two recent articles had me reflect deeply about failure, the mindset we could develop in our students, and how we as educators could empower effort in the learners around us.

The first article was written by Ron Friedman titled If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. Friedman begins his article telling the story of how Sara Blakely overcame remarkable obstacles to create the multimillion dollar Spanx underwear business. The key paragraphs for me were;

“Some parents are content asking their children, “Did you have a good day?” or “What did you learn at school?” Not at the Blakely household. The question Sara and her brother had to answer night after night was this: “What did you fail at today?” When there was no failure to report, Blakely’s father would express disappointment.

 “What he did was redefine failure for my brother and me,” Blakely told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And instead of failure being the outcome, failure became not trying. And it forced me at a young age to want to push myself so much further out of my comfort zone.””

My parents didn’t ask me or my two brothers such questions but my experience was that they never stopped any of us from taking things on. They expected us to contribute around the house, to the family, and be responsible for our actions. This is not to say we weren’t rat bags and never got into trouble – we were 3 boys remember – and our health insurance did get quite a workout over the years. Somewhere along the line I developed a strong growth mindset about the academic side of things and thus was the first member of the family to go to University and then go on to get a PhD.

The second article How to engage students in their own learning process is by Nina Smith, a Finnish teacher who blogs about her experience within the Finnish school system, student centred learning and developing intrinsic motivation within students. The paragraph that stood out for me was;

“One main problem is that “students are typically presented as the customers of engagement, rather than coauthors of their learning”.[1] It is really, really hard to be intrinsically interested and very engaged with things you cannot control, or in activities that are mandated by someone else.”

If I look at my own life experience I am intrinsically engaged in those things I have control over. I suspect that if you look at your own experience you will find the same thing. One of the reasons I struck out to create my own consulting business, despite the challenges that faced us at the time and since, was that there was always some point where I became frustrated with the “mandated” hoops and side work I had to do to maintain my position in the organisations I worked for. Now that I am creating what I do each day and 100% responsible for how my days go I have no problem with engagement. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get stressed or anxious about certain things or that I am always successful, it just means I have no questions about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I find myself often taking on opportunities that I, on first look, haven’t got a clue how to do. I have learnt to figure it out – mainly in collaboration and discussion with others.

This leads me to my takeaway for learning within a school environment from the two articles. If we honestly want the students to be engaged in what they are learning, and to develop their capacity and skill to be lifelong learners, then it is critical to create the environment where they experience being, as Nina put it, the co-authors of their learning. This includes learning that failure is a stepping stone to success and developing strategies and process to deal with “non-success”.

I can hear the echoes from teachers and people in positions of leadership telling me “that’s all nice and good but how could we do that given we have a curriculum to cover?” I am not sugar coating it when I say that it is quite a big challenge. It is big because most schools I see are not structured culturally to create that type of learning environment. Just look around you now, does your school allow you as a teacher the freedom to be the co-author of your professional learning and development and to fail and then learn? Are you even given significant time to collaborate with your peers and develop new learning? I am not talking about the 2 hours you get once per week in meetings I am talking about the time you would get if you were studying a course at university. Are you told by school leadership about school-wide pedagogical initiatives (e.g. embedding formative assessment), have a couple of PD’s and then expected to implement the ideas? Or does the school take its time (sometimes years) to engage staff in a new pedagogical initiative and the teachers are supported with time, group and one-on-one discussions, peer feedback, etc to have the initiative embedded? Research does show that this is what works in schools.

One of the contracts I have been working on involves teachers from a range of secondary colleges taking on an 18 month action-research project in something that mattered to them and the school. The teachers had to build a case for action about the need for an initiative, get it vetted by the school leadership as well as by a university team, before articulating a plan for how they will go about it. It has been fascinating to watch and see the growth in thinking and practice of these teachers. This project for me, as a critical friend, has highlighted the importance of developing great change management processes within schools if we really want to change the nature of the learning environment for ALL learners within the school.

The bottom line, if you as a teacher or school leader, are ACTUALLY interested in developing a strong community of learners and learning within your school then there is work to do. It begins with saying “yes” and then figuring out how. To get you started I have included some articles that could spark some ideas and discussions with your colleagues.

How Beliefs Shape the Effort Effect

STEM Teaches Failure as an Opportunity to Learn

How to Motivate Students to Work Harder

Why Motivating Others Starts with Using the Right Language

Motivating Young Adolescents

Motivated to Learn

COMPASS Learning

12 Things I Want To Hear My Students Say

Grit Plus Talent Equals Student Success

Have a great start to 2015!

