Well, hello again, everybody, and welcome back to Episode 8 of Season 3 of the Polka Podcast. It's hard to believe that we're already on Episode 8. Seems like we started yesterday, but we still have a few more to go, so keep on listening. So our interviewer today is Siobhan Julian. Hello, Siobhan. Hello, Wayne. I'm really excited about this episode today. We are talking about metacognition, and with us today to talk about metacognition are Mary Van Obstel and Marty Perry.
Mary has a PhD in chemistry education with a dissertation on students' metacognitive strategy use in chem lab. So what a perfect guest for us today. She teaches introductory chemistry at two community colleges, Harbor College and McHenry County College in Northern Illinois, and she's taught several PD courses on evidence-based strategies to other teachers. So she has a background in working with other teachers on this.
She's been involved in the Poggle projects since 2015, been using Poggle since 2012, and her goal as a teacher is to make students aware of their own learning, perfect for metacognition for our conversation today, and to help them become science literate. Marty Perry is the associate professor and vice chair for professional education at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Arkansas. And Marty is an OG Poggler.
He was introduced to Poggle in 1997, which is the year that I graduated high school. So you know, yeah, Marty, you should feel a little old there. His career spans facilitating learning in both high school, undergraduate, and professional programs. He has really taught at all levels and he's used Poggle at all levels. So he is one of the absolute pillars of the Poggle project, and he definitely, I can't wait to hear what he has to say today about metacognition.
So yeah, metacognition, let's get into this. When we talk about the process skills, I feel like there's always one process skill that gets sort of shunted to the side when we're having students work in teams, and that's metacognition. Personally, for me, out of all the process skills, metacognition is the one that I struggle with the most.
It's the one that I tend to do the least with in my classroom, which is why it's so awesome that we have Mary and Marty, who are experts in dealing with this, who have strategies, who know what they're talking about when it comes to metacognition here today to share that so we can really dive deeper into this. So first question, we know that metacognition is essentially thinking about thinking, but I'd love to go a little bit deeper into the definition. How do you define metacognition?
And Marty, I'll go to you first. Well thank you, Siobhan. It's great to be here with you and Mary to have some conversation today about this topic. You did get one thing right. I am old. I've been around the project for a long time. And it's really through that involvement with the project and all the great people that I've had the chance to work with over my career that have influenced what I know and try to adopt and adapt into my own curriculum, including metacognition.
But simply, I think I would define it as you're self-aware. You really know what you're thinking about. And for a student or a learner, you're employing effective strategies to help you study and learn. You're not doing things that are ineffective, or if you are, you at least recognize they're ineffective and you try to adapt and do things better the next time.
You recognize that something's not working and you go and visit with another peer or an instructor, somebody that's going to help you do better the next time. So a learner should be metacognitive, should be self-aware, and recognize when you know something and when you don't know something.
And it's hard for novice learners to be good at that, probably even hard for more experienced learners to continue to adapt our strategies, especially as the situation may dictate, having a different strategy than what you might be accustomed to employing. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for that. Mary, what do you think? How do you define metacognition? So when I think about it, it's absolutely being self-aware.
And you really, Marty, you really hit on a lot of pieces and I want to put some words. So planning, monitoring, and evaluating strategies. So those are really what you're doing as a teacher, what students are doing when they're studying. Are they planning ahead? Are they monitoring that they get something or don't get something? Or chemists are running an experiment and something's not working.
Are they monitoring and recognizing that it's actually, you know, that they need to do that and then evaluate at the end about that. So I'm always thinking when it all comes down to it, I'm always thinking about planning, monitoring, and evaluating for any of those things that you mentioned, Marty. And in relation to what the students are doing, and then I also, we have to be metacognitive as well to make sure our class is matching what we say it's matching and what the students are expecting.
So it's a lot of transparency, I think that helps with that. I'm already getting good ideas from the two of you, so thank you. Yes, that's what we want. Yeah, because I had a student come to me and say that they weren't sure how to study. And you know, given everything that's happened with COVID, that makes a lot of sense. And I was trying to come up with some things, but I realized I wasn't being terribly helpful.
