1.     Are your students at the associates or baccalaureate level?

Both of them

2.     Do you use different teaching strategies for associate level students than for baccalaureate level students? Why or why not?

Usually, I don’t differentiate those levels during the teaching process, I track the student responses one to one to better understand their inclinations, strengths, and weaknesses.

3.     What is metacognition and what concept from the chapter resonates with you and why? (identify the page number)

I think metacognition is a reflective approach to frame self-awareness, with a focus on the process of understanding knowledge, seeing from a broader range to understand it as a whole. 

On Page 17 when a student submits something with enthusiasm and after reviewing it turn out to be not that good after all.

4.     What are other factors that might influence student learning?

I often sense when the students are overwhelmed when they are given new information, that causes a sudden stop in the learning process. I feel the need to break that pattern when I see it because the learning process will be compromised otherwise.

5.     How can metacognition help us towards our goal of increasing retention 5-10% starting in the fall?

Using the tools, and or creating a strategy to dissect the problems to identify why they have been assigned, behind this response usually transpires what they really need to learn.

My basic training in the field I teach could be considered “old school”, I learned almost everything I know through mentorship, impossible assignments while I was a student with ridiculous timeframes and of course try and error, a lot of errors.

Confronted with the idea of being up to date, I had to learn fairly recently, everything I teach today and in the process, I learned how to learn from tools that basically were enhancing my basic knowledge, tools that allowed me to overreach in a matter of speaking, to explore areas that otherwise would have been not impossible to obtain, but hard enough not to be taken into consideration.

Soon enough I was overwhelmed with technology and its fast-track pacing, the faster you are the more you do, the less attention you pay to details. I felt that the spiral of the learning process had to be controlled, and set to a productive but meaningful pace.

Core values like, what I call professional honesty, common sense, and commitment were the pivot points that guide me to find a transition from the knowing how to do it to know how to show it.

I try to apply the sequence of my learning process and those core values to my students own learning process with the clear understanding that they will create their own set of priorities and the pacing that comes with it.

In my experience, knowing what I know just creates a clear boundary of those things I don’t know. Pushing that boundary constantly in class often creates an empathy with the students that I think don’t make them feel overwhelmed or threatened by the professor “extensive knowledge”, but on the contrary, we are pushing together the outcomes of the learning challenge. I try very hard to make the student not to feel alone but to be part of a group that is trying to figure out something.

Yes, there are many challenges because not everybody is the same therefore the learning process takes sometimes more time than expected and this creates a real problem.

I have to say that this approach is not always successful but it does seem to work on the majority of my students, but I am always open to discover new ways to send a message as a teacher that a student on the other side of the table can clearly get and do something with it.