Teaching is a continual process of problem solving.
– Leonard Geddes, Founder of The LearnWell Projects
On December 2, 2016, I shared some of the amazing educational experiences that were occurring at the University of the Cumberlands (UC), the largest private college in Kentucky. I was a co-facilitator with Drs. Tom Fish and Bob Dunston, UC faculty members and leaders, at the annual meeting of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), in Atlanta, GA.
Our workshop, Cultivating Appetites for Deep Learning: Enhancing Instruction and Improving Performance, demonstrated how UC’s metacognitive-based Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is simultaneously transforming students, energizing faculty and staff and improving key quality measures.
This post spotlights one aspect of the session that powerfully resonated with the participants.
As part of my consultant role, I met with several faculty members individually to discuss ways to adapt the general training lessons to their respective course challenges. Dr. Laura Dennis, Professor of French and Chair of World Languages, was concerned that her students would perform poorly on their QEP’s signature assignment.
The task required students to write a high-stakes paper that clearly demonstrated high-level thinking. The paper, a considerable portion of their grade, would be rigorously graded using the rubric developed by the QEP team. During one of our training events, Dr. Dennis expressed that previous students’ writing products consisted of shallow reflections. Regardless of the changes she made, students didn’t demonstrate the depth of thinking that she was seeking.
Dr. Dennis’s Micro-Experience
One act of great teaching solves a multitude of problems. Dr. Dennis told me that her students had difficulty demonstrating ideal proficiency levels. I determined that a micro-experience would help her address each of her students’ problems simultaneously.
Micro-experience – an activity that provides students an opportunity to practice a skill that is indispensable to achieving successful outcomes in a course. I proposed that she use a micro-experience to generate the necessary cognitive processes within her students. These structured experiences help learners develop competencies that sustain them throughout an academic program and propel them in their college careers. Micro-experiences can be defining moments in students’ development as scholars and ultimately as lifelong learners.
Dr. Dennis and I completed our most consequential work prior to implementation of the micro-experience. We deconstructed the course, streamlined the outcomes and pinpointed the challenges students would face. View our preparatory summation below.
Problem
The course’s signature assignment requires that students thoroughly evaluate a French film of their choosing. Based upon previous experiences, Dr. Dennis is concerned that her students will insufficiently analyze the film, leading to inadequate final products and poor grades.
CORE STUDENT PROBLEM
The students’ lack of film criteria knowledge will likely limit their ability to thoroughly analyze the film. They are likely to rely on simple recall and mental rehearsal strategies.
CORE PROFESSOR PROBLEM
Dr. Dennis, an expert French culture, “suffers” from the curse of knowledge. The complex thinking skills she employs when watching films are deeply embedded. Thus, her deep knowledge and advanced skills distance her from her students’ experiences.
Solution
Integrate a micro-experience early in the course to provide the students an opportunity to identify their cognitive deficits and begin developing the analytical skills that their predecessors lacked.
The greatest challenge was convincing Dr. Dennis that the micro-experience would put her ahead of schedule with her content rather than competing with it.
Based upon previous experiences, I knew a defining moment would occur early in the course and that the experience would change the nature of the teaching and learning experience. I call this an inflection point.
The image below depicts the coveted transition of ownership where passive students become energetic learners and lecturer becomes facilitator.
Dr. Dennis’s Reflection on the Inflection Points
I think this shift happened at two distinct moments. I collected the journal entries in batches of 3 or 4. In the first batch, I simply read and gave feedback in the margins. In the second batch, in addition to giving feedback, I took our signature assessment rubric and applied a different section to each of the entries. I then encouraged students to reflect on how they could move to the next level for each category, whether a 1 to a 2 or a 3 to a 4. There was a huge improvement when I collected batch 3, and that continued until the end of the semester. This first moment happened around the time of the midterm exam.
The second was in our discussion of the film Lacombe Lucien, which we covered just after the midterm. This is one of the most challenging movies I have ever watched, and no matter how many times I see it, it invariably disturbs me with its moral gray areas and refusal to tell the viewer clearly what to think. I shared all this with my students and told them that if they saw any clear answers in it, I was listening. Well, they didn’t (I really don’t believe such a thing is possible with this film!), but they did have a lot to say. Moreover, we had a strange sort of luck. In the middle of one of the discussions, I was called out of the class for an emergency, and I told them to keep talking while I stepped out to handle the other issue. They cried, half-joking, “How can you leave us alone with this movie?!” When I came back in, maybe 10-15 minutes later, they were still completely on task and talking animatedly about the film. From that point on, I could often start a class discussion with only a very few words, sometimes as simple as showing a scene and saying, “Well, what do you think?” and they could take it from there. There were even times that I didn’t have to start the discussion at all.
