1. Review

Griffin writes this self published think piece about actively utilizing meta-cognitive strategies in class [[#^f30a89]], insisting that regardless of whether if you are subconciously employing meta cognition in your class, it is imperative to be able to name these processes.

Meta cognitive skills are known to be able to trigger flow state in people, increasing intrinsic motivation and process enjoyment [[#^c38772]], enabling what he calls are autotelic students. He offers questions and prompts to engage students in meta cognitive processes [[#^dddf38]], [[#^ec4bad]], [[#^e3d51e]]

In exposing the incompleteness of a concept, we can increase student curiosity and thus exploit this form of curiosity into triggering the meta cognitive process.

2. Source Material

Griffin, M. (2021). Metacognition: Teaching Children to Think. Independent Publishing.

3. Notes

page 16

-> Teachers facilitate metacognitive learning. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011) contrasts superficial surface thinking with the deep thinking of metacognition. He says, “you should not let yourself believe whatever comes into your mind. A thought is not thinking, so intuitions should be thought through. The mind has a tendency for lazy thinking.”

-> Metacognition is about having autonomous control over one’s progress. This sense of self-determination is one of the strongest predictors of success in anything.

-> In addition to this perception of personal control, indicators of autonomous learning include willingness, volition, choice, experimentation, self-initiation, exploration of ideas, and persistence.

page 25

-> Intelligent teacher questions expose the incompleteness of a concept, increasing student curiosity.

-> Allowing questions to remain unanswered for a while intensifies that inquisitiveness. This can be exploited and even contrived by presenting anomalies or contradictory information about the topic. This ambiguity or lack of completeness compels one to understand it further.

page 26

-> A good approach before helping someone is to ask, “Why do you need my help? What is it you cannot do?”

page 27

-> In other words, you must work at cultivating an interest. Enjoyment, in contrast with pleasure, requires effort.

page 30

Ironically, the most effective teachers tell their students the least. Ninety per cent of their utterances are questions that gently prod the student to greater understanding.

page 31

-> Much questioning is superficial, focusing on lower order thinking skills like factual recall. Some procedural questions are unnecessary and are best replaced with a direction. “Have your pencil ready” does not need to be directed as a question.

-> Facilitative questions have students explain, justify, review, revise, and elaborate.

-> Almost all questions teachers ask are instructional in that the teacher already knows the answer. By asking questions we do not know the answer to, teachers model openness and curiosity. This can have a powerful impact on students, transforming the classroom into a learning community that now includes the teacher as learner.

page 33

-> Secondary wait time is the period immediately following a student response. This provokes even deeper thinking and response elaboration.

-> Use of silence. Following the initial student response, the teacher remains poker-faced and says nothing. The teacher neither affirms nor refutes the answer. This silence causes more thinking and self-analysis by the student and the class. Use a follow-up clarifying question:
What makes you say that? You think so, do you? How certain are you of this? Jim, can you please link your understanding with/expand on what Georgina said?

page 35

-> Have a list of effective questions to draw upon in the classroom, until their use becomes second nature. Notice the deliberate rephrasing of common utterances and word choices, like replacing “work” with “learning”. A subtle change in word choice can have a substantial impact on the way students respond. Monitor your language and aim to improve word selection.

->Metacognitive questions put the prime responsibility clearly and deliberately on the student as learner. Teacher questions serve as an appropriate level of scaffolding and no more:
Tell me more! Tell me what you just did. Is what you are doing working? Why? Why not? What do you think you were basing that idea on? Can you show me how to do this? Why is it so? Can you explain to me what you are doing? What goals would you like to set this week? What is your plan for tackling this? Where will you go next? Why do you need my help?

page 36

-> An effective metacognitive-supportive response is “Why do you need my help? What is it you cannot do?” (And perhaps “Well then, what can you do/do you know?”)

