Debbie Niderberg is the co-founder and Executive Director of Hidden Sparks. Prior to coming to Hidden Sparks, Ms. Niderberg served as the Executive Director for The Nash Family Foundation.
Rona Milch Novick serves as the Co-educational Director of Hidden Sparks and is the Director of the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Doctoral Program in Jewish Education and Administration at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration.
Karen Kruger is the Director of Education for Hidden Sparks. She received her Master’s degree from Bank Street College of Education and has taught in elementary and middle schools from Kindergarten through 8th grade.
The authors describe a program designed to help students understand how they learn. In the process, students become empowered to tackle challenges.
Achieving success is a challenge for all students, given today’s competitive and rapidly evolving academic and vocational landscape. In higher education and many careers, students who are independent learners and effective self-managers, who have demonstrated drive and perseverance, and who understand and can express their own needs (Mellanby, Cortina-Borja, & Stein, 2009) are more likely to be valued and recruited (Abdel-Haqq, 1998; Hanson & Sinclair, 2008). With intense competition for limited opportunities, preparing students to be independent and self-driven becomes an important mandate for teachers and schools.
For the student who struggles with a learning difference or disability in mainstream schools, and finds pitfalls and obstacles in the ordinary challenges of learning, achieving the independence and drive required for success can be daunting. These struggling students greatly benefit from interventions that develop their skills in recognizing and capitalizing on natural abilities, maximizing strengths and managing around struggles. In fact, such an approach, brings struggling learners steps closer to empowerment and parity with their peers. In Jewish schools, where students face a dual curriculum and where support services are often lacking, the challenge for struggling learners is compounded, and failure to address such students risks alienation from Jewish peers, learning and values (Goldberg, 2005).
How can schools support the development of independent and empowered learners? The typical vehicles for student empowerment include student government (Brasof, 2011), student-directed learning and occasionally, opportunities for student choice in the educational process and school environment (Brooks & Young, 2011). Metacognition, and its corollary, metacognitive teaching, can be an organic component of educational paradigms and an extremely powerful tool for student empowerment. Metacognition – the process or skill of thinking about thinking, knowing what we know, understanding how we learn, and being able to discern when and how to apply strategies for learning – is a critical step in empowering students to take charge of their learning. Like a test-taker who not only studies content, but masters test-taking skills and develops memory retrieval strategies, a metacognitively trained student has an understanding of his own learning process and can strategize appropriately for a myriad of challenges.
It was with this goal of helping struggling students to succeed in school and ultimately in life that Hidden Sparks was founded six years ago. From the outset the program was committed to enhancing the knowledge and skills of teachers in mainstream Jewish schools to help them reach students who struggled with learning or behavioral challenges and who might otherwise have been overlooked or misunderstood. A central focus in the Hidden Sparks curriculum became metacognition. Simply put, we felt that teachers who understand how learning takes place – both their students’ learning and their own – will be more effective teachers. Similarly, students who understand how learning happens will be more effective learners. In this way, teachers who directly assist students in learning to understand their own learning through metacognitive teaching, provide not only the tools to succeed in school, but the building blocks for success and empowerment throughout life.
Special education services and settings provide support for students with identified learning or behavior challenges. Hidden Sparks, though, was particularly interested in developing teachers’ skills to address the needs of those students who struggle, but who might not meet criteria for identification or support services. For these students, metacognition is liberating. Given the means to understand their learning and behavior profile, such students can use their self-knowledge and strengths to prevail and achieve.
Shaping an approach that would guide the mentoring of mainstream teachers, Hidden Sparks articulated four core principles, reflecting both a belief system and a set of practices. The principles described below weave a metacognitive approach into the scaffolded work with teachers and students.
- Hidden sparks. It is critical to find the “hidden sparks” or talents in all learners and in all settings. It is equally crucial to appreciate the unique array of strengths and weaknesses that make up each learner.
- Reflective practice. There is significant value in being thoughtful about one’s own learning processes and in helping others understand their learning. Reflective practice is not innately determined, it is a skill that can be taught and cultivated.
- Collaboration. Working in a collaborative fashion facilitates change, learning, and growth. This entails transparency and partnership, rather than hierarchy or authoritarian approaches. The collaboration between teachers and between teacher and student to achieve what’s best for the child should be practiced.
- Learning is life-long. All learners can grow and improve. Without on-going learning or support, learners can become entrenched in their struggles. Openness to continued learning is a powerful predictor of success.