But I already feel like I can now go back to that student and say, okay, well, we got some ideas. So thank you already. So with all that, with that great, I love how you put it, being self-aware, knowing that you know something or when you don't know something. When you have a group of new students, either a full year course or a semester long college course, when do you introduce metacognition to your students? And what does that introduction look like? So Mary, I'll start with you.
Okay, so when I first started, I was just incorporating in the lab, because that's where my dissertation was. And so I really, we really focused on, we talked about it just briefly kind of as you know, some slides, but we kind of just looked at what students did. But now when I think about it, I usually talk about it right at the beginning, because it's literally part of my convinced students that Poggle is, you know, is great. And it will help you learn.
So I have a whole first day slide of the things that I have them do. So I usually talk about it. And it shifted from being some slides to part of an exam reflection after their first exam, to now it's a part of all your formative assessments. So whether it's a quiz or taking in class, whether it's a Poggle activity, like, did you get what happened?
And so I think it really meshes nicely with the idea of formative assessments, which we as teachers are doing all, you know, really all the time, you know, all during class, we're checking in, are they, are they getting it? So you have to ask them, are they getting it? You know, so I think of it that way about how, you know, when we're introducing metacognition, and I do use that term, but I've incorporated it to include reflection and kind of planning and things like that.
So the word comes up, but I generally think about it in terms of, you know, are they, you know, formative, are you assessing yourself? What do you know? What evidence do you have that you know this thing? And what do some of those formative assessments look like? So you said that you have them, like with a regular quiz or regular test. So what might that look like? So one, one that I do every day is retrieval practice. It's one of the best evidence-based teaching strategies out there.
And when they come in, students have to sit down and they have to answer this question without notes with, you know, and then either they can answer it and I say, okay, great, check your notes, make sure that it's right. Or if they don't know, then they need to go back to their notes and find it. So it's giving them different levels of, do I know this at all? Like we did this last class, you should, you know, you should have learned it in some capacity.
And if that, so it's kind of that's, that's one. And then I have these bigger quizzes that are more over a unit that I treat as kind of self-checks. So in terms of I don't grade them and that was, it hits on the alternative grading podcast last week is that they're more for revision and checking what you know, rather than this is a summative assessment because it's not like they're still learning the material. So I treat that and then we do a lot of revision in class.
So I have them revise their quizzes and go back and they have to tell me how do I know, you know, or I'm like, how do you know it's the right answer now? And they could say, well, I checked my notes or I went back and did this. And so it's trying to get them to go back and see why they didn't get it the first time. And it's a lot of positive, I think consistent language that I use to really engage them in that. Yeah, that's great.
Marty, having taught at both high school and secondary institutions, what about you? When do you introduce metacognition and what does that look like? Well, if I could just say ditto to Mary's answers, we could probably move right on because I absolutely agree. It has to be day one. It's part of setting the stage and helping students understand what it's going to take to be successful learning in an environment for which a lot of students are not necessarily accustomed. Right.
They're used to the traditional sorts of formats for classrooms. And of course, Pogel does not look like that. So I want them to understand from the very beginning that things are going to work differently and that's going to require them to think more than what they've been accustomed to thinking at least during class time.
And so the more I can get them attuned to that and to think about their own thinking from the very beginning, I'll just list metacognition or being metacognitive as a key to success in this learning environment. It's just one of a few things that I really point out from the beginning.
And a lot of the things that Mary has described as assessment strategies to get them to do that are things that I also do throughout the course, but I can really want them from the beginning to understand the importance. So let's say, and I'll direct this towards Marty. So let's say you've got students coming in who have most likely never had a system like this in place in their classes. How are you going to model to them what you mean when you say, how do I know if I know it?
How do I know if I don't know it? How do you, what are things that you as the educator will do to help the students sort of get started on that path? Well, again, I think it's good for them to see us as individuals and to identify examples in our own day-to-day practice where we have to use metacognition, right?
So we're thinking about what we're doing and what's working well and what's not working well or what I know about this topic or what I have to learn that's come out new in my field that I now have to find a way to change my approach and what I'm doing in my classroom as a result of that. So I think modeling for them how those of us who are in front of them are being metacognitive is important.
