Thursday, April 13, 2017

Metacognition and Peer Assessment

In my FLC today we discussed metacognition, and Donald Rumsfeld's quote, "...there are things we don't know that we don't know". As John mentioned in his post, students may complete an exam confident that they will do well, and are shocked when they don't.

How about us instructors? We may teach our students, and are confident that they received the information, only to find that their exam scores don't reflect this. This is where peer observation can be valuable.

The connection we perceive we have with our students may not necessarily be the connection we actually have. A peer observing us has a perspective we lack by being able to see the connection from a distance, and share with us any disconnect that she/he can identify.

For example, it is very important to be passionate about what we teach. Students pick up on our enthusiasm, and it can be inspiring. But this very passion may blind us: swept up in the moment, we can assume the students are connecting the dots just like we do, and they may be nodding their heads and even smiling, while still not making the connection. It's easy to forge ahead without waiting for student feedback, so we miss the opportunity for assessment.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Tom,

    RE: Time and Observation

    I agree and at the same time don’t agree with your post. Peer doesn’t mean equal. I can observe your teaching and not have any advice I feel I can offer you to improve. I may want to say, wait longer for your students to process the information and become uncomfortable with their knowledge gaps, but that’s easy to say, no faculty waits for every students, nor should they. Without being an expert in your field, I won’t feel comfortable telling you to cut away half the crap we all cover because that’s what’s always been covered.

    To your point, faculty metacognition, when was the last time any of us looked at our course(s) and said:
    1) what is worth being familiar with, (toss it from our 3/400 courses)
    2) what is important to know, and (cover it in our 300 courses)
    3) what represents “enduring” understanding (toss it from 1/200 courses)

    I believe depth vs. breadth is one of the hardest issues for faculty. We don’t always know what breath was covered in their past courses, so we try to cover everything we expect our students to know. I think that trying to “help” them ends up as a disservice to many of them. What happen what they get a job and learn about “just in time training/learning”? What’s the hidden curriculum? What are we teaching and not teaching our students?

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