Through monthly teacher workshops and peer collaboration to discuss each student’s learning profile, weekly guided classroom observations with participating teachers, and a curriculum steeped in understanding learning, behavior, temperament and ecology, Hidden Sparks seeks to support all kinds of teachers and nurture all kinds of learners.
What is metacognition and why it empowers learners
The term metacognition is credited to Flavell (1979), who saw it as the learner’s knowledge of their own cognition. Georghiades (2004), in his review of three decades of research on metacognition explains that it is usually referred to as thinking about thinking or “cognitions about cognitions,” and relates to learners’ knowledge, awareness and control of those processes by which they learn. Two essential and distinct features of metacognition that have been identified are self-appraisal and self-management (Paris & Jacobs, 1984). The former refers to reflective understanding of one’s abilities and affective state during learning. Self-management includes those mental processes that are engaged during problem solving and other tasks.
Considerable evidence demonstrates that the use of metacognitive strategies improves academic performance (Commander & Valeri-Gold, 2001). More important for this discussion is the evidence that directly teaching students about metacognitive strategies and their own learning results in measureable increases in learning (Boulware-Gooden, Carreker, Thornhill, & Joshi, 2007). For example, having a student understand that the reason he struggles with reading is due to a common learning challenge that involves decoding letters and that there are many successful adults who share the same struggle, can reduce the stigma the student might be feeling and provide reassurance that learning differences need not be insurmountable obstacles. In contrast, research on learned helplessness demonstrates that failure can cripple and that success, in and of itself, can be empowering (Firmin, Hwang, Copella, & Clark, 2004; Maier & Seligman, 1976). Joseph (2010) discusses the ineffective learning strategies and poor metacognition of struggling students, which, she argues, result in less confidence and independence in their approach to learning. For such students, providing metacognitive understandings that define the area of weakness helps the student to feel hopeful, enables them to manage the problem, and lessens the risk of students experiencing overwhelming failure.
Metacognitive learning and teaching in classrooms
Given the substantial benefits of metacognition, one might imagine that all teachers would readily incorporate it into their classroom. Many teachers, however, have limited awareness of metacognition and even less training or experience in teaching metacognitive strategies to children (Denton, 2011). Joseph (2010) discusses the intense focus on completion of curricular content as an impediment to teachers focusing on metacognitive skills yet argues that, “what is more important than spending time teaching the critical thinking skills needed for independent learning? Encouraging students to practice reflective thinking does not add extra content; rather, it is a tool for mastering existing content” (p. 100).
The desire to develop students’ higher order thinking has often resulted in inclusion of curricula that schools assume to be metacognitive. Georghiades (2004) clarifies that while teaching cognitive strategies (such as problem solving) facilitates learning and task completion, metacognitive strategies go a step further and allow the learner to “monitor” the process. It is through such monitoring that self-correction and additional learning can occur.
The Hidden Sparks Professional Development Program has found that an effective way to increase teachers’ metacognitive teaching is to embed activities that cause them to reflect on their own learning and behavior into professional development workshops about their students’ learning and behavior. For example, in a teacher workshop targeting language, Hidden Sparks facilitators ask the participating teachers to compose a few paragraphs and reflect on their method of approaching the task. What skills were needed? What was challenging? This reflective metacognitive exercise allows mentors to facilitate a discussion of how helpful it is to be aware of and share metacognitive strategies and how such activities and discussions can be accomplished with students.
Hidden Sparks coaches model the communication of one’s own metacognition in their workshops with teachers and recommend that they do similarly in their classrooms – in other words, having teachers sharing with students how they think when they are learning. Teacher comments like “here is what I am thinking…” provide a window into metacognitive process and help create a more democratic, transparent classroom, further contributing to student empowerment. Saying “I was making an assumption because…” shows students how teachers arrive at conclusions and form opinions. Statements like “I’m changing my mind now that I realize…” or “I’m wondering if…” give students examples of how mental processes occur. They also nurture a class culture of involvement, partnership, and trust, which are critical for student empowerment.