The one thing that didn’t quite happen as neatly as I would have liked was students transferring their newfound skills to their research papers. The rough drafts were… rough. Yet with professor feedback, the final versions were much improved. In all but one case, students processed fairly substantive feedback and used it to improve their work, and not just with details like writing mechanics and MLA citation issues. More importantly, most addressed big-picture questions that required them to do significant self-evaluation and rewriting. I believe the metacognitive work done throughout the course helped in this process.
MID-SEMESTER TEMPERATURE CHECK
Dr. Dennis knew her course was going well! She was in her academic “groove.” In my work with educators, well-designed and executed metacognitive experiences are:
- generative – connecting new insights with existing mental constructs,
- transferrable – promoting skills and experiences that apply to all academic domains and tasks,
- transformative – changing the nature of how students process information
- transcendent – surpassing academic context and reverberating throughout the learner’s life.
See if you can detect these principles manifesting in Dr. Dennis’s students’ responses to their mid-semester journal prompt.
Sampling of Mid-Semester Journal Entries
Prompt: How has your thinking about film evolved in the first half of the semester? Has it changed the way you watch all films or just those seen in this class? Can you imagine ways your evolving thinking skills could apply beyond the realm of cinema?
Processing a Micro-Experience
A strong foundation of metacognitive knowledge, skills and experiences has been cultivated during my multi-year relationship with the University of the Cumberlands community. Many of these insights are compressed into Dr. Dennis’s micro-experience; however, the table below breaks down the key components of this activity.
Metacognition entails getting students to think about their thinking or in this case to think about the thinking involved in the task and their own cognitive processes. The professor wanted to include an in-class experience that would help students set the proper conditions for their thinking so that they would deploy the appropriate thinking skills for the task.
The actionable question was: How can she expand students’ cognitive filters so that they too can sufficiently analyze and evaluate movies?
Then Dr. Dennis leads the students in an exercise to categorize their analyses. (We anticipated that they would be limited to only a few categories.)
Finally, Dr. Dennis engages in a consequential, targeted metacognitive conversation with the class. This discussion makes explicit connections to the role her analytical skills played in informing her ultimate evaluation.
She also names some of the skills and processes used such as listing, prioritizing, comparing, contrasting, and weighing. She explicitly uses language of the QEP rubric and the QEP project itself.
Dr. Dennis then discusses how the students use the QEP goals of discovering, engaging and evaluating in the development of their signature assignment. In this way, she’s ensuring connectivity – that the students make the cognitive leap of transferring the skills experienced in the micro-experience to the actual execution of the signature assignment.
Dr. Dennis’s end-of-the-semester journal entry prompt:
Journal entry 15: How did your thinking about film evolve over the course of the semester? How will you take what you learned beyond the walls of this class?
The following responses show the evolution of the students whose responses were included previously. According to Dr. Dennis, their responses are representative of the entire class.
A Multipotent Experience
One act of great teaching achieves several goals.
Educators view required work like QEP’s as burdensome and impractical. However, Dr. Dennis’s micro-experience achieved each of the QEP’s faculty and student goals and student outcomes. The corresponding table captures the synergistic alignment.
In addition to satisfying the QEP goals, this experience benefits students, faculty and the institution’s quality measures.
Students Are Transformed
Dr. Dennis’s students’ learning surpassed learning content. They made discoveries about themselves as thinkers and learners. Their conception of the world was enhanced. Their intrinsic confidence was boosted.
Educators Are Fortified
Dr. Dennis feels empowered. She’s been so moved by the experience that she’s boldly taking on a new challenge: presenting at an upcoming teaching and learning conference. Educators need big wins! I’m confident this experience will become common for her in subsequent courses. (She’s already informed me that she’s been transferring the micro-experiences to other courses and witnessing similar effects.)
Institutions Flourish
Students who learn don’t leave. The University of the Cumberlands can expect great course reviews from Dr. Dennis’s students, as well as other QEP faculty. These students will not only persist; they will thrive.
Wow! It is amazing to find the good work done by my students presented so beautifully. This post does an excellent job showing their evolution and accomplishments. What’s more, you are absolutely correct – this experience gave my teaching all kinds of new energy and creativity. Thank you!
Thanks for the comment Laura. It was great to hear that your students have continued posting about the course throughout the Christmas holiday break, and that members of the community are taking an interest in your course! Keep up the great work!