At the heart of this course is the learning process and learning how to learn (the application of metacognition). In this experience, you will use a Learning Journal worksheet, Concept Map, and a Metacognitive Exploration worksheet to help you increase your own metacognition and elevate the level of your thinking and knowledge through guided reflection on learning, learning skills, and critical thinking.
When we engage in metacognition, thinking about our own thinking, and step back from just doing to determine how and why we actually do what we do, we strengthen all aspects of our own learning and growth.
In several critical ways, this entire course has been about metacognition and increasing and improving your awareness of your own thinking.
Experience 1 was about becoming aware of how you perform and how you can improve your performance. That’s also where you first encountered the idea of Self-Growth — consciously working to improve your learning, thinking, and performing.
Experience 2 was about the Learning Process Methodology and being aware of how you learn so that you can improve your ability to learn. That experience also introduced you to the idea that methodologies are a way to generalize so we can apply a successful strategy to different contexts. The LPM taught you to be aware of how you learn (serious metacognition there!) so that you can improve your ability to learn.
Experience 3 was about being aware of your emotional reactions (that’s metacognition too) and learning to control them instead of being controlled by them in order to achieve greater self-determination.
Experience 4 was an eye-opener on self-assessment and shared strategies for using assessment and reflection to increase your self-awareness and ability to improve your performances.
Experience 5 gave you the opportunity to consider how you use time in your pursuit of learning and self-growth, learning to prioritize and plan for ever more effective performances.
Experience 6 was another methodology experience, this time with problem solving. In that experience, you learned to be aware of and even change your thinking in situations where you were confronted with problems that needed to be solved. You were also challenged to reflect on that metacognition and assess it in order to improve it.
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).
A Mother 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.”
A while 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:
Additionally, to begin to put it all together,
If you successfully complete this activity, you will be able to:
From a given learning experience, enhance future performance with this knowledge through metacognition)
Metacognitive Exploration: My Learning
When you're ready, click to answer these questions online.
When you're ready, answer the following questions in the Critical Thinking Questions forum. The questions are posted there as well. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
For each of the nine steps in the Elevating Knowledge Methodology, identify a specific thinking skill from the Classification of Learning Skills that would be used to perform that step.
Are all the thinking skills from the cognitive domain? Explain your answer. If you answered "No," what are some examples of thinking skills from other domains?
What role does a methodology play in increasing metacognition about a specific performance?
How does concept mapping improve your metacognition?
What role does generalizing play in the learning process? Provide at least two reasons why that role is important.
Your challenge is to learn to take previous learning (such as you documented in the Discovery Section section of this experience) and actually raise the level of your thinking, knowledge, and learning.
Elevating your level of learning:
Upgrading your answers to Critical Thinking Questions
Identify 5 of your responses to Critical Thinking Questions that you feel
illustrate your best work. The answers you select should come from
the first 10 experience in this course and must all be from different
experiences (i.e., no more than one answer from any experience). Locate, copy,
and paste the questions and your responses to them into a working document
(Notepad or something similar). You will now ELEVATE the level of your responses,
thereby elevating your
learning!
Using what you have learned from the Methodology for Elevating Knowledge, you will create a SINGLE forum post that responds to the following prompts for EACH Critical Thinking Response you selected. This will be a long post and have 5 major 'chunks', one for each of the CTQ responses you selected. (You are strongly advised to do your work offline, since the post will be so long and detailed.)
Share your post in the forum, "Elevating My Critical Thinking."
A sample response from a previous student for a single Critical Thinking Question follows the prompts.
| Sample Student Response to a SINGLE Critical Thinking Question | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Experience 11, Question 2. For each step in the Elevating Knowledge Methodology, what would be an example of a thinking skill used to perform that step? Previous answer: 1 = identifying inconsistencies, 2 = recognizing patterns, 3 = comparing differences, 4 = bounding, 5 = contextualizing, 6 = exemplifying, 7 = divergent thinking, 8 = lateral thinking, 9 = generalizing New answer: The following table shows each step of the methodology, along with the correlated learning skill:
The low-level knowledge, i.e., steps 1 & 2, correlate with information processing learning skills. Steps 3 – 5 seem to align best with learning skills related to constructing understanding (which is what we're actually doing!). Steps 6 – 9 align with learning skills concerned with applying knowledge. How can what you learned in answering this question be applied to a different situation to produce value? (To answer this, name a new situation where you can apply this knowledge in your professional, personal, or educational life and describe how you can apply this learning — understanding — to produce value in this new situation. This is called, "contextualizing your knowledge.") When working on constructing knowledge, whether in school or at work, and I get confused or frustrated, I can identify where in the methodology I am (and I most often get stuck at Step 7, Distant context) and look in the classification for a learning skill that I'm not really using. By concentrating on using it, I can help myself over that hurdle (really not being used as much as you actually could to strengthen current learning at that specific step. Even just looking at the Skill Cluster for that step, "Being Creative" gives me ideas...other skills there are challenging assumptions and transforming images. This keeps me from just staring at a problem, feeling stuck. It gives me alternate ways of approaching the problem or thinking of it. That helps a lot! List 4 additional (and meaningful) situations/contexts where your learning can be applied. The classification of learning skills are used during problem solving process, preparation methodology, reading methodology, and during the personal development methodology (make sure to consider the affective domain with this methodology also). Assume you're teaching someone else what you learned here. What 3 tips would you offer them to help them apply their knowledge effectively? The learner, who is more in tune with the classification can use the classification in real time to constantly find the opportunities for learner performance by predicting which skills that would be used. Stop and take out 5 minutes when things are going slowly to investigate. At the end of the process, pick an appropriate skill to self-assess with regard to the performance. |
Seeing Myself through Three Learning Skills
Remember that in terms of
learning skills, metacognition means becoming aware of our thinking (cognitive domain), our emotional reactions and values (affective domain), and our interactions with others (social domain).
In this installment of My Life Vision, you get to select three learning skills (one from each domain) that are meaningful to you and illustrate aspects of your personality. For each, do a little self-exploration and write a meaningful paragraph about that aspect of yourself. This is all about self-awareness; turn the light on yourself and have fun.
You are required to upload the file you create and it must be at least 2 pages in length. Follow the prompts as given on the assignment page.