Cognitive 3C Tools for Effective Teaching and Meaningful Learning  

Cognitive 3C tools

Executive function

It is often referred to the idea of having a command and control - center in our brain. These top level brain functions activate, organize, integrate and manage other functions in our brain, enabling many tasks we have in our daily lives and learning.

Learning ownership

Having choices is the pre-requisite for ownership.  To be engaged in the learning process students must be given ownership for their learning. Instructional approaches that emphasize choice, learning ownership, knowledge construction, and making connections are more likely to facilitate deep learning.

Learning strategies

Learning strategies and metacognitive skills should be embedded into everyday instruction because this helps students to understand how to best support their own learning, and what is needed for becoming successful in learning and life. Teaching students about different learning strategies is an excellent way to make learning more personal and help students have more learning ownership.

Making thinking visible

Self-talk is the easiest way to make thinking visible. This is a tool Early Childhood Educators use on daily basis, while modeling thinking and supporting concept development. It is equally useful in all other levels of education, but in addition to the teacher modeling their own thinking, students should be comfortable to use it in the classroom as well.

Meta-cognition

This is another part of making thinking visible: modeling one's own metacognition by verbalizing it. Simply put, metacognition is our knowledge of our own learning and cognitive processes, and also how to use those processes to help us learn better. These are the skills of learning to learn. In Finland they are taught from preschool throughout the K-12.

Self-determination

Self-determination is a basic human need. Providing opportunities for autonomy, competence and relatedness fosters engagement and motivation to learn. Planning for instruction with ample opportunities for students to choose, grow and relate – every day, in every class – makes learning easier and teaching more successful.

Self-regulated learning

SRL refers to students’ cognitive-constructive skills and empowering independent learning, focusing on strengthening the thoughts, feelings and actions that are used to reach personal goal. SRL has three phases: forethought, performance and self-reflection. 

Teaching for transfer

Lifelong learning cannot be surface learning. Deep and deeper learning both refer to acquiring transferable knowledge through classroom experiences. For instruction this means creating connections to students' real lives outside formal education - and helping them to use learning strategies that foster the transfer.

Timely and effective feedback

Feedback for deeper learning is information about students’ learning process and meeting the goal.  In all levels of education feedback is an essential element in guiding students’ knowledge construction. Feedback that supports learning proess is not assessment or evaluation. Effective feedback must be clear, explanatory, and timely.

Executive function

Executive function (EF) is an important part of our every-day life experiences. It has often been referred to the idea of having a command and control - center in our brain. Executive function is not easily measurable because it overlaps with many tasks we have in our daily lives. These top level brain functions activate, organize, integrate and manage other functions in our brain. Independent learners have strong executive function skills (see references below). Neuropsychologists have been studying executive function for more than a decade, and I got my first course about it back in 2003, in Niilo Maki Institute, Finland.

Life-long learning

Executive functions are very visible in the cognitive growth of children, and are thus used as developmental benchmarks, for example when kids learn to follow two-step directions. EF keeps on developing and growing into adulthood, so being aware of this developmental process during the school years yields to better outcomes and work-life functionality after graduation. In your classroom the good EF skill is visible in students' ability to work independently, i.e. create an action plan and stick to it. That may sound like a very simple skill, but in reality it is quite wide set of skills that all contribute to success. Here is a short list of EF outcomes:

Helping your students excel these functions doesn't mean adding a new subject to curriculum. Being intentional and student centered in your teaching and providing your students with plenty of chances to practice EF helps them to keep on growing with their skills. Too much structured instruction makes it hard for students to get experience in planning their actions and work, so be sure to have them practice all the steps above in the daily schoolwork. Graphic organizers are invaluable help here! Also point out their strengths in the area of EF, because the very same skill set is necessary in successfully understanding cause and effect.

One quite common problem among students is the inability to start working on their own. It can reflect to ineffective working memory, or even to the fact that there has always been someone around to remind what should be done, but teaching the planning and executing process helps also these students to be successful in their learning. By providing choices in the everyday classroom work we can help students practice their EF skills. Choosing is a a complex process and we seldom think it should be practiced, but the reality is that all the executive functions take part in choosing. 

How can I help you embed EF and choosing into your everyday classroom work? 

St Clair-Thompson, H. L., & Gathercole, S. E. (2006). Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting, updating, inhibition, and working memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59(4), 745-759. 

Nayfeld, I., Fuccillo, J., & Greenfield, D. B. (2013). Executive functions in early learning: Extending the relationship between executive functions and school readiness to science. Learning and Individual Differences.

Learning Ownership

Learning is a fundamental phenomenon in our lives, everyone has experienced it. Researching learning is complicated because there is no single variable to pinpoint as a measurement for it to have happened - learning can be just a change in thinking, but it also can be a behavioral change.

