Focus on Learning!! (Professional Development Reflection- Shelley)

Dr. Saundra McGuire, photo credit:
https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/smcgui1/

Being in a class as a current student, learning how to teach other students, is an interesting dichotomy.  Most of the time when I’m learning about teaching styles/techniques, I’m quietly assessing if I would appreciate it as a current student.  This was the case when I attended a recent workshop sponsored by the Schreyer Institute here at Penn State entitled “Get Students to Focus on Learning Instead of Grades: Metacognition is Key!” by Dr. Saundra McGuire, Retired Assistant Vice Chancellor & Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University.

I knew that metacognition loosely meant being aware of your own thought processes, but Dr. McGuire explained we could also understand how to control our mental processing.  Learning how to learn—now that’s a thought. 

She detailed homework and reading strategies that, albeit, I’ve heard of before—and as a student, literally never implemented.  I knew I should be trying to summarize passages of text in my own words just to reinforce the learning, but come on—I had more important things to do.  When I was taking a physics class in college, I’d just get so frustrated with the problem sets that I would look at the answer and try to work backward, never focusing on fixing my mistakes or working through the problem multiple times until I got the correct answer.  Heck, half the time if I was reading a biostatistics book, I skipped half of the examples and just kept going.  All of these are mistakes that students make that impact their learning and subsequent grades in a course.  Dr. McGuire counseled students during her career and encouraged them to implement these strategies into their studying techniques, and the results were nothing short of incredible.  To watch as students’ grades increased from horrible failing grades to As and Bs IN JUST A SEMESTER was inspirational.  While I’m harping on how great their grades improved, the foundation is that these students focused on learning—they actually retained and learned the information at a deeper level that gave them the tools to do well on exams and other assessments. 

As instructors, we can encourage our own students to implement these strategies!  And, we can keep ourselves accountable by ensuring that we are setting our students up for success.  Solidifying that students know what the task is and can understand how information is organized can greatly improve their study habits, helping them to pinpoint what information is important rather than getting lost in slides and slides of lecture notes.  Dr. McGuire asked a group of students if they understood the difference between studying and learning, and they acknowledged that learning is long-term understanding while studying may just require memorizing information for a test.  Studying is tedious; learning is fun.  Our students have already done the hard part—they understand the difference, and we as instructors can continue to encourage focusing on the learning rather than the memorizing.  The learning will certainly help our students in the long run. 

This workshop impacted me on a deeper level, because I can implement these strategies on both sides of the fence—not only for me personally as a student, but also as an instructor.  These strategies are not only advantageous for the college student, they are important for any learner at any age, in any career, at any level.  Focus on the learning.  

Written by Shelley Whitehead, graduate student in Entomology at Penn State