Megacognition
One goal of every activity in
this book is for you to learn to step back from just doing and
THINK about what you’re doing (and why and how). Here’s an
illustration of why that matters.
A mother was preparing a baked
ham for dinner. Her 10-year old daughter was in the kitchen
helping.
She watched as her mother
prepared the ham, seasoning it and getting it ready for the
baking pan. The last thing the mother did before putting the ham
in the pan was to remove about two inches from one end.
She set this piece aside and then
put the ham in the pan and into the oven.
Her daughter asked, “Mom, why did
you cut that piece off?”
She replied, “That’s how my
mother taught me to do it.”
She began to wonder why.
Together, she and her daughter called Grandma and asked the
bottom of the ham had to be removed before the ham was put in
the pan. Grandma's reply was, “That’s how my mother taught me to
do it. But I don’t know why...I’ll give her a call and let you
know.”
A while later grandma called
back. The answer, it seems, is that her mother’s only baking pan
wasn’t large enough for a full-sized ham, and she had to trim
off about 2-inches from the bottom in order to make it fit.
As amusing as the story may be,
it truly does illustrate the way most of us tend to sleepwalk
through our daily lives, rarely stopping to think about what
we’re doing and why. Great-grandma was confronted with a problem
and she used an effective and successful strategy to solve it.
Grandma and Mom, on the other hand, merely learned to do what
they were shown; they never thought about it more deeply until
the daughter stopped everything, asking, “Why?”
This activity takes things
further than previous activities in that you’re now ready to
literally take your thinking to another level. After all, as
you’ve learned by now, when we’re aware of our thinking, we can
improve our thinking. In terms of learning skills, metacognition
means that:
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We can become aware of and improve our thinking (cognitive
domain)
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We can become aware of and consciously control our emotional
reactions (affective domain)
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We can become aware of and ever more successfully interact
with others (social domain)
Additionally, to begin to put it all together,
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We use reflection as a way to trigger awareness of who we are,
what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, at any given moment
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When we are aware, we can use assessment as a way to
systematically improve our performance in any of the domains
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