To be engaged in the learning process students must be given ownership for their learning. This ownership grows from the choices students have within their learning experiences.

Students also must have learned how to learn to have strong ownership over their own learning. We as teachers sometimes forget that others don't know as much as we do about how learning really happens. So, teaching about learning process and learning strategies is a great place to start.

Learning ownership relates closely to learner agency - when one increases, so does the other. As teachers we must be ready to hand over the learning tools to our students, and assume a supporting role in the teaching-learning exchange. This means stepping down from being the sage on the stage and becoming the guide on the side. 

The four parts 

intentionality of learning, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness” (Bandura,2006, p. 164). 

Empowerment is an important part of supporting learning ownership. We have many different ways to promote self-regulation and self-monitoring, as well as co-regulation in the classroom. This is why the 3Cs must be adopted together: teaching how to choose, self-assessments, peer coaching and  teaching how to choose are all parts of learning ownership. Please visit the other tool pages!

Learning Strategies

Supporting students’ deeper learning by suggesting new or additional learning strategies is an important part of helping students through their educational paths. This has nothing to do with “teaching the content” because most strategies are just techniques for understanding, hence being completely independent from subject matter. For example: Simply knowing several different ways for using a graphic organizer can be used with any given learning task – whether trying to master multiplication, rules of the road, verbs in foreign language, parts of a cooking recipe, names of condition-specific medication,  countries of the world, or  currently know elementary particles (38 last time when I checked, wow!). The graphic organizer, like a mind map, is simply a visual representation of the learning content, possibly with some connections. It doesn’t even have to be hierarchical.

Long gone are the times when teaching was a simple matter of delivering information! This is why teaching about metacognition is a fundamental skill for anyone who wishes to instruct others. Here is a blog post outlining the three crucially important competencies for teachers, instructors and faculty.

Helping students to use active learning strategies to acquire information and elaborate it is important for deeper learning in all levels of education. Most students are familiar with passive learning activities that include listening to a lecture, watching a video, or reading a text without engaging in any additional activity (like note-taking, highlighting, or underlining to support personal knowledge construction).  In most situations various different learning strategies are compatible with given learning objectives and tasks, so suggesting one or few additional learning strategies can have a significant effect on students’ learning.

Plain memorization techniques help us to remember things, but we should also practice retrieving what we have memorized, so that we can use that information. The following learning strategies can help in the first part of internal learning process, acquisition, which mostly relates to memorization, but not really learning how to use the information.

Information alone has a very short memory life. It needs to be connected to your previous knowledge structure.  People have different preferences for associating information (like Piaget’s assimilation and accommodation), and everyone has their own personal way of organizing the information for retrieval. There are several ways to support organization and retrieval.

Learning takes time, because we need to situate new information into the context, and that’s why it is important to span studying over time. Unlike computer memory, humans need to revisit things they know, simply because human knowledge is very contextual [6]. Studying in smaller chunks during the week is more effective than 7 hours on weekend. There is more than 100 years of research showing this [7], so we should believe it is the best practice. There are lots of ways to plan your studies to have a pace that works for you. 

Learning strategies don’t have to be polarized! Research suggested that Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping [8].  While that may be true, why not combine both, and learn even better?  Concept-mapping or mind mapping can effectively support recalling chunks or details. Color-coding concepts can help recalling the categories. Explaining concepts to a friend can help recalling.  

Most of the following learning strategies combine elements from several approaches, just because deeper learning requires engaging in all parts of the learning process: interaction, acquisition and elaboration. This also means taking greater ownership of learning, and also “owning” the content, so that it becomes a permanent part of our knowledge structure.

While teaching we use expansive framing to help students to make connections to the world they know and also their personal lives and experiences. While studying we need to make these connections without help. This is a process that can be learned! 

To find examples of different learning strategies, please visit NinasNotes.fi

Making Thinking Visible

One goal for formal education is to support students to become productive members of their society. Finnish curriculum  supports students to build positive and realistic self-images. Most students have an unrealistic image of themselves. They gather information about themselves from parents, peers, teachers and life events, that all work like a mirrors for developing minds. How the information is put together is quite complex, and in most cases there are misunderstandings and misinterpretations that twist the image away from the realistic one. 

Providing students with self-assessments is an essential tool for a teacher who focuses on cognitive teaching. Especially in earlier grades, when students are not yet used to assessing their own knowlege, it is common to see someone rate their confidence and skill on top level of the scale, but then do quite poorly on the real assessments. This creates great opportunities for engaging in dialogue with the student, and supporting them to have a more realisting image of their performance. The opposite situation is equally common: student rates their own competence low, but then aces the assessment. This is another wonderful opportunity to guide the student to calibrate their own expectations according to the curriculum.