In A key to transforming practice – spiral vs linear learning Part I I proposed that the way teachers think about learning influences the way they teach. By observing the actions of teachers in day to day practice and how they structure and discuss learning within their lessons, units, and across the year we can achieve an insight into their thinking. From my observations of the learning in many schools, and the challenges that teachers identify with their students, I inferred that many teachers are engendering a linear way of thinking about learning with our students – and this would need to shift to allow the enactment of many of the core evidence-based educational research.

In Part II I will explore a more powerful context for teachers to think and operate from and point to some of the recent research and articles that give some guidance as to HOW you can start to shift the context with yourself and within your school.

A Spiral Thinking Approach

Why I am suggesting a spiral approach is because most curricula or standards are organised in a spiral progression of knowledge, understandings and skills. Knowledge, as well as skill development and understanding, is often organised as a progression because it allows for the “pieces of the jigsaw” puzzle to be connected in a way that gives access and understanding to most learners in the fastest way possible. It wasn’t necessarily how the knowledge was first gained (e.g. the German chemist Kekule’s dream that led to identifying the cyclic benzene structure) but it provides a logical process by which knowledge, skills and understandings can be built.

If you explore the processes of scientific inquiry, historical inquiry, design thinking all of them are diagrammatically shown as cyclical processes. In reality, whilst the processes are cyclical, the learning that is achieved are spirals (or helical) in nature because at the end of an inquiry one doesn’t end up in the same place in one’s knowledge, understanding or skill. We learn from the mistakes as much as we learn from the successes. This naturally leads to a growth mindset because a “failure” is weighted equally to a “success”.

HOW to embed it

Ok – so this is a nice idea but how do you embed this thinking with the students?

Well this comes down to the habitual practices and scaffolding you as a teacher embeds in your classes. If you are intending to have the students become life-long learners and transfer their thinking, skills and understandings across subjects as I have suggested, then you will need to provide a framework and language which is used across all the classes and learning you want the students to do. You have to embed a way of thinking about learning, and in particular their learning, that naturally enables the students to think from the framework.

This is already done to some extent when schools use frameworks like De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, or Art Costa’s Habits of the Mind, however notice how these frameworks are often isolated to just be about critical thinking or specific uses. The frameworks I am talking about in this case is how the entire subject area or domain of learning is viewed through. For example, all of science can be viewed through the lens or framework of the science inquiry process. That is how scientists think. History can be viewed through the historical inquiry process – that’s how historians think. The Design Thinking process is how engineers, artists, marketers, and virtually any creative person thinks.

Some examples of habits and practice one could include:

• Having visual diagrams (like the design process, science inquiry process, etc) constantly present and referred to within every lesson
• Using formative rubrics across all subjects – for example rubrics on aspects of literacy across every subject the student is in. One could even use a rubric based on the scientific / historical inquiry process across all subjects
• Having consistent agreed upon language used across all subjects
• Developing student meta-cognition about how they and their brains learn best
• Teachers using the spiral learning process to develop themselves as teachers – essentially being experimentalists themselves

Fundamentally, unless we have an articulated and structured approach by the teachers and the school which defines the framework or lens through which we want the student to grapple with their learning then we will always be struggling with transfer of learning and linear thinking in oru schools.

If you are interested in reading more about this including examples of thinking by other teachers here are some articles:

Spiral Learning

Design Thinking for Educators

Teaching Metacognition: Insight Into How Your Students Think Is Key To High Achievement In All Domains

Why you should give yourself permission to screw up

How Looking at Student Work Keeps Teachers and Kids on Track

Engaging students in learning, not just schooling

35 Psychological Tricks To Help You Learn Better

25 Things Skilled Learners Do Differently

From Science Teacher to Science Facilitator

A class begins, something is taught, hopefully something is learnt, the bell rings and then the next class begins. A unit of learning is begun, there are a range of activities occuring across days – weeks – months, hopefully something is learnt, then the unit ends and the next unit begins. A school year begins, a wide range of activities occur, assignments – possibly tests – are done, culminating projects are run with varying success, hopefully something is learnt, the year ends.

When one thinks about the flow of most of the learning that occurs within schools there is a particular pattern that arises – there is a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes the beginning, middle and end occur in one session. Sometimes it stretches across a few weeks and sometimes across the whole year. However, the habitual pattern is that there is a beginning, middle and end. So does it surprise you that over the years of schooling a learner could naturally develop the perception that learning is linear?

