"When a wise person talks with a fool, who learns the most?"
The old riddle above fascinates. Our level-one, "fast-reasoning mind" often blurts out, "The fool has so much to learn and the wise person so much to teach, that the fool learns the most." But when we have time, or a good night's sleep, we often wake up to level-two reasoning and say, "Umm, the wise person, being wise, has learned-to-learn and so should be able to learn something even from a fool. The fool is probably a fool for lack of knowing how to learn." Finally, we might even get to level-three thinking and really enjoy surprising ourselves.
This article seeks to illustrate two very simple points:
- First, teachers can structure activities that allow students to become more metacognitive and responsible for guiding their own learning.
- Second, teachers can create structures that allow students to identify with other learners, make friends, and invest more of themselves in more efficient learning as they model one another's metacognitive skills.
Facilitating Metacognition
Metacognitiones the act of thinking about our thinking and acting. However, at beginning stages of learning it may often be too much to "think about it" at the same time we are "doing it" (cf. Krashen's Monitor Hypothesis, 1985). It is easier to look at traces of our behavior that have somehow been recorded, and to think about how we were doing at those points. Later when more thinking and acting become automatized and restructured (McLaughlin, 1990), we have more space (cf. Miller's famous 7 + 2, 1956) to actually metacognate about language while using it.
I would like to briefly describe three "Trace-Tools" which can help us perform metacognition at a distance.
Action logs
Murphey (1993) describes the use of action logs, in which students write about and evaluate classroom activities after each class. Such reflecting recycles the material and gets students to think about their learning strategies, behaviors, and beliefs (Fedderholdt, 1998; Murphey & Woo, 1998a). Teachers who read these can also become more metacognitively aware of students' beliefs and preferences and have a better grasp of how their instruction is going.
Language learning histories
Students become metacognitively aware of their development and changing strategies, behaviors, and beliefs through writing their language learning histories (LLHs) (Oxford & Green, 1996). Not only are these useful to help students think about their learning, but when published and read by other students in the same class or in subsequent years (Murphey, 1998), LLHs further expand the students' possible identities and behaviors through near peer role modeling (Murphey, 1996). Teachers in training can also write LLHs to notice how their particular histories influence their teaching (Bailey, 1996).
Videoing conversations for self-evaluation (VCSE)
The process known as VCSE, videoing conversations for self-evaluation (Murphey & Kenny, 1998; Murphey & Woo, 1998b), allows students to take home VHS copies of their conversations to transcribe and evaluate. The weekly videoing "performance events" encourages students to prepare and rehearse targeted material, allows them to concentrate more on meaning while actually having their conversations and being videoed, and then has them look more metacognitively at their strategies and performances when transcribing their conversations.
Identity Construction
Pierce (1995) and Norton (1997) stress the idea that we have multiple identities that are dynamically changing and being constructed in each new social situation. These context-dependent identities are partially constructed by the discourse positions one assumes or is permitted to take (i.e., how and in what ways people can talk). The above three trace-tools for encouraging metacognition also encourage an examination of one's identity construction in specific discourse communities. It is easy to imagine students coming into a class for the first time asking themselves (unconsciously), "Who am I in this class?" "Will I be accepted, confirmed, allowed to use past identities?"
Whatever does happen in that environment provides those learners with a conceptualization, conscious or not, of who they are in that particular environment. To illustrate the extreme, some students may be helped to choose an identity of a language-user and learner, an explorer of their own abilities, while others may find they are merely frustrated test-taking repeaters of someone else's words. Classroom identities are contested, confirmed, and constructed anew in each class and can have a great impact on subsequent learning. By consciously paying attention to what kinds of identities we are encouraging, teachers may radically change the classroom environment.
Socialization as Identity Construction
Identity construction and socialization are two sides of the same coin; we are socialized into certain identities and our identities influence the construction of social circumstances. Watson-Gegeo (1988) proposes that having the goal of socialization would enable language teachers to be more effective:
- The substitution of socialization for acquisition places language learning within the more comprehensive domain of socialization, the lifelong process through which individuals are initiated into cultural meanings and learn to perform the skill, tasks, roles, and identities expected by whatever society or societies they may live in. (p. 582)
Looking at classrooms as mini-cultures and communities, we find that our students do enter more or less effectively into a smsroom society as well. Stevick has for a long time referred to this part of the learning equation as what happens "inside and between people in the classroom" or "depth" (1998, p. xii).
Recent studies point especially to peer socialization processes for the establishing of identities (Harris, 1995). The stress here is less on what happens between teachers and students, and more on peer interaction. So the question is, "What can teachers do to facilitate the smooth working socio-affective aspects of classmates' interaction?" Below are just a few quick ideas that deserve much more space and further classroom exploratory research.
Teachers can structure activities so that students:
- get to know each other better at the beginning of courses;
- learn each other's names, exchange addresses and telephone numbers;
- are encouraged to collaborate;
- change partners often to get to know more people and form more group cohesion;
- accept and appreciate mistakes (one's own and those of others) in order to relax and interact more;
- get physically closer and build trust (through games, etc.).
At a more metacognitive level, they can actually learn about role modeling and consciously become aware of the models around them. Many of my students also then become aware that they are potential models for others and realize their potential impact on the world.
Conclusion
Different strands of research are pointing to the conclusion that the socio-affective aspects of learning (Arnold, forthcoming), those which lie "inside and between people," may be the keys to understanding why some well constructed materials and methods sometimes fail miserably and why some ill conceived ones seem to succeed at times (Stevick, 1998). Socially cohesive and supportive groups of friends stimulate near peer role modeling and more effective metacognition. They enrich the soil to such an extent that almost any farming method can be successful. How teachers can help groups become more internally supportive and stimulating is an exciting area of research which may greatly change the way we structure opportunities for learning in the future.
To return to our wise person at the beginning of this article: if she were truly wise, she might find a way to teach the fool ways to learn, to also be wise, so that they could collaborate and enjoy even more wisdom. Such teaching would be based on respect for the learner's potential wisdom (and this relationship of respect for a learner's potential is what ultimately brings it out). And in the end, for the wis%'!, there are no fools, only potentially wise people. And the wise person also realizes (metacognitively) the parts she plays in constructing her own identities through the quality of the relationships she creates.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Earl Stevick and Jane Arnold for comments.
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