Siobhan Curious inspired me to organize my thoughts so far about meta-cognition with her post “What Do Students Need to Learn About Learning.” Anyone want to suggest alternatives, additions, or improvements?

Time Management

One thing I’ve tried is to allow students to extend their due dates at will — for any reason or no reason.  The only condition is that they notify me before the end of the business day *before* the due date.  This removes the motivation to inflate or fabricate reasons — since they don’t need one.  It also promotes time management in two ways: one, it means students have to think one day ahead about what’s due.  If they start an assignment the night before it’s due and realize they can’t finish it for some reason, the extension is not available; so they get into the habit of starting things at least two days before the due date.  It’s a small improvement, but I figure it’s the logical first baby step!

The other way it promotes time management is that every student’s due dates end up being different, so they have to start keeping their own calendar — they can’t just ask a classmate, since everyone’s got custom due dates.  I can nag about the usefulness of using a calendar until the cows come home, but this provides a concrete motivation to do it.  This year I realized that my students, most of them of the generation that people complain is “always on their phones”, don’t know how to use their calendar app.  I’m thinking of incorporating this next semester — especially showing them how to keep separate “school” and “personal” calendars so they can be displayed together or individually, and also why it’s useful to track both the dates work is due, in addition to the block of time when they actually plan to work on it.

Relating Ideas To Promote Retention

My best attempt at this has been to require it on tests and assignments: “give one example of an idea we’ve learned previously that supports this one,” or “give two examples of evidence from the data sheet that support your answer.”  I accept almost any answers here, unless they’re completely unrelated to the topic, and the students’ choices help me understand how they’re thinking.

Organizing Their Notes

Two things I’ve tried are handing out dividers at the beginning of the semester, one per topic… and creating activities that require students to use data from previous weeks or months.  I try to start this immediately at the beginning of the semester, so they get in the habit of keeping things in their binders, instead of tossing them in the bottom of a locker or backpack.  The latter seems to work better than the former… although I’d like to be more intentional about helping them “file” assignments and tests in the right section of their binders when they get passed back.  This also (I hope) helps them develop methodical ways of searching through their notes for information, which I think many students are unfamiliar with because they are so used to being able to press CTRL -F.  Open-notes tests also help motivate this.

I also explicitly teach how and when to use the textbook’s table of contents vs index, and give assignments where they have to look up information in the text (or find a practise problem on a given topic), which is surprisingly hard for my first year college students!

Dealing With Failure

Interestingly, I have students who have so little experience with it that they’re not skilled in dealing with it, and others who have experienced failure so consistently that they seem to have given up even trying to deal with it.  It’s hard to help both groups at the same time.  I’m experimenting with two main activities here: the Marshmallow Challenge and How Your Brain Learns and Remembers (based on ideas similar to Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset”).

Absolute Vs Analytical Ways of Knowing

I use the Foundation for Critical Thinking’s “Miniature Guide To Critical Thinking.”  It’s short, I can afford to buy a class set, and it’s surprisingly useful.  I introduce the pieces one at a time, as they become relevant.  See p. 18 for the idea of “multi-system thinking”; it’s their way of pointing out that the distinction between “opinions” and “facts” doesn’t go far enough, because most substantive questions require us to go beyond right and wrong answers into making a well-reasoned judgment call about better and worse answers — which is different from an entirely subjective and personal opinion about preference.  I also appreciate their idea that “critical thinking” means “using criteria”, not just “criticizing.”  And when class discussions get heated or confrontational, nothing helps me keep myself and my students focused better than their “intellectual traits” (p. 16 of the little booklet, or also available online here) (my struggles, failures, and successes are somewhat documented Evaluating Thinking).

What the Mind Does While Reading

This is one of my major obsessions.  So far the most useful resources I have found are books by Chris Tovani, especially Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? and I Read It But I Don’t Get It.  Tovani is a teacher educator who describes herself as having been functionally illiterate for most of her school years.  Both books are full of concrete lesson ideas and handouts that can be photocopied.  I created some handouts that are available for others to download based on her exercises — such as the Pencil Test and the “Think-Aloud.”

Ideas About Ideas

While attempting these things, I’ve gradually learned that many of the concepts and vocabulary items about evaluating ideas are foreign to my students.  Many students don’t know words like “inference”, “definition”, “contradiction” (yes, I’m serious), or my favourite, “begging the question.”  So I’ve tried to weave these into everything we do, especially by using another Tovani-inspired technique — the “Comprehension Constructor.”  The blank handout is below, for anyone who’d like to borrow it or improve it.

To see some examples of the kinds of things students write when they do it, click through: