The following materials are posted on my class page for use by my students. Some of them I assign; some don't always fit with the course. They are all written to students, and they all attempt to spark in some form or other student metacognition about their own roles as learners. None is very original, being a reworking of ideas I came across here and there that seemed to help me think about metacognitive processes better. If you'd like to use any of this material, feel free to do so. Just credit the source and don't sell it. If you find any of it useful, I'd love to hear about it. And if you have suggestions, corrections, arguments, or questions I'd love to hear them too.
This is a series of simple questions I have students answer at the very beginning of the semester. In the form they encounter it, it is an HTML form that they complete on the Internet and submit on-line. The answers can be used in a variety of ways to help students reflect on their roles and opportunities and to help them get more engaged in the course.
Thinking About Being a Student
This was inspired by the work of Carol Dweck of Columbia University, whose work has advanced my thinking about learning a great deal. She and her colleagues found that if they had students read a short essay that argued that intelligence was learnable before doing a learning task the students actually learned better and pursued the task longer. So I thought, Why not? I wrote an article that tells students that they can get smarter, in hopes that they will.
In reading Aaron Beck and David Burns about cognitive therapy, it struck me that many of the behaviors they found in clinically depressed and suicidal patients were widespread among students in my English comp. classes! Perhaps, I thought, this could explain the retention problem? So I developed a somewhat systematic list of the categories of automatic thinking that undermine our ability to succeed and provided examples from the classroom.
The Power of Mindful Reflection
We all know that we want our students to take a certain stance toward the world, to think about events from a certain perspective of openness and willingness to learn. In reading Ellen Langer I found the name for this elusive quality: mindfulness. I want students to know what it is, and I want them to know what I'm talking about when I talk about it. Hence this very brief introduction. There's more to come along these lines, when time allows.
It amazes and depresses me that many of the students who come into my classes approach writing as if it had nothing to do with communication. Most of them haven't thought about either the similarities or the differences between writing and speaking, the two verbal routes to understanding. Here I try to get them to think about both the similarities and the differences, to lay the foundation for recognizing that they really do have a voice.
I find that peer review of one another's work is very hard for many students. One of the reasons is that many of them have already formed a firmly negative judgment of it and view it as a waste of time. I want to try to get students to take a mindful perspective on the task of interacting with other students. So this is my brief attempt to get them to think in a constructive way about the potential value of the activity.
© 2000 John Tagg