re: #199 Talking Point Detective

My belief, which has been borne out by a lot of research, is that meta-cognition is a very important variable that influences one’s academic performance. Essentially, it means self-knowledge, or knowledge about the process by which you learn; it comprises the executive functions of the process - knowledge of what enables you as an individual to learn well, knowledge of what strategies you can use to learn, the ability to evaluate your own learning and to adopt new strategies to compensate for weaknesses and take advantage of strengths.

My overall focus as an educator is to help students become more meta-cognitive in their learning processes. It is amazing how much of the underlying structures of our educational system actually work to undermine a student’s meta-cognitive processes. For example, the very notion of how students get evaluated, where they pass over the responsibility of evaluation to their teachers - essentially looking at evaluation as a black box; they submit work and it gets evaluated in some invisible process and then returned.

You know … this also involves a recognition and understanding of, and a refusal to feel inferior because of, those areas where you personally lack ability.

I know, for myself - when someone spews a whole bunch of facts my way, I can take them in and process them and come to a reasonable and rational conclusion fairly quickly. AND I know that five minutes later, I can explain my conclusion to someone else, BUT I cannot for the life of me recall ANY of the facts leading to that conclusion.

All of which gives me certain strengths (as far as being an employee is concerned - ability to make a quick decision), and those strengths would be weaknesses in other situations (where it would be necessary to lay out a stream of facts in order to inform or teach).

I did a LOT better when I stopped feeling like this quirk meant that something was wrong with me.