The long-awaited article.
People have been asking me for years to write an article on metacognition. Metacognition is something that naturally occurs in all people’s minds. It’s a subset of analytical thinking. It’s often referred to as “thinking about thinking”. It helps people improve their learning outcomes by using critical thinking strategies to analyze their own strengths and weaknesses.
My courses are based on teaching applied metacognition strategies. They use a blend of ESL/EFL (English as a Second/Foreign Language) teaching methods and American Language Arts. My courses help students develop strong language skills early, which makes all future learning easier. The strategies they learn about metacognitive strategies that make learning other skills easier, too. The ultimate outcome is that students become proficient self-learners.
I developed this method of learning through years of trial and error, with myself as the test subject. My own journey with metacognitive learning started years before my first day in the classro
Running the Gauntlet .
I grew up with severe ADHD, a total lack of impulse control, and a tested IQ in the 130s in 3rd grade. And, no, that is not “humble-bragging” or any such nonsense. It’s just an objective description of the circumstances. The outcome for me was the complete inability to focus during school. My lack of impulse control meant homework took a back seat to drawing or building stuff with Legos. It also meant that I was very quick, and could see through teachers who didn’t know what they were talking about.
I was both a nightmare and a blessing for teachers, depending on how they utilized me during class time.
As a result, I just could not make myself focus long enough to be able to complete assignments in the way that teachers wanted them done. Very few of my teachers had any idea of how to deal with a child like me. I was not aggressive or confrontational during class. So, many teachers were content just to let me go off into my own little world.
I was typically more than happy with this arrangement, as it freed me up to read ahead in the books, look at the pictures and think about their meanings, and more. However, the outcome was bad scores in school. Even if I understood and knew how to apply the concepts, I just could not make myself care about meeting the criteria of the classroom. Even worse was when test time came. I just could not focus on the questions, even if I knew the information. After a while, I stopped caring. The teachers didn’t seem to care, so why should I?
How did you solve this problem?
It took a long time for me to fully accept it, but I had realized early on that I simply was not cut out for the kind of classroom that federally mandated education had created. It wasn’t until high school that I fully accepted this, and opted to leave high school early. To be clear, I didn’t drop out. I had found out that taking the GED test would give me the extra credits that I needed to graduate high school early. And thus, a few short applications later, good scores on a battery of assessments later, and I was given my diploma about a half-year earlier than my peers.
I then tried my hand at college. Almost immediately, I figured out that it was nothing more than an extension of the same failed education policies that I had just escaped from. I hated my classes. My graphic arts, English literature, and half a dozen other teachers tried to shoehorn in their politics by having us spend more time sitting in a circle to talk about feelings than actually producing anything related to the subject at hand. My Network Administration in a Unix Environment teacher was good. But, my frustration with standardized education came to a head when I noticed my computer animation teacher trying to hide the fact that she had to consult a teaching manual to answer almost every single question asked during class.
I had had enough. Why should I pay thousands to attend a school that couldn’t teach me as well as I could teach myself?
I have to tell this story in order to create the appropriate context for the main point here. All of this negative experience in school created the conditions for me to discover the need for applied, pragmatic strategies for success in learning early on in life.
Cool story, bro. How does this relate to metacognition?
Notice, there, that I didn’t say “success in school”. I said success in learning.
The education system does little more than produce cognitive zombies, dependent on an authority figure to tell them what to think, how to think, and when to think it. And that is not disparaging these poor souls. Many people are becoming fully aware of the utter failure of the modern education system.
It is the root cause of the student debt crisis. If the students who had gone through the standardized education system were being educated by a competent system, would they come out of university with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, working a 40,000$/year job, often unrelated to their field of study? No. They would be coming out with the cognitive, personal, and professional skills conducive to success.
After coming back to the US, I volunteered at a charter school that was supposedly a high-performing school, only to find professionally trained teachers that couldn’t teach to save a child’s life. I hated seeing the teachers put the kids on iPads and called it a Language Arts class.
Even after all these years, the only difference between my teachers and these so-called teachers was the level of technology available in the classroom.
And these people are called “teachers”? Not in my book. All I saw were students being set up for failure by well meaning, but incompetent teachers. And it’s not even the fault of the teachers that they are incompetent. Just like so many others, they are the product of an incompetent education system.
TL;DR
I had a bad time of it in school. I meditated for years on how my reaction to my negative experiences was sabotaging my future. It forced me to open my eyes to the toxicity of standardized education. And it helped me realize that I needed to construct strategies for myself if I were to succeed.
Once I realized that I was being lined up to be pushed into a meat grinder, I took extreme action: I yanked myself out of that environment completely. At 19 years old, I left the US entirely. With the exception of a short stint living in Colorado, I spent the next 12 years living abroad. More than a full third of my life as of this writing. And, I thrived.
Nobody told me what to do, or where to go. I was finally free to utilize my own strengths to find my own success. I accrued valuable professional experience that allowed me the freedom to tell my bosses when I would work, how I would work, and what they would pay me. The most important realization of all was that the strategies I developed for myself to avoid falling victim to the education system could be applicable to nearly any student.
I became even more sure of this when I tried going back to university, again and found that students and teachers in China were suffering the same pitfalls as American students.
I figured out how to teach others what I had taught myself, and my career took off like a rocket. Students came from hundreds of miles away to join the schools I worked at, and their growth compared to the students of other teachers validated my assumptions.
So, what is metacognition?
Metacognition is the act of understanding one’s own thinking and learning processes. It is bringing naturally occurring, subconscious mental processes into the conscious mind, and then learning how to consciously control them.
It is learning to evaluate one’s own understanding and discovering how to improve your own outcomes. It is developing a sense of personal accountability for your learning outcomes. Discovering your uniqueness and learning to exploit it in service of yourself and others. It is thinking about thinking and learning about learning.
Metacognition is tearing down your perception filters and comprehending the world for what it really is, and not what you wish it were. It is learning to think for yourself, and learning how to disregard the manipulation of others. It is supercharging the brain to maximize the performance of the mind.
When you master metacognition, you master your world. From there, the level of success you achieve is limited by your own energy and ambition.
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