1 of 42

1

TAC Facilitators:

Daisy (she/they), Philosophy

Ben (he/him), Physics

Going Meta: A System of Reflection to Improve Teaching Effectiveness During the Quarter

2 of 42

2

3 of 42

3

Be present

Step up/step back

Speak your truth

Workshop Norms�This workshop is designed to be interactive and collaborative.

Be respectful

Raise your hand to ask questions

Be curious

4 of 42

4

Workshop Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

Understand the basics of metacognition
Reflect on personal teaching practices
Create a SMART Goal related to one’s teaching effectiveness
Understand how to create a mid-quarter inquiry to gather evidence to reflect and adapt teaching effectiveness

5 of 42

5

Our plan for today (60 minutes):

Define metacognition
Understand how metacognition can help improve teaching effectiveness
Create a SMART goal related to one’s teaching effectiveness they want to improve one.
Brainstorm a mid-quarter inquiry questions to collect student data tailored to your specific goal.

Workshop Agenda

6 of 42

6

Traditionally, metacognition refers to:

“..Thinking about thinking”^[1]
Self-Directed (or Goal-Directed) Learning^[2]

Promote self-sufficiency, autonomy, and confidence within one’s learning process

Related to students within a classroom setting ^[1][2]

^{But we can go meta about our teaching pratices and effectiveness!}

What is Metacognition?

Center for Educational Effectiveness [CEE]. (2019). Reflection and Metacognition Series. Just-in-Time Teaching Resources. Retrieved from http://cee.ucdavis.edu/JITT
Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., Norman, M. K., & Mayer, R. E. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey- Bass.

Daisy - Read of slide and add the following to each bullet point:

Added to bullet point 1 - essentially the goal is to make you more aware of you thought process when you thinking about how to access your learning goals
Added to bullet point 2 - in addition to increasing your awareness, secondary goal of metacognition is to away learners to become self-directed learners. Once we understand how we approach tackling learning tasks, then we can decide which tasks we’d like to pursue. In addition, this allows for more individual personalization to learning strategies for the autonomous learner. With that being said, the upshot [read bullet point below]
Added to bullet point 3 - Traditionally, metacognition is thought to refer to the paradigmatic case of students learning within a classroom. Learning tasks such as studying new content for an exam or learning a new skill such as writing.

7 of 42

Reminder - You are Doing Great!

Thinking about thinking can be hard!

It’s part of our “System 2”.

This is a continuous process. So, let’s strive for progress over perfection.

7

8 of 42

8

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., Norman, M. K., & Mayer, R. E. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey- Bass.
John Spencer (2018), “Five Ways to Boost Metacognition In the Classroom”. Retrieved from https://spencereducation.com/metacognition/

What is Metacognition?

Daisy - The process of metacognition and be generalized to the following:

Assess the Task - Learners will first assess the task at hand that they would like to tackle/accomplish. For instance, a task learners could work toward could be studying to get an A on an exam or learning a new language well enough for a trip in 6 months. When assessing a task, someone is looking at how to break it down, what it requires, and the expected timeline to complete the task.
Evaluate Strengths & Weakness - Once the task is broken down by the learner with its respected timeline, then they can assess what are their strengths in completing the learning task by the expected deadline. This can help the learner understand better what strategies might be the most effective to use given their current context.
Plan the Approach - With one’s strengths and weaknesses in mind, one can think through the available strategies—and maybe ask folks around them who’ve been through the task which other strategies they might recommend — that can help the learner complete the task.

Remember back to your first time being a college student. If that was too long ago, then maybe think back to the last time you mentored first year students through their first semester/quarter in college. Think back to them thinking “studying” for an exam was merely attending all the lectures and then attending the exam to get the A. This example is meant to illustrate that some strategies need to include check-points along the way.

Apply Strategies - With the plan, the time comes to apply the strategies to the task at hand.
Reflect - After applying the strategies and receiving data/results, then it's time to reflect on what one learned about their learning and thought process, assessment of strengths and weaknesses, strategies and application of them. This is to assist with being present with the current context to your learning activities and how to grow in the next iteration.

9 of 42

9

TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 4: Metacognitive Processes (n/a). Retrieved from: https://lincs.ed.gov/state-resources/federal-initiatives/teal/guide/metacognitive

What is Metacognition?

Metacognition can also be thought of as three phases:

Planning Phase
Monitoring Phase
Evaluation Phase

10 of 42

10

What is Metacognition?

Question to Practice Metacognition

1. Planning Phase

What am I supposed to learn?

What prior knowledge will help me with this task?

What should I do first?

What should I look for in this reading? How much time do I have to complete this?

How am I doing? Am I on the right track?

Should I adjust the pace because of the difficulty?

What can I do if I do not understand?

How well did I do? What did I learn?

Did I get the results I expected? What could I have done differently?

Can I apply this way of thinking to other problems or situations? Is there anything I don’t understand—any gaps in my knowledge?