Visible thinking strategies help students to verbalize their knowledge. This is often done with think-pair-share strategies, but there are many other thinking routines, too. In early childhood classrooms it is vitally important for teachers to use self-talk and parallel talk to enrich their students' emerging vocabulary. In K-12 classrooms it is important for the teachers to model their own thinking and problem-solving processes, but also to manage instruction and build the classroom community. One example could be teacher noticing that students are getting tired or restless, and verbalising this as a suggestion to take a little break for stretching. In distance education message boards, padlets and other communities are used for sharing participants' thoughts.

Learning is communal by nature. Sharing thoughts and ideas leads at best in communicative meaning-making, where the group is constructing knowledge together. Let's make sure to teach our students how to do this! 

Metacognition

It really is just thinking about thinking and learning about learning:

The awareness and perceptions we have about ourselves as learners, understanding of the requirements and processes for completing learning tasks, and knowledge of strategies that can be used for learning.

Teaching metacognitive knowledge and skills is an important part of supporting deep learning in all levels of education! It just looks different: for very young students we try to help them on a path of self-efficacy and positive academic self-concept by supporting self-regulation and concept development; for grad students we offer support in managing the self-regulated learning process and self-evaluation/self-judgment.

Teachable meta-cognitive tools enable us to concentrate on planning for learning, reflect upon the learning process as it is taking place, monitor of our own production or comprehension, and evaluate our own learning after an activity is completed.

Self-determination

People are curious by nature. This curiosity is a great reason for learning something new. Sometimes, we as teachers, work against this natural flow of learning and end up in a situation where students resist learning. Here are 5 rules for avoiding this mistake:

1. Build a classroom climate that supports learning. This can be done by engaging in frequent discussion about how subjective learning is, and how everyone learns and understands in a unique way – based on their previous knowledge and experiences. Provide choices for students to engage in learning and demonstrate their competence.
2. Help students to choose to learn. Often students are mandated to attend school, which doesn’t create a great starting point for cooperation, however, providing opportunities for autonomy, competence and relatedness fosters engagement and motivation to learn (as argued in SDT – self determination theory). Validating students’ concerns and opinions helps to engage in open and honest communications. Students are in your class to learn. You are there to help them to learn. You didn’t mandate them to attend school. Try to step away from the power struggle of why, to making the classtime as meaningful as possible.
3. Avoid rewards and punishments. They reduce the intrinsic motivation to learn and point students’ focus towards getting a reward or avoiding a punishment. All time and effort placed in creating a fair rewarding system is time away from the most important thing in classroom: learning. External regulation leads to external locus of control – and what we really want is for students to become self-regulated learners.
4. Emphasize cooperation. Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it is situational and contextual, which only emphasizes the importance of the rule number 1. Plan for plenty of students’ talking in your lessons. Students learn from each other, and sometimes it is easier for them to understand a concept when another student explains it, just because their vocabulary is similar (as academics we often have lots of teaching jargon in our sentences).
5. Recognize competence and help the student to move forward. Everyone is on their own learning path, therefore expecting all students to have exactly the same competence is foolish. Provide feedback to influence the outcomes of students’ learning actions towards meaningful growth – this is the essence of Growth Mindset! “Effective teachers who actually have classrooms full of children with a growth mindset are always supporting children’s learning strategies and showing how strategies created that success.” [1]

Self-determination theory discusses motivation, emotion and development. Intrinsic motivation (e.g. doing something because we are interested in doing it) is much stronger predictor for future educational success than extrinsic motivation, which is associated with surface and strategic learning approaches.  The three principles in SDT are:

• Autonomy – have choices and be an agent of one’s own life and learning
• Competence – reach goals and move towards meaningful growth
• Relatedness – connect and interact with others

These are basic human needs. Providing ample opportunities for students to choose, grow and relate – every day, in every class – makes learning easier and teaching more successful.

References:

[1] Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. School Field, 7(2), 133-144.

[2] Zimmerman, B. J. (2013). From cognitive modeling to self-regulation: A social cognitive career path. Educational psychologist, 48(3), 135-147.  Available at researchgate.

[3] Dr. Dweck, 2016,  in an interview with Christine Gross-Loh  https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

Self-regulation

There is a difference between praise and positive feedback in the classroom: praise emphasizes the teacher control and power relations, while feedback supports students’ self-regulation.  Cognitive learning and teaching strategies help students to understand their own learning process and self-regulate and co-regulate their learning in the classroom and beyond.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a core conceptual framework to understand the cognitive,
motivational, and emotional aspects of learning (Panadero, 2017, p. 1). It is crucially important for every teacher to know about SRL and be able to support students' self-regulation through their pedagogical practice.

References:

Panadero, E. (2017). A review of self-regulated learning: Six models and four directions for research. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 422.

Teaching for Transfer

to make sure that knowledge is applied in a new context and is not limited to simple elaboration