Metacognition in adult learning
I’m a terrible student. My grades weren’t all that great until I got to college and stumbled upon metacognitive strategies. My roommate at the time described it as “weird note taking behavior.” I didn’t know then that what I was doing was having an awareness of my own thought processes. I started using things external to me to help me remember. Latin spurred the behavior. Thanks to the declensions in Latin there is a long tradition of students doing everything they can to memorize how to decline nouns in Latin. I would write down word for word what I read, re-study and then self-test. I used flashcards, composition notebooks, sticky notes, colorful pens (which I really enjoyed) and even songs to prepare for tests. I did pretty well in Latin.
Corporate learning is different. You don’t have to do a lot of memorization. It seems more efficient to find the guidelines than it is to memorize any policy because it will change anyway. We do more at work than find relevant policies though.
Let’s say that I’m a manager and I’m going into a challenging feedback conversation. I look up the company’s policies on giving feedback. I find a ‘just in time’ elearning. I re-read the frameworks and examples. The conversation goes ok. Let’s say I’m a different manager. I’m in a one on one conversation and an opportunity comes up to give feedback. I vaguely remember that I was supposed to SBI or something? Turns out the employee took that training too and things get awkward. Real life is unlike Latin class in that you never know when the test is going to be.
Simply restudying materials isn’t the best strategy and adults don’t always have the time or desire to look up old training. Spaced retrieval practice would be a good metacognitive strategy for this situation. That is, practicing this skill deliberately over months. Taking this skill from awareness to mastery will require many training interventions centered around practice in the same way I might review flashcards leading up to a test in Latin. This is also a social skill so it’s best practiced in the way that it would happen in real life. Roleplays with real people or at the very least simulations are necessary to translate a framework, like SBI, into a usable skill.
In addition to metacognitive strategies there are social-metacognitive strategies. People do this all the time. Through discussion, spaced repetition and feedback my partner and I have a joint understanding of what “doing the dishes” means. We don’t have any written guidelines about it that’s for sure. In the same way a cohort, community of practice or a team of managers guide each other into a joint understanding of what good feedback looks like. They do this by making their thought processes transparent to their fellow managers and building a shared mental model of what good feedback looks like. We can ground these practices in training by helping cohorts build psychological safety. Let them fail in front of each other in a safe space that has low stakes.
This is just one example of how metacognition can change your design. There are some good books out there that cover the subject. One of my favorite non-academic entries into the topic is Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen.