Incorporating metacognitive practices into your class

Dr. Sandra McGuire https://faculty.lsu.edu/smcgui1/ is an expert in supporting faculty in helping students learn how to learn in their class. She argues that most students come to college underprepared. Specifically, she advocates for metacognitive equity, or closing the gap between students who use metacognition (effective thinking and learning strategies) and those who do not. (https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0516466a-bf01-4aff-a0ba-9c326f59d464/content). She argues that this the gap in metacognitive strategies contributes most to the persistent achievement gap and that all students must be taught how to learn. A 2017 Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-enroll-students-arent-prepared-higher-education/, shares “data from 911 two- and four-year colleges revealed that 96 percent of schools enrolled students who required remediation in the 2014-15 academic year, the most comprehensive recent numbers. At least 209 schools placed more than half of incoming students in at least one remedial course”. 

Dr. McGuire counseled several students to have a back-up plan for medical school after failing an organic chemistry test in her course. She went through faculty professional development which encouraged her to incorporate metacognitive learning strategies into her teaching practice. The improvement she saw in students helped her come to the belief that most students do not know how to learn. She argues that in many cases, metacognitive learning was not a prerequisite for good grades in their previous educational experiences. “Many received As and Bs without the need to learn the subject matter in a great deal of depth”.  An example she shares to illustrate this point is supporting a student who stated he had “valedictorian syndrome””, which he explained by stating, “Well, I was valedictorian of my high school class but I’m flunking everything at [college].” 

If you think of these same students as scientists, she argues, “They’ve collected, interpreted and made predictions regarding data they have collected for all of their lives! If they skipped classes or barely opened their textbooks in previous educational experiences, yet successfully graduated in a top percentage of their class and ended up in college, we can understand that based on their personal “lab” experience, the same behaviors should result in the same success in college.”

This led her to the conclusion: It is often not a student’s lack of innate ability or talent, but rather a lack of effective learning strategies, that can make the difference in academic success. (Growth mindset)

What are the benefits of using metacognitive strategies in your classroom?

When instructors assist students to develop strong metacognitive abilities, students develop a deeper awareness of the learning process and gain control over their own learning. This leads to:

  • enhanced personal capacity for self-regulation

  • increased ability to manage one’s own motivation

  • students becoming more independent learners.

 

Examples of metacognitive strategies you can incorporate into your course:

From Cornell University: 


https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/teaching-cornell-guide/teaching-strategies/metacognitive-strategies-how-people

  • Use a pre-class survey, homework assignment, polling questions in class, or a short reflective writing piece as a way for students to explore their existing knowledge about a topic.

  • Ask students to prepare for class by reviewing the week’s syllabus topic and reading. Use the Canvas online quiz tool, in-class polling, or index cards to learn how students understand the goals for the class meeting, how they think they should prepare, and what they learned from the reading.

    • Some potential questions:

      • What is one question you still have about the reading?

      • What is one thing you are curious about?

      • How can you best prepare for class?

      • What can you do in class to help yourself learn?

 

Additional strategies include: 

  • Verbalize the thought processes used to consider, analyze and solve problems. This may be as simple as ‘thinking aloud’.

  • Encourage students to ask themselves the following while studying or completing homework assignments:

    • What should I do first?

    • Is something confusing me?

    • Could I explain this to someone else?

    • Do I need help to understand this?

    • Where did I go wrong?

    • Does this relate to other situations or prior knowledge?

    • How can I do it better?

 

In Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation (p. 85) (Available at IU libraries https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/18412847) Dr. McGuire provides details on how you can incorporate the following practices in your course:

  1. Previewing

  2. Preparing for active reading

  3. Paraphrasing

  4. Reading actively

  5. Using the textbook even if it is not required

  6. Going to class and taking notes by hand

  7. Doing homework without using solved examples as a guide

  8. Teaching material to a real or imagined audience

  9. Working in pairs or groups

  10. Creating practice exams

Quick Tip – AI Prompts for Teaching

Dr. Cynthia Alby developed the resource “Cut and Paste AI Prompts” for instructors. This comprehensive guide intends to provide instructors not only with prompts, but techniques to effectively experiment with various AI tools specific to various practices of teaching, such as  course design, assessment development, and lesson planning.  As Dr. Alby notes, “I have found that providing instructors with prompts they can cut and paste into AI made them more comfortable, more quickly with experimenting. I also discovered that when I can help someone experiment with AI for an hour or so, their anxiety levels tend to drop, and they begin to see it less like a threat and more like a tool.“

Using Video in Your Course

There are several ways that you can use videos in your course, regardless of modality:

  1. Introduce a class or unit: Create pre-lecture videos for students to watch prior to attending class. This provides students with an initial exposure to the content, sparks interest, and improves students’ understanding. The visuals in your video can help them connect with the material.

