Thank you for the welcome Leonne and Viviana!
I am writing to you from rainy Victoria as an uninvited guest on the traditional territories of Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ
peoples. I am slowly becoming more aware of how this place influences
the way I think and how that changes when I move to a different
location, with different people.
I
registered for this MicroCourse because now that I have been out of
school for a while (after almost 16 years as a post-secondary student) I feel a
need to connect with formal learning opportunities as often as I can fit
them into my schedule. I keep thinking to myself I should go back and
get another degree, but this seems like a better place to start. :)
I also thought the topic looked interesting, and something out of the ordinary.
When I think of metacognition, I go back to an early ISW experience when we asked participants to start by sharing with a partner their answer to the question: "How does learning happen?" Because we had an odd number of participants, I was also prompted to reconsider that question myself. My own response went back to an experience as an upper-level undergrad, when a professor challenged me on a deeply-held belief that I had about the past. To be challenged in this way was frustrating and unsettling, but also probably one of the most powerful learning experiences of my academic career.
When I think about how learning happened for me in that experience, it was through confrontation with an idea that did not readily fit into my way of looking at the world. When I think of metacognition, I think about the ways that my mental network of ideas is structured and how it evolves. How do new ideas fit? Can I find a place for them in the existing structure? Or do I need to change the structure? As I get older, I start to wonder if the structure becomes more difficult to change? I am a historian, not a psychologist, so I don't pretend to have a great understanding of this process, but there are many cliches which do.
I find that a lot of students say things like "I am a visual learner" or "I prefer to listen to lectures" and then close themselves off to other ways of learning, especially when I am asking them to collaborate. Of course, we all have different preferences and different abilities, but we know that learning styles are malleable, not hard-wired. I want to know more about strategies that folks use for making learning processes more transparent. How can I make these processes visible to learners in my classroom, or in my workshops, so that they can then manipulate the processes to be more successful?
Also, if you are eligible, and haven't done so yet, get out and vote!