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E
XPERIENCE
11: M
ETACOGNITION
: T
HINKING
ABOUT
M
Y
T
HINKING
318
L
EARNING
TO
L
EARN
: B
ECOMING
A
S
ELF
-G
ROWER
Experience 7 was about your motivation and drive for life through creating a life vision. Metacognition is
also understanding your own motivations and why you do what you do. Throughout every experience we
have added after class activity to help you understand yourself better, what motivates you, what values you
have and what contributions you can produce for society.
In Experiences 8, 9, and 10, you continued your metacognitive awareness, learning to think about thinking
when you work with others, when you’re evaluated, and when you read. In each case, your increased
metacognition gave you the ability to improve your performance.
In each and every case, you have had to be aware of your own thinking and learning. The goal of every
one of these experiences was for you to learn to step back from just doing and
THINK
about what you’re
doing (and why and how).
Amother was preparing a baked ham for dinner. Her 10-year old daughter was in the kitchen helping. She
watched as her mother prepared the ham, seasoning it and getting it ready for the baking pan. The last
thing the mother did before putting the ham in the pan was to cut off about 2 inches from one end. She set
this piece aside and then put the ham in the pan and into the oven. Her daughter asked, “Mom, why did
you cut that piece off?” The mother replied, “That’s how my mother taught me to do it.” The mother got
to thinking and began to wonder. Together, she and her daughter called Grandma and asked her why she
cut the bottom off the ham before putting it in the pan. The reply was, “That’s how my mother taught me
to do it. But I don’t know why she did that. I’ll give her a call and let you know.”
Awhile later Grandma called back. The answer, it seems, is that her mother’s only baking pan wasn’t large
enough for a full-sized ham, and she had to trim off about 2-inches from the bottom in order to make it fit.
As amusing as the story may be, it truly does illustrate the way most of us tend to sleepwalk through our
daily lives, rarely stopping to think about what we’re doing and why. Great-grandma was confronted
with a problem, and she used an effective and successful strategy to solve it. Grandma and Mom, on the
other hand, merely learned to do what they were shown; they never thought about it more deeply until the
daughter stopped everything, asking, “Why?”
This experience take things further than previous experiences in that you’re now ready to literally take
your thinking to another level. After all, as you’ve learned by now, when we’re aware of our thinking, we
can
improve
our thinking. In terms of learning skills, metacognition means that:
•
We can become aware of and improve our
thinking
(cognitive domain)
•
We can become aware of and consciously select our
emotional reactions
and
values
(affective
domain)
•
We can become aware of and ever more successfully
interact with others
(social domain)
Additionally, to begin to put it all together,
•
We use
reflection
as a way to trigger awareness of who we are, what we’re doing, and why at any
given moment
•
When we are aware, we can use
assessment
as a way to systematically improve our performance
in any of these respects