But I think getting them to do these retrieval practice exercise that Mary described and to do that routinely, right? This is not once every three or four weeks I need to be metacognitive and see how I've done. So I think it's a daily study habit that they need to get accustomed to early on and practice over and over and over again. Just like any other skill, if you want to get good at it, you've got to practice it frequently.
So if they're not practicing metacognitive behaviors on a regular basis, they're not going to be any better at it than any other skill, content or process skill that you would want them to master. All right. So next question. Well, we're here on the POGLE podcast after all. So let's talk about POGLE and metacognition. How can POGLE activities facilitate the development of metacognitive skills? And I'll go to Marty first on this one. That's a great question.
And again, I think it starts with the facilitation of the activities and what you do as a facilitator of those activities. So I mean, there might be some built in questions to the activities that encourage metacognition, but I think your role as the facilitator. And again, are you doing some of the things that Mary described just a few moments ago on a routine basis to encourage that?
I also think the reflector role, which we model in a lot of our workshops and meetings that we have in POGLE, or maybe you call it strategy analyst or something like that, that is a role that is critical, I think, to metacognitive advancement. If we want our students to practice that role, that's going to help. So as a reflector in my classroom, they have a sheet that they are required to fill out and submit usually after class.
So I don't require an immediate, you've got to get this filled out before you leave class. But before they come back to the next class, I want them to address three major points. Number one, can you summarize the important concepts that were learned in class that day?
They don't have to be long and drawn out on any of these explanations, but something more than just the bolded headings of the activity, you know, something that indicates they've actually learned something about whatever the topic was and the content of that activity. Secondly, I ask them to reflect on whatever the key process skill was for that activity.
So if it was problem solving, I'm asking them to think about what did their team do well that would illustrate problem solving and also think about what they might do better next time, what's a way that they can improve their problem solving skills. And again, that particular skill will be different every class period typically, so that each time they reflect, it's not always on the same process skill. And then lastly, I'm asking them for where they're still having difficulty.
What's the muddiest point? Where are you still uncertain? So again, thinking about what they don't know well. That also is great information for me because then it allows when I come back the next time to address areas of concern that I see for lots and lots of teams in my classroom. So that's something that I do on a daily basis with activities. Yeah, I like that taking that analyst role and really drilling down some of the metacognitive natures there. Mary, what about you?
How do Poggle activities in your classroom help to facilitate metacognition? So I go back to the idea of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. And so Marty talked a lot about the evaluating process and I think planning because they're in a group and they all have to answer the same question, they might consider like, are we getting the correct answer? You know, are we doing this right?
If there's some confusion or if you mean as a facilitator, you might notice that one group is taking forever on a question and you realize like they just are stuck. They've kind of they've stopped, they've monitored themselves, but at some point they just haven't gotten to that we need to do something about this and move on. You know, they kind of are wrapped up.
And so I focus a lot on, you know, kind of the times where you, you know, the check-ins, you know, are the keys on some of the Poggle activities where it says, did everyone get the right answer? And so sometimes I use those as, you know, we write it up on the board and everybody, we know everybody's in the same place, but sometimes I do individual kind of check-ins to say like, how comfortable are you as an individual with this answer?
Because obviously in a group, not everybody tracks at the same, you know, there's one person who's like, I know everything and somebody else who very much feels like I am slowly getting this. And I think it's important as a teacher to recognize where your students are, because you know, they're not all have the exact same flow, you know, and it's great when you do have a group that just flows together, but a lot of times they don't. So that's kind of where I focus a lot on the monitoring.
And you know, on and off, I've done evaluating reflectors reports in that way, but it fluctuates. I've been mostly online for the last two years. I'm finally back in person, so I've had to like relearn how to do parts of Pogle again. So that's kind of where I land on the Pogle activities. They're super great for monitoring their learning, at least in the beginning.
My favorite thing of what Mary just said, other than it all being awesome is that idea of with the key points being like rate yourself individually, not as a team. Like we know we all got there as a team, just where are you right now? Like do you get it? Do you kind of get it? Have you gotten there on your own or did you need the team to help you out? I like that a lot. And I just want to say related to that, I put little confidence emojis.
So I also ask them, those are more on quizzes, but it gets them to say, are they confident or not confident? And so that gives them a little themselves a bit of an idea about, oh wow, this question looks super confusing and maybe they get it right and they rated themselves low. So trying to work on that idea of confidence and related because it is related to metacognitive strategies.
Well, also just the idea of putting emojis on papers for high school students automatically would make everything 10 times cooler. So that is great. I love that idea. I love that data. Right. How confident are you that this is correct? Do you know this or are you still having questions about that? So if your students are practicing strong metacognition skills, if you feel like, yes, they are very good at planning, monitoring and evaluating, what would that look like in your classrooms?
What would they be doing? What kinds of conversations are they having? What is that going to really be looking like? So Mary, I'll start with you. Okay. So I have a little list of things I think about. Go for it. Attempting to answer any question provided, whether or not, you know, and maybe it's not raising their hand, but, you know, writing it in their notes, looking back at their notes to check their answers, making changes.
So in the lab, making changes to a lab procedure that's not working or thinking about stopping and being like, this is not going well. I need to do something instead of keep going at setting up. A big thing is like having them set up their own procedures for some things. If you have the ability in your class to use some very guided inquiry labs, use some very open-ended labs like that.
And so students would be experiencing, a lot of times just letting them figure stuff out, like giving them the time to think in class. And it's hard because we want to cover so much. Sometimes we just have to let them hang and let them figure out for themselves what's going on. So I always think the conversations that go between like, we're figuring this thing out and then talking a little bit, you know, and having, just seeing them interact.
And, you know, just like you're trying to solve a problem anywhere, even if it was at home, but it's in the lab. And then like outside the class, I kind of think it's like testing themselves on practice problems, explaining to another student, you know, kind of letting that peer interaction happen in revising assignments. If given the opportunity, you know, if they have a quiz to revise or a lab report to revise that they take that up and attempt to make changes to it.
Cause they recognize there was an issue and that they could fix it. That is a fantastic list. I love that you had shared that list with us. Marty, your kids are doing great at metacognition. What is that going to look like? Yeah. Mary's list is awesome. The only things, the only things I would emphasize or maybe add to it, they're questioning each other. So they're not just saying, oh, well, he knows the answer and I'm going to write that down.
That they really do reflect on whether or not that makes sense to them. Right? So they're continually thinking about what somebody else has offered as an idea and trying to assess whether or not it's correct in terms of their own way of thinking about it. And they're self correcting, whether it's individually or as a team, when they get to question eight and they realize that question five is wrong, they're going back and they're fixing it.
You as the facilitator are not having to fix it for them. They recognize when they've made a mistake. So they're definitely practicing metacognition and that's scenario, I believe. And then the outside of the classroom environment, I think is just as critical as the inside piece.
So all those things Mary just talked about, there's those study habits and their plans and the planning, the monitoring, what they're doing outside of the classroom and preparation for the next class, the next quiz, the next exam, whatever that may be. Again, that's where a lot of us in the old days when Poggle didn't exist, that's where we practiced metacognition in our own learning environments because our classrooms weren't necessarily encouraging us to be metacognitive during class time.
So we had to think about what we learned from class outside of the classroom. And certainly we want to continue to encourage our students to do that. So again, when you meet with a student who has performed poorly on some major assessment, you're probably going to ask them, what were the things that you did to prepare yourself for this particular assessment in the course? What did you do? How did you study? Did you study with others? Did you make study materials, study aids?
Did you simply just reread the activities and not work any problems? What is it that you did in preparation for this particular assessment? Fun fact, I just had a student complete a set of test reflections and one of my questions was what did you do to prepare for this test? And they said nothing. I was like, okay. And then the next question was, well, what could I do differently to prepare for the next test? And he said, actually study. And I was like, okay, well, you're honest.
There's a start. There you go. There's the start. So one of the things that you both mentioned in your response about what that would look like is questions that they're asking questions either of other students or of you. And we know that students ask questions in class regardless.
So what would be the difference between the types of questions they'd be asking if they're doing a really nice job in reflecting on their learning versus just the types of questions that they're asking if there are more, I'll put it this way, a typical high school or possibly middle school students? And Marty, what are your thoughts? Well, I mean, I think the typical question we get from every student who's probably not practicing at the level we want is, is this right? Ah, yes. Right.
They've answered number eight and they want to know, is it right? Is this correct? Yeah. And again, we want to avoid saying yes or no. So what do we normally say? What do you think or what's led you to this point? What were the previous leading questions that got you here and help them again develop the confidence that they're thinking about the process that led to the answer to that question is correct and get them to affirm that.
Or we send them to talk to another team in the room that's nearby to see what they got and to explain what they were thinking. So avoid just the confirmation of yes, you got it right or no, it's not. So we're trying to encourage them when they get there to be metacognitive, even though we're not using that terminology necessarily. And I'm sure a lot of Pogal facilitators are already doing these things in their own environment. So this is not novel.
This is something everybody's probably doing on a regular basis. I have noticed in students like post COVID, there's definitely an increase in the anxiety about, did I get this question correct? And this need for affirmation. It's a pretty simple question. You look okay there. You look pretty confident. You know how to do it. And they're trying to read your facial expression. So the better the poker face you have. Ooh, that's interesting. I like that.
Yeah. So because again, depending on the face you're giving them, they may think, oh, I've done it wrong because the way you're looking at me. So I think that's why it's also good as a facilitator to walk around the room and ask students why they got the answer they did to question eight, even when it's right. Yeah. Mary, what sorts of questions do you think students would be asking each other if they're really displaying a high level of reflection? I fall back on the idea of argumentation.
If they can set up and they say, I think the answer is this for these reasons. They might say, why did you get that answer? And I always think a really good conversation has both sides. One person saying, what do you think of this? And the other person might be saying, well, I think this because of this. And so I spend a lot of time on argumentation in my class as well. They've got to write every time I say, I'm going to use the word evidence. I'm going to ask you questions all the time.
I'm never going to give you a straight answer. And they start to recognize the shift that question. But I realize that within a semester, it can be difficult to have those changes. But I see it's much more of a conversation between two students rather than one being like, oh, yeah, I agree. I agree and moving on. That's why there's so many of those. I think there's a recent post asking, well, what happens if you have these really simple answers to questions?
Students aren't going to have very different answers because they all just say, it's like when kids in elementary school are like, what's your favorite food? And everybody says ice cream because the first kid did. And so you want to make sure that your questions that you're asking are setting up your classroom that they feel like they can say other things or in different ways so it's not so much focused on I just want a right answer.
And I mean, there is for many vocal activities, obviously, there's a more correct definition than other correct definitions. But you want to get at that idea of they can say it in multiple ways. They can add pieces on. And especially for different levels of students. Maybe one is just we just need a basic sentence about the definition, but somebody else might say, well, look it in here, it also you can add this on.
And so trying to provide those different levels of interest to students and kind of ability. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for that. As you go throughout your course, and hopefully you're having your students develop these skills, how do you point out to them their progress? How do you let them know how they're improving or like that they have improved or that they still have some room to improve? So how do you literally communicate with your students about their reflective capabilities?
And Mary, what do you think? It's a lot of I think feedback, very consistent. In short, I mean, I know we can get into the habit of writing so much, but I always have a rule of came from Pogal, like you have like a strength and improvement and an insight. And so when I give feedback on any of their lab reports or any of their quizzes, it's always like, you've done really well at this.
You need to improve on this and it might, and then I, you know, you can show what's wrong and right, but that I really try to focus on because they do need to see positive encouragement that they are doing something right in class, even if they don't get the content right all the time, but they've gotten better at this over the semester. So I do mostly feedback.
I've taken a step back from numbers for grading for a while, so I'm focused on giving feedback and verbally, you know, and I have small classes. So granted, I have 24 students or fewer in a class for someone who has over a hundred. There's going to have to, you're going to have to think of different ways.
Maybe you have the same type of feedback you would give like a kudos kind of like good job on I've noticed you've been doing this in class, but a lot of just the verbal and the written feedback and that's kind of where I land and I incorporate kind of this idea of assessment into into their overall grade.
Like if you've been revising and reflecting, that shows me that you're trying harder to get, you know, to get a grade than if you're just going to do the bare minimum, which is fine for some students. That's what the goal is, but you want to encourage them to say, do this, revise this, see where you went wrong. So written and verbal feedback was kind of the SII. That's a big thing for me. Siobhan just mentally put a post-it on that and it's like, yeah, like that idea going forward.
Thank you, Mary. Marty, what about you as you go throughout the course? Like how are you providing, how are you letting the students sort of know or communicate to them about the development of this skill? Sure, again, the reflection sheets that I use on a daily basis are probably the primary way. Do you respond to those? I do respond to each one of them and sometimes the responses are more in-depth than others.
And I try to find a student very early on who does an exceptional job at writing a reflection and share that anonymously with that student's permission with the rest of the class so that they get a good exemplar of what I'm looking for or what I would hope to see from others who might be writing minimal, a few words at best and it's not even a complete sentence to try to encourage a little more depth of processing of the content, the process skill and where they are struggling.
Predominantly, again, I'm trying not to get into evaluating them for grade as much as I am completion of the exercise. And again, I think the feedback, as Mary has mentioned, is more important in these cases than a numerical score would be on something that, again, is a lot more subjective to grade. Again, we're both scientists and all of us are here.
And so we think of things very objectively in a lot of the things we teach, but this seems to be something that it's harder without a glorified rubric to go through and give points for. So I'm really wanting to encourage their reflections and reward them from having completed them as fully as I would expect them to.
Again, if they get in the habit of only giving me a few words every time or not answering the answer, the strength of the team, but not the way the team could improve, then I'll start digging them a little bit just to say, hey, I'm expecting you to do a little bit more than what you're putting forward here. Mary mentioned exam wrappers earlier. I do exam wrappers usually after each exam for all students to, again, help them assess where they are and what they're doing and what's effective.
But part of that exam wrapper often includes having them predict a score on their exam before they know what the score is. So they've just completed the exam. I tell them to complete the exam wrapper soon thereafter and to make a prediction about how they have performed on that exam. And of course, you have some students who are very good at that. They can get within a few points. And as you might expect, there are some students whose predictions are way off, right?
So 15, 20, 30 points off from where they actually ended up performing. Probably in both directions. In both directions, right? So you do have that subset of students who Dunning and Krueger refer to as being unskilled and unaware. So they think they've made an A, but they made a D, right? So they really thought they knew the material, but yet their score shows the complete opposite.
And I think, again, that can be instructive for students to recognize, hey, I thought I knew this stuff, but I didn't. And you can have that conversation with that student and say, what are you doing? What was your preparation like? And how can we change that so that you will have a better performance in the future? Yeah, definitely. Uninformed. What was it? Unskilled. Unskilled and unaware.
Yes. So with all this stuff about reflection and metacognition, we know that the way the brain develops throughout adolescence, there are certainly times where that's just a bit of a tall ask. So does the age of the student make a difference when you're talking about introducing this sort of level of reflection and self-examination?
Do you think there are any adjustments that might need to be made for, let's say, middle school classes, if you're doing this in a middle school class versus a high school class versus community college versus a four-year or even further? Mary, thoughts? Well, absolutely. So metacognition is knowledge and skill tend to grow as a child grows. And they really don't have as much when they're in middle school and high school and even in right entering college. It's not until your 20s.
And if we think, if you continued on in school for a long time, things got easier. You knew that you weren't doing well in a class or things like that. I'm a big fan of a book called Powerful Teaching, and so they talk about by Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain. And they really talk about different things that you can do. And one of them's in higher ed, one of them's in, I think, middle school or high school. And they really give this kind of toolbox of things that you can use at all levels.
I think where the importance comes in is sometimes when we say, students, please reflect. And students are like, what are you talking about? What does reflect mean? And I think I've started to recognize that a student speaking another language, having different levels of fluency of English. Sometimes you realize people don't know what that word means. What does reflect mean? We always think about it in meditation. Just reflect on your life. But you want very specific things.
