I took part in a staff session that was organised at Manchester Law School recently by Dr Kryss Macleod. The topic was metacognition, what it was, how it could be used to improve our students’ legal education. Kryss took the lead, had done a ton of work in preparation including her slides and an online workbook for staff. Super stuff. My role was much more ancillary, showing briefly two examples of metacog in simulation. My full slideset is here (I used an abbreviated set during the session), and I’ll describe below the examples and why I chose them.
I’ve always been attracted to the notion of metacognition, perhaps as a way of accessing how we think and feel about learning. That impulse to explore the phenomenological deep awareness of learning drew me way back in the 1980s to the research by Linda Flowers and John Bereiter, Marlene Scardamalia and many others on literacy and compositional studies. I was fascinated by the idea of think-aloud protocols as metacognition, as a way of accessing, however imperfectly, what writers were thinking as they wrote. I compared their findings with my own experiences as an undergrad & doctoral Arts student, and realised how much I could have learned personally had I known about this research, and if I had used it to guide my personal writing habits. Later, when I came across the phenomenographical research by Noel Entwistle and others on preparing for exams, and how it often (but not always) resulted in the emergence of clear and useful knowledge structures from an amorphous sometimes inaccessible body of data (what Entwistle called ‘knowledge objects’) – that metacognitive discussion would have been really helpful to have had as an undergrad student.
That fascination continued into other forms of teaching and design work within legal education where metacognition could play a role: skills-based learning, formation of literacies, PBL, simulation, communities of inquiry, collaborative learning and much else. In the session with Kryss I briefly described the Personal Injury sim transaction that Charlie Hennessy and I worked on in the Glasgow Graduate School of Law: how at its best the design could stimulate metacognition, how we improved it year on year, what students thought about it. Just one example from student feedback (my emphases):
‘In tackling this project I think that our group made two main mistakes. The first mistake we made was in approaching the task as law students as opposed to lawyers. By this I mean we tried to find the answer and work our way back. Immediately we were thinking about claims and quantum and blame. I don’t think we actually initiated a claim until a week before the final settlement. I think the phrase “like a bull in a china shop” would aptly describe the way we approached the problem. […] Our group knew what area of law and tests to apply yet we ended up often being ahead of ourselves and having to back-pedal.
The second mistake we made was estimating how long it would take to gather information. We started our project quite late on and began to run out of time towards the end. None of us appreciated the length of time it would take to gather information and on top of this we would often have to write two or three letters to the same person as the initial letter would not ask the right question.’
It’s a really thoughtful piece of reflection, full of metacognitive thinking. The second paragraph acknowledges their rhetorical problem: running out of time, writing reader-centred prose, not writer-centred prose, and the subsequent difficulties that that caused. The first paragraph is even more interesting. The idea of looking for a problem’s answer and working back to the data is what students do in academic assessments, because they don’t have the stored experience of experts who can work from data > solution patterns – what Patel characterised as forward and backward reasoning, and labelling the latter as ineffective problem-solving.1
But if students are not experts, and are faced with the need to learning problem-solving, what can they do? They can rely on each other in collaboration, and on the professional resources that were made available to them in the sim. It was the medical educationalist Bleakley who compared cognitive research on PBL based on what he identified as acquisition metaphors, to research based on metaphors of participation, where collective work is ‘more than the sum of any recollections individual team members might bring to the work situation’. In this article, as in much of his work, he goes on to explore aspects of theories of identity-formation, narration, the rhetorical strategies of practitioners, the role of activity theory, distributed cognition and dynamicist learning in complex adaptive systems’, all of which he brings to bear on metacognitive richness of medical learning.2 That constellation of approaches, I’d argue, helped to bring about the students’ awareness, above, that they were approaching problem-solving the wrong way, and how they might bring about change in the future in their metacognitive thinking.
The second example was the Ardcalloch Legal Information & Advice Service (ALIAS) – a Mediawiki adapted to be the container for students’ simulated client newsletters, required as part of the Diploma in Legal Practice programme around 2003-06 and which were freely chosen and written up by students.3 I wrote guidance for students on producing the newsletter articles, from the point of view of genre distinctions. But the first year the results were not pretty. Students wrote the pieces like they were mini-2,000 word essays, complete with case & statutory refs, footnotes, etc. Socialised into academic writing over their four years of undergraduate life, they were still producing the same for what was effectively supposed to be web legal journalism. Something more was needed to shift the metacognitive needle.
So I brought in two people from a local law firm, McGrigors (now Pinsent Masons) – a professional support lawyer (PSL) and their web editor. They presented to the students on how to write for the web, and sited that within the processes that they used in the firm, eg how the PSL would source stories, interfacing with fee earners, work with the web editor; how the editor edited text for the web newsletter, how a web newsletter functioned as different from paper, and from other forms of writing on a firm website.
Students loved it. We later recorded them on a webcast for future years. They brought to the markers of genre shifting the specifics of how the genre was created and how it all worked in a law firm. Metacognition, in other words, involves social and organisational awareness and can be all the more powerful when situated in that context. Sure, what the PSL and web editor brought to ALIAS sim was domain knowledge, schemas and scripts. But more importantly, what they brought, too, was the ethical and narrative contexts of practitioners’ scripts, their contribution to growth, identity and the effect of communities of practice upon the development of reasoning and compositional skills.4
What we were doing, in effect, was extending the collaborative context of learning by bringing in professionals who could explain what they did, why they did it, and how it improved the professional practices of the firm. The results bore that out: the client newsletters produced by the next and subsequent student yeargroups in the ALIAS simulation were much improved.
And sure, the ALIAS sim project was the merest start in genre-shifting, just as the PI transaction was only one of the first instances where students encountered new forms of metacognitive reasoning. But the start is essential: students experience how ‘textbook’ knowledge becomes tacit knowledge as the novice practitioner gradually develops metacognitive scripts for handling different types of problems – in the PI transaction, paying attention to forward/backward reasoning; in the ALIAS project, shifting genres practices from academic essay to web journalism.5 As others such as Stratman and Deegan have proven in the field of researching legal reading capabilities, the adoption of professional roles at a deep level can provide a useful third way between the learning of domain knowledge and skills and the learning of clinical knowledge and skills.6
- Patel, V., Kaufman, D.R. (2000). Clinical reasoning and biomedical knowledge: implications for teaching. In J. Higgs, M. Jones (eds) Clinical Reasoning in the Health Professions, London, Butterworth Heinemann, 197-214. ↩︎
- Bleakley, A. (2006) Broadening conception of learning in medical education: the
message from teamworking, Medical Education 40(2), pp. 150–57. For Dewey, learning from experience was a constant process of backward and forward thinking. As he put it, ‘[t]o “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.’ Dewey, J. (1976-83). The Middle Works, 1899-1924, edited by J.A. Boydston, Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, vol 9, p.147. ↩︎ - See slides 20-23 of the slideset for detailed information on the project. ↩︎
- The key text is of course Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, CUP. ↩︎
- The issue is explored by Krieger, S. (2002). Institutional denial about the dark side of law school, and fresh empirical guidance for constructively breaking the silence. Journal of Legal Education, 52, 1-2, 112-29. ↩︎
- See Deegan, D.H. (1995). Exploring individual differences among novices reading in a specific domain: the case of law. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 2, 154-70. Stratman, J.F. (2002). When law students read cases: exploring relations between professional legal reasoning roles and problem detetion. Discourse Processes, 34, 1, 57-90. ↩︎