In his work with pre-service graduate education students, Shedd (2010) combines both modeling and direct instruction. He uses frequent and brief “side-bars” describing his process in course development and delivery, making direct suggestions to students regarding how they may transfer these approaches to their own teaching, a pedagogical tool that we have incorporated into Hidden Sparks training. Modeling metacognition can help students accept, process and remediate their learning struggles. When teachers share the strategies they employ in challenging situations, such as “I have trouble remembering names and so I do…” normalizes learning challenges and models adaptation and success despite handicaps. It is a small and natural step from this type of modeling to self-advocacy. Kleinert, Harrison, Fisher, and Kleinert (2010) identify the abilities that contribute to self-advocacy and self- determination for students as selecting personal goals, planning steps towards goals, assessing progress, making choices and monitoring one’s own behaviors, steps that are enormously helpful later on in college, career, and life. By bringing cognitive and metacognitive understanding into the classroom, Hidden Sparks professional development builds these skills for self-awareness, self-regulation and self-advocacy.
A teacher who models assertive statements of personal needs for success with comments such as “It’s easier for me to pay attention to my writing if I take short breaks every 20 minutes” provides a direct example of how students can appropriately advocate for their learning needs. Of course, not all meta-cognitive modeling should focus on weaknesses or challenges. With statements like “I enjoy helping people organize their desks, it’s easy for me to see where things should go” students see clearly that teachers, and all learners, have both strengths and struggles.
In order to most effectively help teachers learn about learning, and collaboratively communicate together about and with students, Hidden Sparks found that it was critical to develop a shared language and lens for understanding learning based on the expansive neurodevelopment and cognitive science field. Specific foci include memory (short term, active working, long term), attention (mental energy, information input, academic/behavior output), language (receptive, expressive), social cognition (verbal pragmatics and behaviors), higher order thinking (problem solving, concept formation, critical thinking, brainstorming, reasoning/logical thinking, rule use), spatial and temporal sequential ordering, and gross, fine and graphomotor functions. We have seen many “Aha!” moments as seasoned and novice teachers alike realize the complex interplay of multiple learning pathways required for even relatively basic school tasks. In analyzing which learning pathways are tapped by specific tasks, and sharing that approach with their students, classrooms become significantly more transparent and democratic. One Hidden Sparks teacher shared: “Something I do differently because of Hidden Sparks is try to create a more respectful classroom community where we can talk about the ways that we learn differently.”
As part of its scaffolded approach, Hidden Sparks teachers are encouraged to introduce a metacognitive consideration of these learning pathways into their classrooms through conversations and activities with students. Conversation starters might include: “How do you remember important dates?” or “How do you memorize words for a vocabulary test?” or “What does it mean when someone says: ‘Pay attention!’” One mirroring activity (used with teachers who may in turn do the same with their students) that is frequently used in Hidden Sparks workshops focuses on short-term memory. Participants are shown a list ofseven unrelated words for thirty seconds and asked to write as many as they can remember after the list is removed. For younger children who cannot read or write, seven objects on a tray can be displayed, or pictures provided. Even very young children (ages 3-5) have been shown to have metacognitive abilities (Whitebread et al., 2009). Whether done with participating teachers, or in a classroom of students, all are asked to share the strategies they used to help them recall the words. What follows is a rich discussion of memory, what facilitates it, which strategies work for different people, and which strategies might transfer to other tasks.
An activity that can prompt discussions of higher order thinking phenomena like brainstorming and problem solving involves providing small groups with a paper clip and asking them to chart as many ideas as they can generate for how it could be used, aside from attaching papers. A debriefing discussion about how the lists were generated allows consideration of Follow-up activities to organize the ideas into categories facilitates exploration of concept formation and critical thinking.
Activities around, and discussions about, the different pathways of learning raise teachers’ and students’ awareness of possible strengths or areas of struggle that exist within these pathways. Teachers and students begin to understand that each individual has a unique learning profile and areas that might be easy for one could cause struggles for others. They also learn that tasks that may seem impossible under one set of conditions are imminently do-able under others.
Perhaps the most direct way to teach metacognition is through straightforward instruction in the use of metacognitive strategies and thinking, and encouragement of – and practice in – their application. Guided self-evaluation through checklists that focus on thinking processes is one example. Such checklists may be as minimal as two-to-four questions at the end of an exam reflecting on students’ pre-exam studying and the process they used during the test or as expansive as detailed questionnaires on learning approaches.
Hidden Sparks teachers are encouraged to weave metacognitve awareness into all regular curricular lessons, asking students to state what they already know about a new topic as it is introduced. This encourages reflection about what they do not know and what they want to know and the teacher benefits by understanding the prior knowledge of the students. Additionally, teachers encourage students to describe their thinking processes by asking: “How did you come to that conclusion?” or “What were you thinking when you read that passage?” or “How did you decide which research topic to choose?”