So the thing that I would say for basically any level is that you need consistency and you need to explain what it means. So when I ask you to reflect on this lab experiment, I'm thinking, what are the two errors that you can figure out that happened? I want you to think back through the process that you took. And that's going to take time. And so you can't just assume the first month of school, they will have it.
This is going to be, especially for middle and high school, you've got a whole year, oftentimes, with students to be able to see them grow in that. In college, some teachers do it, some don't. And so they might get thrown in and out of it. But to really say, look, I know that you know these things. You know that you study well or don't do this. I mean, you're aware. So it's not as trying to step it up.
But again, I think the language you use is really going to be helpful in explaining what does this mean and what I expect to see out of it. And that can, I think, help them by even taking it home and adding it to their study thing for any class. And I always say, what I'm teaching you in all of these strategies, this can be used anywhere. This is not just for chemistry class. And that's a really important thing to me as you are a new student in college, just in college.
You know, what do you not know how to do? And how is my class going to assist you in that as an introductory course? You know, junior year, that's a whole different thing. There's other things you'd be adding on to those, very minimal. But at my level, it's important, just as important to teach them how to be a student as for them to learn the content. Because the content is, it's a lot less than an upper level course. Thank you.
Marty, age of the student, and especially as someone who has taught at lots of different levels. What do you think about introducing this, especially in the light of what Mary said? Yeah, Mary made some great points. And what I would like to emphasize is the maturity of the learner should not necessarily be tied to their age.
Yes. I had some very talented high school students who I thought their maturity of learning and ability to be metacognitive would be equal to or better than some of the professional students that I'm encountering right now. So I think it is appropriate to target, again, what might be the norm for your classroom environment and to not have expectations that would exceed what a competent student in your area of teaching should be expected to do.
But again, you're going to have some talented students who are capable of going deeper, being a lot more reflective and metacognitive than others. But I absolutely believe that it can be practiced, again, not necessarily at the same depth and expectation, probably at all levels. I mean, we're still wanting students even at middle school or below levels to learn and to question what they're doing and question what somebody else is doing and thinking and trying to understand things.
So I don't think that we don't want them to be metacognitive. Absolutely. It's just not going to be at the same depth that we would expect of a college or graduate or professional student to be able to do. Yeah, it's going to just look different. It'll look different, yeah. And just what Mary said beforehand about it being clear language and very clear expectations. I always think that's just good teaching, right?
That's just good teaching that you are absolutely clear with what you're looking for and you don't just say, okay, reflect on the lesson. It's like, no, no, no, no. What does that mean? What does that look like? What do I expect to see from you? And like Marty said too, showing the exemplar. Oh, I'm a big fan of exemplars. I think it really helps. You can explain until you turn blue in the face, but if you show your students, you know, this is what I'm looking for. I think it tends to click.
And then the final question. So I started off this conversation thinking that I wasn't really doing that much with metacognition, but Marty and Mary have actually convinced me I'm doing more than I realize. I can still definitely step it up. I mean, I'm not saying that there's no room for improvement, but I thought I was like at like a 0.5 on a scale of zero to 10. Maybe I'm now more at like a two or three.
But what advice would you give to a practitioner who isn't really highlighting this in their classroom on where to start? Like, where do you start? What strategies would you suggest they start using to introduce it in a way that allows their students to start becoming better reflectors? Marty, I'll start with you. While at the risk of overstating the obvious, I would encourage people to be metacognitive. No, that's not overstating the obvious at all. Like, so I'm serious.
You know your students, you know your environment better than anybody else does. So think about what's going to work best for your population that's going to encourage them to study and learn and to think more effectively than what they've been doing. So again, we've highlighted some examples today. You know, whether it's retrieval practice, reflections, exam wrappers, you know, revising laboratory reports, you know, all of these things are metacognitive behaviors in your writing mind.
You're probably doing a lot more than you give yourself credit for. I'm sure a lot of people are. They just didn't realize it necessarily fit under this umbrella of metacognition in their classroom. Or it could be done more purposefully. Correct.