  2. Building background knowledge on a topic: We know that students learn best when they take in information via multiple modalities—through reading, listening to the instructor’s oral explanations, hands on activities and viewing visual media. Images and videos support the learning of new content, concepts, and ideas. (Adapted from Educause)

  3. Emphasize a Point with Video:Identify key learning goals or areas where students have difficulty understanding and create a short microlecture to support students. These can be used for flipped classroom application (with active learning, clickers, orTopHatin class to review and extend video content) or for independent student review. You can use video as a tool to enhance the class discussion and make whatever you’re teaching that much more accessible to your diverse body of learners. Keep these videos focused by only discussing the learning goal. Avoid adding fun facts or informati9n not directly related to the topic. Click here for resources related to creating microlectures.

  4. Demonstrate Examples: Instead of providing students with an answer key to a problem, create a video (with narration) working out the solution step-by-step. To encourage students to watch the video, work out only part of the problem in the video and have students complete the rest and submit it online as a no or low-stakes assignment or quiz (e.g. through Canvas). PlayPosit allows you to quickly integrate questions into your quizzes so you can get a sense of how well students understand the problems. It also allows students to receive immediate feedback. Click here for resources related to creating PlayPosit. Quick Check in Canvas also allows for quick inline low-stakes assessments in Canvas (Adapted from University of British Columbia)

     

  5. Interview with an Expert: Record interviews with experts in the discipline, providing examples and explaining concepts relevant to what is being covered in class. This enriches students’ learning by allowing them to hear what other experts have to say about a particular topic. (Adapted From University of British Columbia)

  6. Dispel misconceptions – A video that explicitly dispels common misconceptions about a topic can help students achieve conceptual change. This can be as simple as a video that starts with ‘you might think that… but you’d be wrong’. Simply presenting facts can reinforce students’ incorrect assumptions. Indeed, deliberately using a video that presents incorrect information then discussing these mistakes can also be an effective way of handling student misconceptions at the start of a unit. (from Monash University)

  7. Make video part of a larger homework assignment. Faizan Zubair and Mary Keithly are each part of the BOLD Fellows program at Vanderbilt University, in which graduate students develop online learning materials for incorporation into a faculty mentor’s course. Faizan developed videos on that were embedded in a larger homework assignment in Paul Laibinis’ Chemical Engineering class and found that students valued the videos and that the videos improved students’ understanding of difficult concepts when compared to a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework. Mary worked with Kathy Friedman to develop videos and follow-up questions to serve as pre-class preparation in a genetics class. Although there was no apparent change to learning outcomes in the class, students valued the videos and post-video questions as learning tools and thought that they were effective for promoting student understanding.(from Vanderbilt University)

Getting to Know Your Students

Jennie Carr, an Associate Professor at Bridgewater College, explains that researchers have found “strong positive correlations between [faculty] building relationships and rapport with students and academic achievement, attendance, student interest, motivation, empowerment, self-efficacy student attention, classroom behaviors and interactions (Benson, Cohen, Buskist, 2005, Houser & Frymier, 2009, Kozanitis, Desbiens, Chouinard, 2007; Myers, Goldman, Atkinson, Ball, Carton, Tindage & Anderson, 2016)”. Some ways you can develop connections with students in the first few weeks of class are listed below. Some techniques work better for smaller (n<60) classrooms while others work well with all class sizes. As the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon notes: “Even in large lecture classes, it is possible to get to know a conspicuous number of your students, a few at a time. For students, it’s the effort that counts”. Some of these tips I have shared before, however, I have added some new insights and additional information that may be helpful (hopefully).

Learning Student Names:

Name Coach: https://cloud.name-coach.com/ – Assign students the task of recording their name and writing the phonetic pronunciation of their name. Name Coach slows down the recording to help you hear how they pronounce their names. This will help you to listen to their names and learn how to pronounce their names correctly. Use Name Tents – If seating allows space for students to have name tents, ask students to write their names in large letters on both sides of a folded 5 x 8 index card and to keep this card on their desks/tables for the first few classes. The Canvas Roster: https://academiccontinuity.yale.edu/faculty/how-guides/canvas/canvas-class-roster is available in the People menu of the Canvas course to all Canvas roles except Observer, displays the name, email address, role, photo, and NameCoach recording (if available) for each member of the course. Using the Photo Roster tool, you can change the page or print layout; search and filter the list of course members; group by role, section, or group; and print or export the current view. Official IU photos and associated features are only available to instructors in SIS courses. The roster has a feature that allows you to print out an attendance sheet. You can use that sheet to make annotations that will help you remember your students’ names. The Eberly Center suggests taking a few extra seconds for each student to identify their most 1-2 noticeable traits. Be sure to include ways of pronouncing names that are unfamiliar to you.

Introduce Yourself

Consider sharing information with students beyond your name and the name of the course you’re teaching. Vanderbilt University suggests one of the following:

  • Personal biography: your place of birth, family history, educational history, hobbies, sport and recreational interests, how long you have been at the university, and what your plans are for the future.

  • Educational biography: how you came to specialize in your chosen field, a description of your specific area of expertise, your current projects, and your future plans.

  • Teaching biography: how long have you taught, how many subjects/classes have you taught, what level of class you normally teach, what you enjoy about being in the classroom, what do you learn from your students, and what you expect to teach in the future.

