Expert Teachers and Deep Student Understanding
In this reflection, the School of Education’s Jonathan Firth shares what he has learned from a seminal book on the science of learning.
I’m a big fan of the book ‘How People Learn Brain, Mind, Experience, and School’ edited by John Bransford and colleagues.
It’s a great summary of the science of learning as well as being very practical. Although over 20 years old now, it’s still well worth a read. And although the title mentions ‘school’, it strikes me as relevant to most other education contexts, too.
The discussion of the work of effective expert teachers in the book is highly relevant to metacognition. For example, in chapter 7, Bransford et al. explain how teachers need to understand their own discipline deeply, as well as recognising the barriers that learners will face to understanding.
They also provide some practical, concrete examples across multiple teaching subjects. To focus on History, they give the example of a teacher who sets a 9th Grade class the fun challenge of selecting items for a time capsule. However, the real purpose of the task is for students to specify their assumptions about what makes something historically valuable. These assumptions are then returned to and examined.
In another History example, the authors discuss an experienced high school teacher named Ms. Sterling. She spends the first week of her AP class by having her students think about statements such as ‘What is history?’ or ‘How can we know the past?’.
This prompts students to think deeply about what the subject entails, and to question their own knowledge and assumptions. As the authors argue:
One might wonder about the advisability of spending 5 days ‘defining history’ in a curriculum with so much to cover. But it is precisely Sterling’s framework of subject-matter knowledge—her overarching understanding of the discipline as a whole—that permits students entry into the advanced world of historical sense-making.
By the end of the course, students moved from being passive spectators of the past to enfranchised agents who could participate in the forms of thinking, reasoning, and engagement that are the hallmark of skilled historical cognition.
To me, this is a fundamental benefit of metacognition in the classroom. It’s not (just) about giving students tools to take in more information and skills, but also equipping them to use that new learning. To think about what they are learning, what it means, and how to apply it.
This has the potential to facilitate:
- Higher order skills, as students don’t just ‘know’ but can also analyse.
- Better creative problem solving and transfer, as they come to understand the limits of their knowledge and where it is relevant to other situations.
- Better reading, as metacognitive learners can select and engage with texts in a more strategic way, and monitor their own learning.
Overall, this suggests a way to build more discerning students. It also strikes me as more time efficient than rushing into a course.
In fact, I used to do a similar thing when teaching high school psychology. We engaged with theoretical approaches to psychology at the beginning of the course, and explored how these could provide competing explanations for simple, everyday behaviours. How a behaviourist vs. a biological psychologist would explain a person’s music preferences, for example.
I certainly found that this deeper understanding of how the subject works set learners up to successfully analyse and evaluate information that they encountered later.
I hope these ideas have encouraged you to recognise where you are already doing powerful metacognitive work with students, and to focus on this even more going forward. You can get Bransford et al book for free.
This post is simultaneously publishing on Substack.
Metacognition and understanding are explored on our MSc Education Studies programme, as part of the ‘Frameworks for Understanding Learning’ module.
Jonathan Firth also offers CLPL sessions based on metacognition and study skills.
Image - Pixabay