I had this insight recently during a conversation with a group of teachers at a primary school. The predominant unconcious context, and thus the subsequent habitual practices, within the school indicate that learning is perceived as linear by the students AND teachers. I then started exploring if that was the case in other schools, both primary and secondary, and found the same pattern. When I brought up my thinking with the teachers they all agreed. The way they often operate as educators could certainly develop a perception in their learners that learning is linear – start topic, do activities, end topic, next topic.

Learning, by its nature, is non-linear. The gaining of knowledge, whether by the individual or by humanity as a whole, is non-linear. Vygotsky coined the term “zone of proximal development” as a way of indicating that an individual learnt in a non-linear way. Piece by piece we gain knowledge and build a mental model through which we perceive the world. We begin with an incomplete model, given by our personal observations, the opinions and beliefs we grew up with. It is filled with misconceptions and misunderstandings. As we learn we slowly come to a more organised and consistent perception and interpretation of our world and how it works. The learning is non-linear but the explanations and ordering stem from an organised viewpoint . What often happens in schools though is that we “teach” in a linear fashion without honouring the non-linear nature of learning and thus engender a linear way of thinking about learning.

Context is Critical

“So what!” you may say – isn’t that the way schools have to operate?

Well, no.

As the saying goes, our context will eat our strategies every day of the week.This underlying context within the way that we teach will undermine any and all good evidence based initiatives because it stems from and leads to a particular mindset. How we as educators think abut learning influences our habits, our practices, and the way we create learning for others.

Let’s look at some of the common issues and complaints in schools that we could infer stem from this context:

• The students aren’t showing high order thinking or transfering their learning across subjects
• Students who struggle developing fixed mindsets (“I’m not good at Math, English, etc”) rather than growth mindsets
• Students aren’t being responsible for their learning
• Lack of motivation by students (and staff at times)
• There is a lack of resilience and persistence in learners
• Mathematics teachers don’t develop literacy in their lessons even though it is a major source of why students can’t answer worded questions
• Teachers are focused on covering content rather than ensuring learning is occuring

All of these definitely have a range of underlying causes to why they occur but one of the common features is the way that teachers think about learning and thus operate as educators.

If we take the case that teachers have a big say in how learning is perceived by learners, then by shifting the context of the teachers implies we can shift the way learners perceive learning. Look around you at the dominant habits and practices of the teachers within the school.

• What do they tell you about the context they hold about learning?
• Do their habitual practices show that they are linking learning across lessons, classes, subjects, days, weeks, years?
• Do they have anchor contexts and visible displays (which are constantly referred to) where students consistently and coherent develop the perception that they are exploring and building upon their understanding of the world?

If you think not then then the teacher context needs to shift to enable good pedagogical practices to occur.

If we begin by focusing on developing teachers to think from the context that learning is a spiral of increasing understanding and richness then I assert that these issues will start to shift. From this focus context teachers can begin to build habitual practices that are consistent with this context.

In Part II we will discuss what I mean by Spiral Learning and also give some simple HOWs teachers could use to go about shifting their context so as to develop a spiral learning context with the students.

Rachel Grieve in her article recently in The Conversation discussed the importance of spreading the scientific thinking skills across the curriculum. And as researchers and teachers realise the more that we develop the cognitive abilities of students the more they can become independent learners and drive the learning.

However, the biggest barrier to implementation is not in recognising that developing students to be meta-cognitive is important but in the HOW. How could schools go about structuring their learning to have this happen? What could be some of the approaches that schools could embed to support the development of critical thinking, resilience and grit? I have put together some references, workshops and articles to start you on your way.

Thinking Science Australia – University of Western Australia

The University of Western Australia has developed the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program which is an intervention program design to specifically develop cognitive abilities in students. The program is based on five principles: Concrete preparation, Cognitive Conflict, Social Construction, Meta-cognition, and Bridging. The evidence base for Thinking Science Australia shows a noticeable improvement in students’ ability, not only in Science but in English and Mathematics also.

Thinking Science at Mt Alvernia, QLD

Mt Alvernia College in Kedron, QLD has been implementing the Thinking Science program with their Year 8 students for the past few years and will be running a two day workshop on August 1 and 2 in Brisbane for all interested parties. The two days will involve hands on practice and training in “using cues and questioning to engage and facilitate student-based conversation and to promote intrinsic learning” and all the practicalities of how to develop a thinking environment. You can find out more information here.

