Metacognition. It sounds like the kind of $10 word beloved by keynote speakers, lecturers in undergraduate classes in education and retired folk who write columns about educationally related topics.
But it is a word about a concept that, as a teacher, I ignored too often. Metacognition means “thinking about thinking,” “knowing about knowing.” It is about finding ways to teach kids to learn about how, as individuals, they learn best and how to use particular strategies for learning.
People who study metacognition seriously are called metacognologists (seriously) and are researchers who believe that the ability to think about thinking and to learn about how we learn is unique to sapient living things. Sapient beings are also able to exercise judgment and make decisions based on that learning.
If that has you feeling superior, don’t. Rats are regarded as sapient animals, as are dolphins.
The problem for educators is that despite our obvious human capacity to learn, as teachers we don’t really know enough about how individual students learn.
In their book Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains, co-authors Donna Wilson, an educational psychologist and former teacher and doctoral researcher, and Marcus Conyers write that metacognition is an essential, but often neglected, component of a 21st-century education. We spend an inordinate amount of time on what to learn and not enough time helping individual students come to terms with how they learn.
All we know for sure is that no matter what broad-spectrum labels we invent to describe learning “styles” — “kinesthetic,” “auditory” or “visual” — we know that everybody probably learns differently.
It is an irony that instead of accommodating this knowledge, we still group kids together in classes of 20 to 30 and teach them as if they all learn in the same way.
Enter Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and Terrence Seinowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. Together, they have created an online class called Learning How to Learn.
Learning How to Learn has been taken up by more than 1.8 million students from 200 countries, the most ever on Coursera, an online venture that offers more than 2,000 reasonably priced ($29-$99) courses from schools such as Stanford and Yale.
The course engagingly blends neuroscience and common sense.
Examples of techniques useful for coming to terms with an individual’s way of learning include “focus, then don’t focus.” Learning can occur when we are focused on the task at hand, but also can occur when we rest after a burst of concentration. It is in the resting stage that connections between bits of information, unexpected insights, can occur.
So “taking a break” is also an effective learning technique. Precisely because an individual is not thinking about the task, the brain can subconsciously consolidate new knowledge.
I have heard this described as the “incubation” period, when the brain continues to make connections between what we already know and what is being learned. It is the same idea as trying to remember a name by not trying so hard to remember it.
Listening to a song, taking a walk — anything to enter a relaxed state — takes your mind off the task at hand.
Oakley suggests that this “helps the mind slip into focus and begin to work without thinking about the task.”
I can vouch for practising as an important technique for learning, because as musician I sometimes practise a new phrase or guitar fingering while watching TV.
Just practising the same fingering again and again while focused on something else apparently creates neural patterns that can later be reactivated when needed, or when playing while being distracted.
In his new book How We Learn, award-winning science reporter Benedict Carey echoes Oakley’s advice about how our brains absorb and retain information.
Carey, like Oakley, is critical of the fact that from an early age we are told that restlessness, distraction and ignorance are the enemies of learning, and that learning is all a matter of self-discipline. Yet scientists have known since the late 1990s that our brains still fire off nerve impulses — an indicator of activity — when they’re idle.
Scientists have identified several brain networks, called “resting state” networks, inside our grey matter where this phenomenon occurs.
Maybe that $10 word, “metacognition,” is worth much more than just $10 in our continued pursuit of learning more about how we learn.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
