Gary Heidt teaches at Perkiomen High School, just outside of Philadelphia. At the start of the school year, he runs a How My Mind Works exercise with students. The exercise asks students to build a metaphor for the way they imagine their brain operates.
My way of thinking is kind of like how a computer does things logically. I'm really good at logical thinking, solving stuff step by step, but I'm not the best at doing lots of things at once, sort of like how a computer tackles one thing at a time. My strong suit is looking at things closely and making quick decisions, kind of like how a computer quickly figures out stuff and handles tasks efficiently. My keen perception allows me to pick up on little things, like a computer's sensors sensing what's going on around it.
—JD (student)
Abstraction can be challenging the first weeks of class, so Gary introduces the exercise by pulling out his trusty metaphor dice. Students create a metaphor by rolling the dice, and then answer the question: “Why is die A like die B?”
Aside 1: if you want to peer down the rabbit hole, there’s a short article about writers using the dice, which in turn references this book of poetry.
Aside 2: if you want to get detailed in your explanation of metaphor, Gary goes ancient and reaches for Aristotle’s classic definition of metaphor, which, to paraphrase brutally, says that we understand the target (die A) because we understand the source (die B).
With some metaphor practice under their belt, students hit the main part of the assignment: create a metaphor for their mind. To help get the creativity flowing, Gary puts random objects on the tables where students are sitting. Pine cones, magnets, dried flowers, lego pieces, key chains. Anything which helps students shift their context past the classroom.
Students write out their metaphor by hand in class, and for homework, they create a post in Unrulr, sharing either a drawing that they made of the metaphor or other curated imagery pulled from the interwebs.
Finally, Gary asks the students to browse through their peers’ metaphors, and comment back on the ones they find interesting.
Note that throughout this lesson, Gary has never said metacognition, but that’s exactly what the class is exploring. Students are creating a model of how their brain works – they’re thinking about how they think! And their model becomes a reference point throughout the year.
Whenever Gary wants students to reflect on process and how something happened? He can refer to their metaphor: What’s happening in the [metaphor: engine] right now? How did the [metaphor: sponge] react during that exercise?
The metaphor is an unscary and unconfusing way to talk about metacognition. It avoids the pitfalls of:
- The unfriendliness of the scientific term (meta-what?)
- The inherently jumbled nature of common explanations (uhhhh, thinking-about-thinking)
At the end of the semester, Gary wraps things up by asking students to repeat the exercise: “My thinking now is like a…” Students can:
- Revise their metaphor, adding or changing the details and explanation.
- Change their metaphor entirely, based on what they’ve learned about themselves.
These comparable metaphors
- Create that ever-elusive evidence of metacognitive growth: a pre-class mental model of thinking, and a post-class mental model of thinking.
- Help students to readily see the changes in their own (don’t say it) metacognition (**sigh**)