So in addition to the resource that Mary mentioned, powerful teaching, I think there's a couple of other resources many in our Poggle community are probably familiar with that I think again are great for encouraging some of the things we've been talking about today. So the first I'd mention is the book co-authored by Mark McDaniel called Make It Stick. Many of you may have seen Mark at a Poggle event before. He was one of our plenary speakers at the first NCAP that we did in 2017.
He's also been at other Poggle events. He's a professor at WashU. So again, I think this book is very readable even by a general lay audience. We have students in our own program read the book in preparation for their study in our professional program here in the College of Pharmacy and we do some follow-up exercises with them. We've actually had Mark come and speak with them and even his daughter this past year.
So again, it hits on lots of themes, but metacognition and thinking about how students learn effectively is one of them. The second resource that I would like to call to bear is the Ellipse Project. Again, this was started within the Poggle project itself by some very experienced practitioners and lots of people inside the Poggle project have contributed to it.
So Ellipse stands for Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM and they have lots of wonderful tools that you can use in your classroom that are rubrics that can help students develop their process skills. One of which of course is metacognition and self-assessment. So again, I encourage you to check out those rubrics for use in your classroom if you haven't thought about using them before.
And again, there's a wonderful website that's going to be part of the show notes for the Ellipse Project as well as some website information for both of the textbooks that we've mentioned make it stick and powerful teaching. Mary. My big thing is just make one or two small changes. If you are going to say, I'm going to do retrieval practice, just do that. I know that making changes is exhausting at all levels. Teachers are doing so much. They're teaching the classroom and then they have to prep.
So being asked to change your classroom is difficult and you can't expect to change your entire lab sequence to make it more, to engage students more metacognitively. But you could change a small part of some labs to have them to start seeing how it looks. And it can be surprising that you're like, wow, it's not as much.
And my biggest thing is I was trying to think back is when I started some of this stuff and yes, I've been doing it for 10 years, but I've been doing a lot of this stuff for a long time, but it wasn't until recently that I was like, I'm actually doing it consistently. And so change takes a while, but make one or two small changes.
And again, looking up different strategies to use, I think those small kind of, I've talked about classroom assessment techniques or I think they're called CATS, but you can use powerful teaching or these different ideas that you're just trying to get students to do things to make themselves more aware. And a big thing is model it. So just one thing that you could simply do is when you're doing a problem on the board is do it wrong. And then- Oh, I like that so much. Go back.
So when I draw the structure of nitrogen gas, I go through all the possibilities and say, look, man, I keep messing up. I use this rule and then I use this one. And then you finally get through and you realize, and then there might be times where you try to give yourself something harder so that they actually see you go through this process of I know something's wrong. How am I going to fix it?
Or on a test, I've noticed that sometimes students will do really poorly on a question and I'll come out and say, hey, I thought we did this in class. I thought we did this. Everything's amiss and I need to go back and change this question. You guys need to, we need to talk about it and kind of figure it out. And so making it a conversation in modeling it, being consistent and being intentional and transparent.
Like I'm trying to get you guys to learn this stuff because it's going to help you in your lifeline goals. Yes, it's not chemistry, but it's something you're going to need. Absolutely. Thank you so, so much, Marty and Mary. We really appreciate your time today that you could come in and have this conversation. And again, I have made so many mental post-it notes during this discussion that I'm going to go back to the classroom tomorrow and there is some stuff that I want to start implementing.
So I hope that our listeners also got some great ideas. Again, Marty, Mary, thank you so much and I'll send it back to you, Wayne. Well thanks to Siobhan, Mary and Marty for such a great discussion of this very important process skill. How do you incorporate metacognition into your facilitation? Let us know by joining the conversation at hashtag the Poggle podcast on the Facebook practitioners page.
Earlier this month, we held the first zoom happy hour with the networks group and we had a great time. We are planning our next meeting on March 2nd. Be sure to RSVP to the next invite and join us as we get together with our fellow Poggle practitioners. Until next time for everyone at the Poggle podcast, this is Wayne Pearson. So long everybody.