page 37

-> The following questions help cultivate a growth mindset.[5] Children need to believe they can improve through practice, that their abilities are not fixed. This learning mindset embraces challenge and accepts mistakes as a necessary part of the improvement process.
What did you do today that made you think hard?
What did you try hardest at today?
What mistake did you make today that taught you something?
What was the best mistake you made today?
What did you struggle with in this unit of work?
What strategy are you going to try now?
How do you intend to improve?
What can you learn from this?

page 38

-> Commonly used passive studying techniques like re-reading notes and highlighting key passages are less effective than having students generate questions and writing summary notes (Ebersbach et al. 2020).

page 41

-> You ask a question. “I don’t know” (IDK) is the response. How do you deal with this? Some children respond with IDK pretty much automatically, without thinking.

page 42

-> Ask the student what they mean by IDK:
Why don’t you know?
Did you hear the question? Yes? Then please repeat it to me so I can check for understanding.
Did you not hear the question? Do I need to speak up or do you need to listen more carefully?
Is it the way I phrased the question, or a word that I used? Do you need more time to think about this?
Is it because of something to do with the topic?
Why don’t you understand?

-> Another tactic is to flip the IDK response: “Well then, tell me what you do know about this.” As a follow-up, and depending on the response, you might say: “You knew more about this than you had me believe.” Or, “OK – you don’t know much about this topic – yet. Where do you go from here?”

-> But metacognitive prompts elicit deeper engagement in that they invite the student to comment on their thinking:
One thing I strongly agree with is … One thing that really makes me think is … One thing I find confusing is …

page 45

-> The last on this list, “I used to think … but now I think …” is a powerful thinking routine for tracking learning. It can be used after reading new information, watching a film, listening to a speaker, having a class discussion, or at the end of a unit of study.

page 46

-> Like metacognitive prompts, cognitive verbs signal to students the type of thinking suitable to demonstrate and describe their learning. Cognitive verbs are numerous in number and can be categorised using Marzano and Kendall’s four levels of cognitive processes: retrieval, comprehension, analytical processes, and knowledge utilisation.
Retrieval : Define, demonstrate, identify, name, recall, recognise, retrieve, select, state, use
Comprehension: Clarify, communicate, comprehend, describe, explain, illustrate, model, represent, summarise, understand
Analysis: Analyse, apply, categorise, classify, compare, connect, consider, contrast, critique, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, generalise, identify, infer, interpret, judge, reflect on
Knowledge utilisation: Create, conduct, decide, determine, develop, discuss, elaborate, evaluate, investigate, justify, predict, propose, solve, synthesise. (Marzano and Kendall 2007)

page 48

-> Metacognition is knowing what you are doing, and why you are doing it.

-> If you cannot name processes, you are less likely to use them effectively. You are less likely to think clearly.

page 68

-> For younger people, meeting short-term, incremental goals, implicit in mastery courses, builds self-efficacy and confidence. Children with specific, time-bound goals learn faster and better than others. They get more done and persevere for longer. For children, goals should be short-term and time bound, as long-term goals are no better than no goals at all.

page 71

-> To monitor and regulate progress in the present requires awareness of thought processes. Teachers can pause mid-lesson to enable students to get in touch with their thoughts in the present:
What am I doing right now? How am I doing this?
What should I be doing? Am I on the right track? Is this too easy?
Am I finding this difficult?
What strategies will I try to fix the problem, or to improve further?
How does this compare to what I have done before?

page 74

-> For improvement, one needs honest feedback and truthful acknowledgement of strengths and weaknesses. But there is a good deal of evidence that some teachers disregard this principle, giving high grades for mediocre work. This is a classic sign of low expectation in that student’s ability to achieve at a higher level.

page 89

-> Flow represents the highest metacognitive style of learning that deliberately directs, regulates, and reflects on challenges, resulting in improvement and increased ability. Flow is pure intrinsic motivation. As such, autotelic students who seek and experience flow are less dependent on the external rewards and threats that are sometimes used and required to keep others motivated.

4. ChatGPT Queries