One important way to bridge from metacognition to empowerment is to increase students’ responsibility for planning and regulating their learning. It is difficult for learners to become self-directed if all of their learning is planned and monitored by someone else. Instead, teaching students to estimate time requirements of assignments and organization of materials to complete an activity empowers them as independent and responsible for their learning. Provision of calendaring and planning tools, with a particular emphasis on students discovering which unique supports and structures work for them, is helpful in building autonomy.
Student empowerment through metacognition of behavior
From its inception, the Hidden Sparks program recognized the direct association between learning and behavior and the importance of fusing both in its professional development for teachers. Unfortunately, behavior and learning are often bifurcated, with the former being the purview of the classroom teacher and the latter, especially when problematic, becoming the concern of school support professionals. In reality, behavior issues are one of the most common concerns for teachers (Clunies-Ross, Little, & Kienhuis, 2008; Geving, 2007) and often pose a major impediment to student success. Therefore, Hidden Sparks sought to increase educators’ understanding of behavior science to allow them to work with their students in a collaborative, growth-oriented and empowering manner. The work of Green and Ablon (Green, 2006; Green & Ablon, 2008) on collaborative problem solving (CPS), combined with a focus on positive behavior approaches in place of more common reactive and punitive approaches, has been a critical element of the teachers’ training.
Collaborative problem solving empowers students to drive the solution process in addressing their challenging behaviors. Teachers serve to facilitate discussion, brain-storming, and evaluation, but by no means take charge. Students engage in self-reflection (e.g., what is the challenging behavior about, when do you do it, how does it help you?), self-regulation (e.g., what might you do instead, what else would work for you?), and assertive self-advocacy (e.g., can you tell me what might I do differently that would help you?). The goal is to arrive at a mutually acceptable resolution of a problem, with the promise of relatively short-term evaluation of the success of the agreed upon solution, thereby leading to appropriate and productive behavior that the student feels he/she owns.
Although it is a logical step from a metacognitive approach to learning to a metacognitive approach to behavior, some educators may be concerned about relinquishing control or the potential effects of “lax” discipline. The goal of education is not, however, the control of students, but rather the preparation of students as masters of their own behavior, growth and learning. Evidence that behavioral control accomplished within the context of partnership, and that includes the student as the primary design and management agent promotes more engagement and lasting behavior change further supports a collaborative and empowering approach (Menzies, Lane, & Lee, 2009; Vanderbilt, 2005).
Layering empowerment and future directions
Hidden Sparks mentoring occurs simultaneously on multiple levels. Mentors receive training and on-going support from the program’s educational leadership. In turn, they provide training and on-going support to school-based mentors, who bring the program to participating teachers, whose students benefit from the nuanced and comprehensive understanding of learning and behavior. Metacognition as a vehicle for empowerment is a central process at every layer. Not surprisingly, there have been some challenges. The allocation of adequate time for mentoring, a challenge in secular settings (Long, 2010) is even more difficult in day schools. Our experience has been that strong commitment from school leadership is critical. The nature of the leadership, however, is also important. As the Hidden Sparks approach emphasizes collaboration and empowerment, a strongly authoritarian administration that mandates participation or utilizes punitive approaches towards teachers and/or students will provide a less than optimal environment for cultivating metacognitive practices that support autonomy and advocacy.
Across the layers of the Hidden Sparks program, participants have shared their empowering experiences as they reflect on metacognitive exercises and learning. A coach remarked, “I’ve seen teachers grow in their understanding of their own learning profiles and become more sensitive to the learning styles of their students. This helps them better address the needs of their students and encourage their students to communicate their own understanding of their unique learning profiles.” An 8th grade student offered, “I learned that because I have strengths in social cognition, I can work with any group and I’m usually a group leader. But my long term memory is not so strong and I have to be careful when I prepare for tests.”
In our on-going work in the Hidden Sparks professional development program, we see increased teacher and student awareness about learning and behavior in ways that generalize beyond the specific classes or students we are addressing. We encounter students and teachers developing and mastering strategies that will be of use to them across all aspects of their learning and beyond the confines of classroom walls. These exciting developments keep us engaged in what we hope will be a transformative process – nne in which Jewish schools will become centers of learning, where students with all variety of learning styles and behavior profiles will be empowered as successful learners – and ultimately as successful adults – continuing and enriching our remarkable tradition.
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