Making Learners Extraordinary

This is a brilliant website reflects the work of Tait Smoogen and his foundation on developing extraordinary learning environments. Tait is in the midst of unpacking the principles of what leads to extraordinary teachers and extraordinary learners. What he has identified thus far include: The Power of the Puzzle, Deep Observation, Meta-Active Thinking, Talk-it-out, and Co-Constructing the Curriculum.

There are also a range of articles that are worth reading which flesh out this area

• Critical Thinking From the Ground Up
• What is Meta-Cognition and can we teach it
• Students Can Learn by Explaining, Studies Say
• Learning Strategies Outperform IQ in Predicting Achievement
• Deliberately_difficult__why_its_better_to_make_learning_harder
• How to Give your Great Ideas wings (and cash)

It is interesting when you start reading out of your field how many interesting ideas one discovers that are applicable to education.

Ken Blanchard is one of the world leading experts on management and leadership. He is the author of a series of books called the “One Minute Manager”. He, and his team, have sold millions of books and empowered managers and leaders in a range of industries worldwide in simple and effective approaches to developing leadership and managing their organisations.

In “Leadership and the One Minute Manager” I discovered an interesting table (see Figure 1 below) where the One Minute Manager discusses “Situational Leadership”. The principal behind the approach reminded me greatly of how inquiry–learning, project-based learning can be designed to empower and develop skills in young people. It actually reflects the essence of what Bertram Bruce from the University of Illinois pointed out about the stages that teachers must go through to develop skills in leading inquiry learning (Figure 2).

Figure 1

The table outlines the relationship between four developmental levels and the four leadership styles that a manager / leader would use with the person in that developmental level.

1. Directing – for people who lack competence but are enthusiastic and committed. They need direction and frequent feedback to get them started.
2. Coaching – for people who have some competence but lack commitment. They need direction and feedback because they are relatively inexperienced. They also need support and praise to build their self-esteem, and involvement in decision making to restore their commitment.
3. Supporting – for people who have competence but lack confidence or motivation. They don’t need much direction because of their skills, but support is necessary to bolster their confidence and motivation.
4. Delegating – for people who have both competence and commitment. They are able and willing to work on a project by themselves with little supervision or support.

So if one was going to develop independent learners who are responsible for their own learning teachers would need to use a variety of leadership styles. Teachers would also need to ensure that the students develop competencies and skills. They need to have the basic knowledge as well as the skills to use that knowledge.

Figure 2

However, how many teachers become stuck using one leadership style? Some are all about directing. Some are all about supporting or coaching. If a teacher does not use the appropriate leadership style to the student (and it gets even more complicated because students can be in different developmental levels for different subjects … and the One Minute Manager actually shares a story about this) then we can actually be counter-productive to learning.

What do you see? Tell us in the comments section of the blog.

Next week we will discuss another aspect of leadership … how do you actually set up your teaching to develop leadership.

This week I thought I’d make a short entry but one that could be really useful for you. Yep … I am giving you stuff in this one!

When I lead inquiry learning workshops with teachers one of the skills that they highlight as important for young people growing up in a 21st century environment is planning and organisational skills. If we are going to develop those skills we need to systemize the process such that the students know what to do.

For example, at a secondary school I have visited, they have a set number of templates that they use to generate ideas, capture ideas, display ideas, use to link and mind map, etc. So they train the students to go straight to the templates (tools) when needed. This approach will develop the habits that build the planning and organisational skills. It also lessens the workload for teachers once their students have be trained!

There is no need to reinvent the wheel as there are many resources available on the internet. Here are some:

• http://www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml
• http://www.edhelper.com/teachers/General_graphic_organizers.htm
• http://www.inclusiveschools.org/Web_%2526_New_Media_Tools
• http://www.teachertools.org/forms_dynam.asp

Search through for what you can use and adjust them to your needs.

The second part of this week’s blog is around De-schooling school and the future of education. I came upon two interesting videos (which I have attached from Youtube) by George Siemens, an educational technologies expert. The first video discusses how schools (and society) are institutionalised and because of this constraint limit what is possible in schools.

The second video, Robin Good (the interviewer), questions George Siemens about what he sees the future of education. George raises soem very interesting ideas and thoughts about the skills for the 21st century and beyond.