Do I need to go back through the task to fill in any gaps in understanding?

Qs to ask yourself

2. Monitoring Phase

3. Evaluation Phase

Daisy - read off slide

Planning Stages - “ learners can ask, What am I supposed to learn? What prior knowledge will help me with this task? What should I do first? What should I look for in this reading? How much time do I have to complete this? In what direction do I want my thinking to take me?”
Monitoring Stages - “learners can ask, How am I doing? Am I on the right track? How should I proceed? What information is important to remember? Should I move in a different direction? Should I adjust the pace because of the difficulty? What can I do if I do not understand?
Evaluation Stages - “learners can ask, How well did I do? What did I learn? Did I get the results I expected? What could I have done differently? Can I apply this way of thinking to other problems or situations? Is there anything I don’t understand—any gaps in my knowledge? Do I need to go back through the task to fill in any gaps in understanding? How might I apply this line of thinking to other problems?

11 of 42

11

TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 4: Metacognitive Processes (n/a). Retrieved from: https://lincs.ed.gov/state-resources/federal-initiatives/teal/guide/metacognitive

What is Metacognition?

Elements of metacognition can include:

Personal variables
Task variables
Strategies variables

Daisy - read off slide

Adding to the elements, learners can learn more about 1) themselves 2) the task at hand and 3) their strategies they need to apply.

Personal: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information
Task: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task—for example, knowledge that it will take more time to read, comprehend, and remember a technical article than it will a similar-length passage from a novel.
Strategy: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task; for example, knowing how to activate prior knowledge before reading a technical article, using a glossary to look up unfamiliar words, or recognizing that sometimes one has to reread a paragraph several times before it makes sense

12 of 42

12

What is Metacognition?

Question to Practice Metacognition

1. Personal Variables

What did I learn about my current skill level of writing?

How might I learn /understand about the amount of time it takes me to do this task?

Did I learn more about the task I was trying to accomplish (e.g., the demand of the task, the time, different norms across disciplines, etc).

What did I learn about the strategy I employed? Does it fit with this context?

Did the strategy or strategies I employed be used in other contexts?

Ex: Using an outline to structure reading a difficult article to flag questions and look up jargon in a biology class.

Qs to ask yourself

2. Task Variables

3. Strategy Variables

Daisy - read off slide

Adding to the elements, learners can learn more about 1) themselves 2) the task at hand and 3) their strategies they need to apply.

Personal: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information
Task: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task—for example, knowledge that it will take more time to read, comprehend, and remember a technical article than it will a similar-length passage from a novel.
Strategy: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task; for example, knowing how to activate prior knowledge before reading a technical article, using a glossary to look up unfamiliar words, or recognizing that sometimes one has to reread a paragraph several times before it makes sense

13 of 42

13

TASK: To teach (effectively)

Deliver content clearly in lecture
Create an equitable course design or assessments
Co-facilitate and create an inclusive classroom
Coach students to give more than 1 to 2 word answers in class
Get students to complete all work needed for discussion sections
Have students complete the learning outcomes of the course and have fun!

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

14 of 42

14

How to Use Metacognition to Reflect on Teaching Effectiveness

Briefly, what does effective teaching mean to you and which task might you want to focus on?

15 of 42

15

How to Use Metacognition to Reflect on Teaching Effectiveness

Briefly, what does effective teaching mean to you and which task might you want to focus on?

THINK-PAIR-SHARE

16 of 42

16

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

17 of 42

17

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

18 of 42

18

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

19 of 42

19

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

20 of 42

20

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

21 of 42

21

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

22 of 42

22

TASK: To teach (effectively)

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

23 of 42

23

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

24 of 42

24

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

25 of 42

25

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness: A Mid-Quarter Inquiry

Apply Strategies

One of the best ways to get feedback on your teaching (on some facets) is a mid-quarter inquiry.
It’s like end-of-quarter course evaluations, but you write the questions and do it in the middle of the quarter.
This lets you act on the information during the course, not just planning for the next class once the current one’s done.

26 of 42

How to set up an MQI

Explain to students why you’re doing the survey and how you will use the responses. This makes students much more likely to give you feedback. (Bribing with cookies also helps).�
Set up a Canvas Quiz or Google Form with the questions you want and send them to your students.

26

Think about your SMART goal. Choose questions that will give you data to help you achieve that goal.

An MQI doesn’t have to be in the exact middle of the quarter - any time before the end of the quarter, when you can still respond to the feedback during the quarter.

27 of 42

What are student evals (not) good for?

Student feedback is often helpful, but you should also trust your own discernment.

27

[1] Kogan, V., Genetin, B., Chen, J., Kalish, A. (2022) Students’ Grade Satisfaction Influences Evaluations of Teaching: Evidence from Individual-level Data and an Experimental Intervention

[2] Buser, W., Batz-Barbarich, C., Kearns Hayter, J. (2022) Evaluation of Women in Economics: Evidence of Gender Bias Following Behavioral Role Violations

Students tend to give worse evals when they aren’t satisfied with their grade.^[1] Hopefully, asking for feedback mid-quarter helps mitigate this.

