Toward Teachers' Adaptive Metacognition

AI as a Methodology for Supporting Educational Praxis and Teacher Metacognition

“…The proposal to create a techno-intellectual infrastructure for supporting educators' metacognition brings to sharp focus several areas of pertinence, namely, academic and industrial attempts to create communities of educational practice such as ASSISTments (Heffernan and Heffernan 2014), ALEKS (Falmagne et al 2006), Learning Designer (Laurillard 2012), or STAR./LBD.Legacy (Schwartz et al 1998); work related to teachers' metacognition and its importance to continuous professional development (CPD) and pedagogical innovation (Lin et al 2005;Lin and Schwartz 2003); and AI, especially knowledge representation and engineering (e.g. Davis et al 1993;Conlon and Pain 1996).…”

“…This feature is important here, because it highlights the complexity of the teaching task in which typically, educators have to manage the teaching environment and the support they deliver at several levels simultaneously. While different forms of evidence and knowledge representations may emerge at these different levels, the fact that so many different factors compete for teachers' attention at any given time means that teachers may and often do miss many important cues and links there-between (Lin et al 2005). Thus, one of SL's crucial aspects is its emphasis on creating a legacy of explicitly recorded contextualised pedagogical decision-making related to the different types of knowledge represented in SL, which can facilitate later situated and coordinated recall and dissemination of key decisions.…”

“…For example, videos of teachers tackling specific classroom challenges are used as anchors for enquiry into the types of challenges that they or others have encountered, for exposing teachers to different, from their own, forms of pedagogies, and as a trigger for their generating new ideas. The third feature of importance is the SL's structured reflection cycle which is used to support the pre-testing of teachers' existing knowledge, generation of ideas for increasingly harder challenges, comparison of different perspectives and self-assessment, all of which support purposeful scaffolding of the development of teachers' metacognitive skills (see also Lin et al 2005).…”

“…Bull and Kay 2013), research related specifically to educators' self-reflective skills and their impact on their professional development is relatively sparse. 3 According to Lin et al (2005), the nature of educators' metacognitive abilities differs substantially from the nature of metacognitive skills as understood conventionally in relation to monitoring and controlling one's individual thoughts and understanding in relatively stable contexts of particular subject domains. Specifically, educators, especially those practicing in the traditional classroom contexts, but increasingly also in contexts such as MOOCs or online learning environments (e.g.…”

“…Methods that enable practitioner introspection, reflection in and on action (Schön 1987) and adaptive metacognition (Lin et al 2005) that can be shared with, inspected and reproduced or compared by other practitioners are deemed particularly important to supporting both the understanding and the establishment of best and innovative teaching practices and to offering an effective basis for educators' life-long professional development (Lin and Schwartz 2003;Hewitt et al 2003;Lin et al 2005;Laurillard 2012;Cohen and Manion 1980;Conlon and Pain 1996). Enabling such a sharable metacognitive exchange, however, presents a further challenge for EBP.…”