Have a seating plan

When students arrive in your class, let them sit where they want, and then ask them to remain in those seats for at least two weeks. Create a seating chart for the room and have students fill in their names on the seating chart. Refer to the chart as you conduct the course. This reference will allow you to learn names according to placement in the classroom. (University of Lethbridge)

Icebreakers: The Center for Teaching and Learning at IU-Indy https://ctl.iupui.edu/Resources/Preparing-to-Teach/Using-Ice-Breakers reminds us to use icebreakers as a way of getting acquainted with students and establish classroom community on the first day of class. However, you can use small icebreakers beyond the first few weeks of class to help build rapport. Top Hat https://app.teaching.iu.edu/tools/top-hat provides a list of icebreakers that can be used in various contexts, including course- or assignment-specific icebreakers https://tophat.com/blog/classroom-icebreakers/

Having One on One or Small Group Meetings/Office Hours – Carr (2020) recommends setting up 1:1 or small group appointments to meet with students during the first few weeks of class. “Meaningful interactions with students outside of classes is listed by the National Survey of Student Engagement as a high-impact educational practice (NSSE, 2017). Approximately 95% of my students attend. During the 1:1 meet and greet meeting, my primary goal is to get to know the students on a personal level. I explain to them very simply, “I care about you first and foremost as a person – I want you to be successful in this class.” The meeting encourages students to not only find my office but also helps reduce anxious feelings about meeting with faculty when they have a more serious concern”The Canvas Scheduler Tool https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-add-a-Scheduler-appointment-group-in-a-course-calendar/ta-p/1021 allows you to create a block of time where a student or groups of students can meet with you. Students can sign up for appointment times in their own calendars. Have students say their name when asking for a response to a question during your lecture or discussion, or when they ask a question. Explain to them that this helps not only you, but their classmates learn their names.

In addition to office hours – When possible, arrive to class a little early and stay a little later to chat with students. This will also allow students who may not feel comfortable raising questions during class to approach you in a low-pressure way.

Asking students to complete confidential student profiles – Another way to get to know your students is to have them complete a student profile (you can use Google Tools, Microsoft 360, or Qualtrics to create a profile: https://forms.gle/P2upb3JKzhSnzBRE8). Profiles are a form with questions that allow you to better understand who your students are, what they know about the class/discipline, as well as the types of expectations they have for the course.  It also allows you to understand what types of boundaries they have in terms of work and family that may impact how they perform in your course.

Quick Tip: Working with Teaching Assistants

Dr. Angela Jenks and Katie Cox , in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine developed a checklist for faculty that work with teaching assistants. The checklist contains categorized questions that faculty should answer for the teaching assistants they supervise in order to help the course run smoothly and minimize misunderstandings over faculty expectations.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • What to discuss during your initial introduction

  • AI Roles and Responsibilities

  • Communications Protocol

  • Course Objectives and Topics

  • Course Management Protocols

  • AI Professional Development Opportunities

  • Teaching Reflections

  • How to Manage Student Observations and Feedback

  • Midterm and Final Exam Grading/Protocols

If you would like to brainstorm ways to customize this list to your course. let’s meet!

Canvas Checklist

This Start of Semester Checklist for Canvas, adapted from the University of North Texas, is comprised of pointers, reminders, and resources, useful for setting up a course in Canvas.  The document has four sections:

In the content review section, there are a few links to resources from or related to Quality Matters., a respected organization that has developed rubrics for course design standards. CITL has also developed resources based on Quality Matters rubrics. If you would like to have more information about these resources, course design, or rubrics, please reply to this email.

As a reminder:

The checklist from last year contains ideas and quick tips for taking full advantage of the resources available in Canvas. While this post from 2021 contains a chart (created by Instructure, the developers of Canvas), which explains how Canvas functions can be used at lower and higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, to create different types of learning experiences in Canvas.

For example: When you think about Announcements as a Communication Tool in Canvas, you can use announcements in simply to provide one-way updates and communication, or more robustly to:

  • Reinforce classroom activities, display student work, and encourage best practices.

  • Allow students to reply, and are often used for classroom interaction and Q & A.

  • Encourage and expect student replies, often being used as question starters, contests, and ways to extend learning.


As always, please let me know if there is any way I can help you in your planning.

Higher Education Podcasts

Dr. Laura Pasquini is an educational coach and consultant who is passionate about podcasts. She has created two resources that may be useful to you if you are interested in finding more educational podcasts to listen to, or creating your own:

  • HigherEd Podcasts: https://bit.ly/higheredpodcasts is a spreadsheet that she has curated. The first page has a list of more than 200 podcasts that focus on various aspects of higher education. The second page is a more general list of podcasts that touch on more random topics in the range of education, general interest and self-improvement.

  • Behind the Podcast: http://bit.ly/behindthepodcast provides a behind the scenes look at how some of the more popular higher education podcasts are created recording set-ups of several higher ed podcasts. The producers of podcasts such as Teaching in Higher Ed and Thinkudl.org share information about the hardware and software they use to create their podcasts, as well as their hosting service and resources they use to produce the content for their podcasts.