Female instructors are more likely to be evaluated negatively for the same behavior as male instructors.^[2]

28 of 42

What are student evals (not) good for?

When judging how well students are learning, trust clicker questions / quizzes / essays more than student self-reporting.

28

[1]. Deslaurier, L., McCarty, L., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., Kestin, G. (2019) Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom.

A 2019 study^[1]found that while students in an active-learning physics class learned more, they thought they learned less compared to traditional lecture! (Struggling with the material actively in class meant they felt confused more of the time, but it was good for them).

But evals are still good for measuring student motivation and buy-in. Students aren’t experts on teaching, but they are experts on their own experience.

29 of 42

Ex: I want to improve student participation and “classroom culture”

29

“Rate on a scale of 1-5 your feeling of belonging in this classroom.”

30 of 42

Ex: I want to improve student participation and “classroom culture”

30

“Rate on a scale of 1-5 your feeling of belonging in this classroom.”

The more concrete the question, the better.

“I’m willing to ask a ‘dumb’ question in class in front of my classmates.”

“If I’m struggling in this class, there are people I can go to for help.”

31 of 42

Ex: I want to improve student participation and “classroom culture”

31

Do you feel comfortable asking questions in class?

Yes
Kinda, but only in small groups
Kinda, but I don’t know what questions to ask in the first place
No

Listing specific multiple-choice options instead of just using an open-ended question might prompt students to say things they wouldn’t think to mention!

Lots of students said this on one of my MQIs. This was new information to me!

Office hour conversations can help you get an idea of how students are feeling and what to ask for.

32 of 42

Ex: I want to write better assignments

The first quiz I ever gave an instructor was a bit of a disaster…

32

The vast majority of my students got stuck at the same part of the quiz, and got the same partial credit for not making much progress. Clearly, my quiz was way too hard and probably wasn’t clearly written!

33 of 42

Ex: I want to write better assignments

33

I polled my students asking how I could have made the quiz clearer.

�I asked, “If you could have had one more piece of information on the quiz, what do you wish you had?”

“I wish you told me the key step to solve the problem!”

(I’m not going to do that, but this tells me I need to be more deliberate about teaching problem-solving strategies)

“I wish the problem was broken up into more parts instead of being one big paragraph.”

“I wish the information that was relevant to the word problem (as opposed to set up) was bolded or emphasized.”

Asking a specific question got me specific, actionable feedback!

34 of 42

Ex: I want to spend class time more effectively

34

What can you do to help your learning?

What can I do to help your learning?

(Ask in that order!)

What advice would you give to a student taking this class next quarter?

(Better for an end-of-quarter survey).

This helps develop students’ own metacognition!

Ask students directly, “Which of these class activities are especially helpful to your learning?”

(100% of my students last quarter said “Asking the TA or the professor questions in small groups”... but keep in mind that those conversations are most productive only after students have done a lot of work on their own.)

35 of 42

Your turn!

Spend five minutes drafting some questions for a mid-quarter inquiry that would give you data for improving at your SMART goal for teaching. (Page 4 of the handout)

The spaces on the handout are just for suggestions, not a set number of questions you have to write.

35

36 of 42

Group Share (5 minutes)

Get into pairs at your tables.

Let each person share what they’re trying to accomplish in their MQI and what kind of questions they ask. (Ex: How do I get more students to come to office hours?)

Explain why you chose the questions you did.

Ask the table for ideas about other questions to ask, or answers to list for your questions (Ex: When asking why students don’t come to office hours, maybe it’s because they’re embarrassed of asking basic/remedial questions in front of classmates?)

36

37 of 42

Class Share (5 minutes)

What parts of your teaching do you want to improve on using an MQI?

What kinds of questions would you ask?

37

38 of 42

38

How to Use Metacognition to Evaluate Teaching Effectiveness

This part will be up to you as you take data from your students and think about things to change or new things to try in your teaching.

39 of 42

Book a Consultation to Create & Review MQI Results with a TAC

We are happy to help and work with

you!

39

Book a consultation today!

40 of 42

40

Self-paced modules & recordings at cee.ucdavis.edu

Upcoming Workshops

41 of 42

Understand the basics of metacognition
Reflect on personal teaching practices
Create a SMART Goal related to one’s teaching effectiveness
Understand how to create a mid-quarter inquiry to gather evidence to reflect and adapt teaching effectiveness

41

Workshop Feedback

https://tinyurl.com/Sp25Workshops

42 of 42

42

Teaching Assistant Consultants

Daisy Underhill

Philosophy

Siuoneh Didarloo

Psychology

Isabella Cantu

Sociology

Ben Eustis-Guthrie

Physics

Nicole Keough

Animal Behavior

Ian Lim

Physics

Sam Nelson

Music

Ana Ruiz Alonso-Bartol

Spanish & Portuguese