Student-centered learning

One way to promote student metacognition and enhance learning, is through student-centered learning. So first of all, what is student-centered learning?

I prefer to explain it by defining its exact opposite first: teacher or school-centered learning.

School-centered learning: the WRONG way
School-centered learning means that students rely almost completely on the information they receive from their teachers and given textbooks.

They do not try to utilize the internet to find more information explaining the same concepts but from a different perspective. This is an example of what is called a limiting factor.

Simply put, rereading the same textbook over and over again until you understand the things is less efficient than trying to see the same concepts from a different perspective e.g. on the internet.

Student-centered learning: the RIGHT way
From Wikipedia:"Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving."This includes teaching the students how to seek information independently, that is, information other than received from the teacher or a textbook.

Learning is a very individual thing, some people like to read a textbook while others prefer watching a documentary on YouTube (although doing both is usually the most effective, see E-learning (theory) on Wikipedia).

So how can one promote student-centered learning?

One way is to give “open” homework e.g. saying “I want you to pick one source, either from Wikipedia, YouTube, or anything else related to this subject for next week, and I want you to explain what you have learned.”

In order to also make your students read the textbook, you could add “…And it has to be unique and different from what is stated in the textbook”.

How Does Student-Centered Learning Promote Student Metacognition?
First of all, we have to define some terms:

Metacognitive knowledge means knowledge about oneself and how cognition works;

Metacognitive regulation means regulation of one’s cognition in order to control learning;

Metacognitive experiences means knowledge of when one’s own thinking works or doesn’t work

By freely browsing the internet, watching YouTube documentaries, etc. students slowly get to know what makes them learn more efficiently and what not. One can see how this applies to metacognitive knowledge and experiences, but what about regulation?

One way to ensure that students become aware of how much time they spend on learning things when giving them “open” homework, is by simply telling them that they have to note down how much time they spent on each task e.g. 15 minutes of Googling to find a source such as Wikipedia, 10 minutes of reading, 30 minutes of understanding, and so on.

This way, students become more aware whether they are spending their time efficiently or not. In order to amplify this awareness even more, one can give them tasks where they have to collaborate and explain what they have found and learned to other students.

Through collaboration, they might learn how someone only spent 10 minutes of understanding yet learned way more than they did. Maybe that person read a much simpler source such as the ELI5 subreddit, or maybe that person utilized multiple sources rather than just one.

Further, this image shows the many benefits of collaborative lessons: Metacognitive regulation can be further broken down into three simple components:

Planning → “Where and how do I find information for my homework?”

Monitoring → “How efficiently am I finding information” or “How well am I understanding this information?”

Evaluating → “What is the quality of my final product? And how efficiently did I produce it (in comparison to other students)?”

One can see, again, how collaboration and explaining it to other students allows one to “evaluate” better. In fact, there’s almost no way to know how well you are learning without comparing yourself to others!

Lastly, by making the students compare the time they have spent on each task to each other, this further enhances awareness and student metacognition.

Add-Ons To Open Homework and Collaborative Lessons: Metacognitive Pre- and Post-Assessments
Pre-assessment essentially means that, before you discuss and teach the lesson, you first ask them “What do you already know about this subject?”

What does that achieve? It allows for what is called semantic learning i.e. making new neural connections with already existing neural connections. This, in turn, allows for what is called robust learning.

Robust learning, according to LearnLab, Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center consists of three main components:

Long-term retention: It is retained for long periods of time, at least for days and even for years.

Transfer: It transfers, that is, it can be used in situations that differ significantly from the situations present during instruction.

Accelerated future learning: It accelerates future learning. That is, when related instruction is presented in the future, the acquired knowledge allows students to learn more quickly and/or more effectively.

One can see how, again, asking the question “What do you already know about this subject?” satisfies the three main components of robust learning.

Metacognitive post-assessment means that you are asking questions such as “Have any ideas and beliefs changed during this lesson?”

What does this achieve? Let’s repeat the definition of metacognition again.

From Metacognition, Wikipedia:"Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”, “thinking about thinking”, “knowing about knowing”, becoming “aware of one’s awareness” and higher-order thinking skills."By making the students aware of how their thoughts and beliefs are changing and also why they did change, they are becoming more aware of “thinking about thinking” i.e. metacognition.

I will refer you to: Promoting Student Metacognition by CBE — Life Sciences Education for more in-depth information about metacognitive pre- and post-assessments, as well as more possible questions and examples to ask during these phases.

Again, collaborative lessons can speed up and enhance this process.

Psychological Safety: Why Students Are Afraid To Speak Up
The problem one can experience as a teacher or student, is that students may not exhibit honesty when collaborating and discussing with other students, such as when comparing each other’s time spent on each task e.g. saying you only spent 10 minutes when, in fact, it took you 20 minutes.

This, in turn, leads to worse metacognitive improvements during and after class. During class, because they experience stress and after class, because their self-image is inflated when learning new things (they keep reminding themselves that other students do the same things in less time).

Why do students do this? Because students don’t want to look “bad”, and it can cause discomfort in some students to know that someone made a better assignment with less time and effort.

From Wikipedia:"Psychological safety can be defined as “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career”."Students, especially in their early years and young age, can especially be vulnerable to wanting to keep a “good self-image”.

So how can one promote psychological safety as a teacher or student themselves?

Promoting Psychological Safety In The Classroom
One way to promote psychological safety in the class from the students’ perspectives, is to now and then have them note down questions anonymously. These questions, in turn, will be addressed and discussed.

As a teacher, you can try to add words such as “That’s an interesting question”.

Oftentimes, a lot more students experience the same kind of problems revolving around the same question. Depending on how the discussion progresses, the one who asked the question will slowly feel more at ease. In fact, everyone who also experiences problems around the same question will feel at ease, because they are now aware that they are not the only one with such questions and difficulties.