"Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The
University of Colorado |
|
Office of Teaching Effectiveness
& Faculty Development 1250 14th St. Room
720 |
Phone (303) 556-4915 |
Teaching to Elicit High Levels of Thinking (IV -
metacognition)
4. Under what criteria might the
human population of Earth be considered as excessive?
In a
recent workshop, I raised the issue: "Consider how it felt when you
confronted each item; let's start with that first question." The student
who had earlier answered, "Frankfort" broke into a big grin and said,
"It felt pretty good!" We all laughed, knowing indeed how good it
feels to have "the right answer!" Acquisition of low-level knowledge
feels good, and knowledge and comprehension are easy acquisitions to test for.
Such seductive qualities make it easy to overemphasize low-level thinking in
teaching and testing, and leave students and ourselves feeling a bit too
satisfied in so doing.
As we
proceeded, feelings changed. By the time we discussed the last item, things
were more animated, but surely less comfortable. A 50% capacity and one
doubling time of 38 years conveyed to students that they would likely be around
to share the experience of an Earth with an exceeded supporting capacity. The
final open-ended challenge had no neat short answer that gave instant gratification
as "right," but it drove home the point that the most important real
world problems do not have such answers. Any action plan would require going
beyond objective facts and would involve urgency, emotions, values, compassion,
denial, etc. The discussions brought such traits quickly to confrontations, and
these did not feel so good.
The
participants had just taken a whirlwind tour up the spectrum of Perry levels of
thinking, and the exercise was one in metacognition
a self-assessment of one's own thinking process while involved
in coping with varied challenges. Kruger and Dunning (1999) found striking
consequences from lack of metacognitive awareness among college students:
"Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to
realize it." Their work showed that the very inability to perceive one's
own approaches as inept produced an inflated self-assessment of one's own
competence that precluded recognizing competence exercised by others. These
researchers had just described the antithesis of lifelong learning
an inability to seize moments of crucial opportunity to learn
from others. Such a handicap is not what we want to send forth in our graduates.
This
imparts two educational obligations: (1) to provide open-ended problems for
students to grapple with and, (2) to help students to understand their own
thinking along with understanding of content. Doing an exercise such as
described at the start of this issue is one way to introduce the concept of
metacognition. The confirmed efficacy of single "critical thinking
courses" has not been encouraging (van Gelder, 2000). It appears that
metacognitive abilities develop better through experience from dealing with
content in challenging ways than through short-term study of process alone.
Critical thinking is identifiable through the process by which one engages an
open-ended problem. Although acquisition of high-level thinking comes slowly,
we must not underestimate the value of including open-ended challenges in our
own single courses.
van
Gelder, T., 2000, The efficacy of undergraduate critical thinking courses: http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/reason/papers/efficacy.htm.
Getting onto PostExpress
You no longer receive announcements
on workshops etc. by email because only the Chancellors' Office is allowed to
post directly to all faculty at UCD, and such posts are pretty much restricted
to emergency announcements. Routine communications now must come through
PostExpress, which is a bulletin board system designed to reduce full-text
emails to busy faculty. To date, few have done what is necessary to get onto
what is now the only campus-wide electronic communication system. Some folks
who see message titles from Post Express popping up in their email think they
have access. If you cannot open the actual messages, you don't yet
have access. Announcements for grant opportunities, awards, training etc. come through this bulletin board,
so one cannot afford to be off it for long without missing out on some critical
opportunity. Unfortunately, the system has been troublesome to get onto, so I'm
trying to ease things with a recipe sheet. The ten-step process should get you
on within as many minutes. Just follow the boldfaced directions.
2.
Go
to http://eolus.cudenver.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=POSTEXPRESS&A=1
Bookmark the site.
3.
Select
"join or leave the list".
4.
Fill
in your email and name. Click on the "join the list" button. (Most likely you have been
enrolled already with the email address of your firstname.lastname@cudenver.edu.
This is the newer universal format for email on this campus. Try that first and
wait for a response from the L-Soft list server at University of Colorado at
Denver.
It should come within a few seconds. [NOTE: If you traditionally use an older
email address such as firstinitiallastname@carbon.cudenver.edu,
you can put in this latter address and get registered successfully, but in
light of the fact that you may have been already enrolled under the former
email, the result could be your getting registered twice. If in the future you
start getting two copies of postings, this nuisance can be corrected later by
returning to "join or leave the list" and leaving the list under the
email you don't want to use.]
6.
You'll
get email confirmations from the L-Soft list server. Now things get slightly
less intuitive because although you are registered, you have not yet been
registered with a password. (Lord knows why we were not given this opportunity
on the screen in step 4, but we work with what we have rather than what we wish
we had---this is somewhat like teaching!) Go to your browser and hit the button
"Back to POSTEXPRESS home page".
7.
Try
logging into an archive such as February 2002, week 4. You'll either be presented with a
screen that requests you to log on with a password, or you'll get a screen with
a nasty "NOT AUTHORIZED" message but still with an opportunity to log
on via
email and password.
8.
Provide
your email and password. However, if the server gets obstinate about letting you in, select
the "get a new LISTSERV password first" hot link and then
provide your email and password. What works best is to select the "Login
and save my password as a cookie" button, but your browser must be
set to accept cookies to do this. Once you are set up this way, you don't ever
have to go through any hassle of logging in or recalling your password in the
future. Given the fact that Post Express is going to be the UCD communication
tool, it is best to automate by getting the cookie because you will need to use
Post Express often.
9.
You'll
get yet another confirmation from L-Soft list server, and you need to reply
again to the sender only with an "ok" (no quotes) as the sole message.
10. At this point you should be blessed with the ability to enter
Post Express. To test this, close your web bTo test this, close your web browser, then reopen it and go to
the site you bookmarked in step 2. Try getting into any dated archive. From here on,
you should only need to click on that bookmark in your browser to get and send
announcements. PHEW!!