During the past 12 months I have been studying about how to be a better teacher. I have read several books about How People Learn, How the Best College Teachers teach, How to Make Ideas Stick and many more. One theme that was found throughout was that students need to be actually "doing" the learning and not just receiving answers to questions they haven't asked as most prominently happens in a lecture.
To "do" learning is a lot easier when we know how we are learning and how we are thinking. Thus the term metacognition. Metacognition has many different definitions. Here are two:
* Thinking about one's own thinking.
* Awareness of an knowledge about one's own learning
Many studies have proven that we learn more when we spend time analyzing how we learn. What processes we use, the quality of the approach we took, the quality of the actual learning.
We can learn more and better when we plan, monitor, and regulate our thinking and learning.
Monday, I get to rejoin students in the classroom in a course called thermodynamics. We are going to spend some of our time learning about metacognition so that we can better learn thermodynamics.
TBL: Somebody always said you should learn a new word every day. Maybe this was a new word for you.
Angie and I took a kayak trip up out of Tioga Beach today. It was great!
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