A heartfelt welcome to the new subscribers. I hope you find some valuable insights from this newsletter.
We have been speaking about designing our own learning journey and how to move from information to knowledge. But now it is time to get meta! Or metacognitive.
While we should continue to work on our cognitive skills, if we want the knowledge to truly embed in our systems and become learning superheroes- we need to work on our metacognition.
Metacognition helps learners become aware of their strengths, their weaknesses and how they learn which enable a much deeper learning. It makes thinking and learning visible to the learner.
Back in my first newsletter, I talked about thinking about what is our own process of learning and trying to identify trends and employing it in our other learning goals. I was in short, telling you to be a metacognitive learner.
Metacognition includes two domains:
Knowledge of Cognition- This includes thinking about ourselves as learners, our learning process, the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ questions, and also being able to identify which strategy should be used when!
Regulation of Cognition- This includes our executive functions- how to plan, monitor, regulate and evaluate our own learning process.
As self-determined learners, we can not learn if we are not thinking about how we learn, where we struggle, how it connects, where it fits. Or if we don’t know where we are going and how to get there. It’s like a driver in the car seat that does not how to drive planning to cover a distance to nowhere with a litre of petrol in his fuel tank!
So how do you build metacognition?
With practice, time and efforts! And of course- a deep awareness of the need to be meta. I say it again and again- hoarding information is not the end goal. The end goal is a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Metacognition helps us do that.
But there is a structure you can follow that can help you get there.
On a path to becoming metacognitive:
You have to start with setting a goal- What are you trying to achieve?
Then sit down and identify what you know and what you don’t know.
The next step is to continue to monitor yourself by asking questions such as where did I struggle? What was the muddiest thing? Has there been a time when I struggled similarly and I overcame it? Can I use it here? What is this reminding me of?- The key is Self Questioning!
And then continue to adapt yourself, the strategies you employ to meet the learning goal.
Once you come to the end of your learning, evaluate your learning as well as your learning process.
Take these 5 steps and apply it. Things will start to emerge, honestly it will start to make sense and the things you learn will be lifelong! You will also become a better learner.
Here are some more references for you to explore metacognition:
References:
https://www.queensu.ca/teachingandlearning/modules/students/26_learning_inventories.html
https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/
https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_leading-with-cultural-intelligence/s06-02-what-is-metacognition.html
In the next newsletter, we will look at note taking methods and learning journals- The cognitive and the metacognitive!
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Keep Learning!
Adios,
Avni