S came to see me today. She wanted to discuss the class XXXX. She was so angry with me and she told me it was because of that reflective paper I’d set in XXXX class. S said “I was so angry about that paper. I had the worst prac experience, you know I barely got through, my supervisor spent most of it suggesting I need therapy, and even worse picking at me in supervision so that I barely had any skin left by the end…I was starting to wonder if he wasn’t right, maybe I do need therapy. He said I had no self-awareness, and had family of origin issues …when I tried to ask what that meant he told me I was being resistant and should think about what that suggests about my lack of awareness and suitability of social work … anyway I thought okay I just have to get through, I can’t afford to fail the prac, I mean I am on a scholarship and I have kids to feed. I need to get finished. I kept thinking just get through, just hold on. I thought I will never have to think about this experience again!” S paused for breath…”And then what happens? I get back to Uni and I get into your class and you make me go back and examine it in minute detail for an assessment.”
She looked so beaten for a minute. I felt for her. I could see the experience of placement had been really painful. I was about to apologise when she said “thank god you did, although I spent most of semester being furious at you…writing about it helped put some perspective on it… The paper helped me look at what I did and what happened. I came today to apologise – I know I was really difficult in class and I wanted you to know why…”
I was stunned and I just sat there – I told S I was grateful she’d taken the time to let me know about it and I shared that I had been wondering about the assessment and the class, especially being new to teaching. I wasn’t sure what it had all been about. Well you just can’t tell, can you? I thought it was about me…but it’s nothing to do with me…You can’t tell what is going on sometimes… (Teaching Journal entry, 2008)
Bridge
Not all learning is pleasant and not all teaching is either. Learning and teaching the skills of higher order thinking is to engage in hypothetical reasoning and higher order mental tasks including thinking about the thinking taking place. This is a function called metacognition (Anscombe, 2009; Fox & Riconscente, 2008). There are debates about whether each part of the brains’ processing system (discussed previously) results in different kinds of
metacognition (Arango-Muñoz, 2011). Arango-Munoz (2001) outlines how some discussions of metacognition associate it with mindreading and the theory of mind as well as
consider metacognition as a form of executive function that monitors the environment using the emotions systems to do so (Arango-Muñoz, 2011). In other words, one component is concerned with ‚ < knowledge of cognition<*whilst the other is about+ regulation of cognition‛ (Muis & Franco, 2009). Both perspectives are supported by empirical experiment and therefore for the purpose of this discussion it is possible to assume that both kinds of metacognition co-exist and that both contribute to human learning and reasoning.
Educators have been very interested in this function and it has considerable links to beliefs about knowledge (Muis & Franco, 2009). It is considered to be a key route to development of higher order reasoning skills, or in educational terms critical thinking. In terms of teaching Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) suggest that along with factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge good teaching requires the planning for opportunities for developing
metacognitive knowledge in students. A key route to this is reflection on learning tasks, engagement in a broad array of different kinds of assessment and providing opportunities for students to choose strategies for meeting the assignment tasks (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). These may be incorporated into planning teaching activities.
Metacognition and the associated development of higher order cognitive processes are resource intensive for the individual. Fortunately, as parts of the role become routine this frees up resources for other aspects of learning and/or teaching. This explains why the first semester or year is often very hard for students as they learn different strategies to apply for different tasks. It is the same for learning to teach or indeed going into practice for the first time. Given this it is sometimes hard to hold on through the discomfort some assessment can create for students. I found this was more possible to do if I was clear about my rationale for setting the particular kind of assessment. I was not always clear until after I had run an assessment. It was not the student evaluations at the end that always pointed this out. Grading student assessment is an important impetus for engaging in reflection on teaching and assessment design. Reflective assessments were and are still the most likely to initiate such introspection and reflection, more than any other kind of assessment.