TLA Teaching to the Brain: Metacognition

Todd Zakrajsek

Explore how thinking about thinking helps students better manage their own learning and learn difficult concepts deeply. The program features a senior English teacher and a sixth-grade teacher, with expert commentary from University of Michigan professor Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

What is the relationship among literacy, metacognition, and STEM content knowledge, and what can we do about it?

Reading Apprenticeship is an instructional model that provides students with resources for approaching complex texts more confidently and strategically by engaging their instructors in a dynamic professional development process of making their thinking visible. This workshop engages STEM participants in metacognitive conversations centered on complex disciplinary texts that defeat many students. By discovering and reflecting on their own ways of unlocking STEM graphs, charts, illustrations, and problems, and more, workshop participants experience ways the Reading Apprenticeship approach helps students master core concepts. The workshop also helps instructors explicitly support academic literacy in their discipline. The facilitator shares artifacts of student work to demonstrate the efficacy of Reading Apprenticeship in STEM classrooms.

21st Century students come to college with widely varying academic skills and motivation levels. During this session, chemistry professor, learning strategist, and author Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire explains why many students come to college woefully unprepared and have difficulty achieving student learning outcomes. She also discusses cognitive science research-based strategies that facilitate conceptual, transferable learning that can close the achievement gap plaguing many of our institutions.

Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire is the Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success and retired Assistant Vice Chancellor and Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University.

This webinar presents research that establishes the need for requiring online orientation prior to students enrolling in their first online course. Discussed are testing students’ reading, writing, technology, self-regulation, and self-efficacy skills, as well as teaching students how to access online campus resources.

Suzanne M. Swiderski, Assistant Professor, Department of English (2015)
University of Wisconsin-Parkside

Steve Janz, Instructor, Business (2017)
SAIT Polytechnic

Holly Whistler, Instructor, English (2018)
Nash Community College

Courtney Mlinar, Head Librarian, and Co-Leader, ACC Information Literacy Team
Tobin Quereau, Professor, Student Development, and EDUC 1300 Curriculum Designer (2017)
Austin Community College

John D. Eigenauer, Professor, Philosophy (2017)
Taft College