Metalearning and Other Ghastly Sounding Words

courtesy Wordle

And I thought the word ‘metacognition’ was too heady and ghastly sounding for the blogosphere. I felt guilty about referring to this ugly term in my Middle-earth posts.

Now we have a full blown discussion about it half-way round the Globe! Tony Karrer spawned a debate on what he refers to as metalearning. As usual, he made me think, but not specifically about what he was posting about.

Matacognition

Wikipedia (I’m a great fan of this site) defines metacognition as:

cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.

I had a strong hunch that metacognition was closely related to, if not the same as metalearning. I’ve since discovered that metalearning is a more specific term, though it has a range of meanings.

 
Metalearning in education

When it comes to educational aspects, Wikipedia quotes
Donald B. Maudsley, defining metalearning as,

the process by which learners become aware of and increasingly in control of habits of perception, inquiry, learning, and growth that they have internalized.

The above description explains the brand of metalearning I’ve become more familiar with.

Metalearning in teams

Wikipedia makes a distinction when metalearning is used in the context of performances of teams and relationships:

(T)he dynamic process whereby a system (relationship, or organization) manages to dissolve limiting dynamics such as point attractors and limit cycles that impede effective action and evolve liberating and creative dynamics represented by complex attractors whose trajectories in phase space, by never repeating themselves, can portray creative and innovative processes.

If you can make sense of that on first reading, you’re a genius!

Having spent half an hour at least, thinking and researching the meanings behind these words and phrases, I found they took me back to a topic I’ve revisited several times on this blog in the last year. Complexity seems to find its way into everything I look at to do with successful teams and sustainable communities.

After unpacking the seemingly garbled sentence, I found that it offered a lot to do with thinking and learning involving teams and relationships. It seems that metalearning is a well established study, applied to the way teams and organisations perform.

Losada

Formerly initiated by Marcial Losada, metalearning is the study of how groups of individuals in a team contribute to its performance. Metalearning does this in a way that enables a team's thinking to evolve uninhibited, so that new ideas can emerge.

By understanding and controlling the balance between the external and internal references to do with that thinking, the results can lead to high performance in business teams. I began to wonder if this is really what Tony Karrer had in mind when he wrote his post.

The Losada Zone

The various ratios of positivity and negativity involved in human interaction that can exist, lies within what’s called the Losada Zone. Negative feedback can act as a warning signal, whereas positive feedback encourages the status quo. Losada found that high performance teams have a so-called P/N (positivity/negativity) ratio that is high (5.6), medium performance teams have a lower ratio (1.9) and low performance teams come in with a still lower ratio (0.36).

Such a ratio is a measure of and is related to the connectivity potential within a team. The Losada Line (at 2.9) signifies the lower limit, separating people who have the potential to achieve a complex understanding of others from those who have a lesser ability to do this. Those who succeed are said to be above the Losada Line, and those who fall short lie below it. The terms ‘flourish’ and ‘languish’ are used to describe the two states.

Frequent innovation 
High performance teams possess creativity and are capable of recurrent innovation. They tend to work along the lines of complexors. Coined by Marcial Losada, the complexor describes the form of outcomes of successful teams in the recursively intricate way they emerge and evolve. Intimately mapped on to complexity theory, the characteristics of complexors resemble fractals, elaborately regenerating themselves.

Point attractors, though not the exact opposite of complexors, are outcomes that are akin to the fate of a wind-up toy. Effectively they refer to performances that decay, lead to inaction and go nowhere.

Where to from here?

It appears that metalearning applies to and can be applied to the performance behaviour of teams. Becoming aware of the need for openness and being receptive to new ideas in a way that permits these to be advantageously and constructively considered is something that, presumably, can be learnt by members of a team or community. 

Earlier in May, Jay Cross posted Become a Chief Metalearning Officer. Having thought more about all this, I have three questions:

• Is it possible that by managing and applying specific learning processes, a better performance can be reached in teams that are already partly on the way to attaining success?
• Does this special type of learning lie within the province of the individual's control?
• Can this sort of ‘management’ be controlled and executed by a manager?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, perhaps we can use metalearning to help our world.

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What’s learning about?

I often wonder what learning’s about. It seems strange that I’ve spent tens of years observing it happening in my students, or not as the case may be, and I should still think this way. But it’s true. . .

I often wonder what learning’s about

From the moment of birth a child starts to learn. Children are like vacuum cleaners. They are capable of picking up anything and everything that they can learn and make sense of and a whole lot more besides. It is impossible to stop a youngster from learning without an act that would be either physically or mentally injurious to the child.

Some say the human ability to learn developed through evolution as a survival trait and that it has been passed down through the generations. Much to the exasperation of their teachers, this amazing ability seems to be lost, at least in part, for some children when they go to school. So what is it that progresses this ability to learn in some children but seemingly not in others?

Arthur Lydiard was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1917. Late in 1978 I read his book ‘Run – the Lydiard Way’. His world-famous schedules helped me get my average marathon time close to 3 hours. The first few chapters of his book describe how his curiosity brought him to experiment on his own body, pummeling it with the most formidable vigorous athletic activities: running, sprinting, climbing and ultra-marathon running.

By experimenting on himself he learned how the body responds to physical activity, both beneficially and injuriously. Lydiard took the principles he developed to many countries where world-class athletes, coached by him, won Olympic medals by the handfuls. Lydiard had a drive to promote athletics. But the most significant thing he did for himself was to learn how his body reacted to physical activity. He learnt how to use physical activity to improve physical ability.

I often wonder what learning’s about

I was a hopeless case as a secondary school student. A snotty, skinny year 8, my only interest was Science, a subject that I’d an obsessive passion for. I progressed to year 9, dropping Latin, for my teachers were in despair that I could ever learn a single word of that language. Development in year 10 was not much different. The deputy principal warned me sternly that if no improvement happened in other subjects, especially English and Mathematics, I would not study Science the following year. That threat changed my life as a learner. The thought of not doing Science made me think of what I had to do.


With an average achievement in any assessment in Mathematics or English of no more than 25%, I decided to approach my teachers and ask for help. I got a falling-apart book from my Mathematics teacher. Though its pages fell at my feet on opening, it covered all the work for that year and had examples throughout with answers at the back. It was my first experience of what formative assessment could do for a learner. My English teacher got me into the school’s junior debating society. From then on I never looked back.

That year in Mathematics I achieved an end of year examination result that should have won a prize. But I was accused of cheating, though no real proof could be obtained as to how I did that. I also won a debating competition during that year when standing as the Scottish National candidate in a mock election. Even in Scotland at that time, Scottish Nationalists were thought of as walking jokes. Perhaps I assisted in some small way towards the eventual victory in 1999 when Scotland established its own Parliament. Who knows?


I can firmly attest that if it weren’t for my obsession with Science and the threat of having to leave that interest behind, I’d never have studied English or Mathematics the way I did - at least not at school. But it didn’t stop there. So much more had to be learnt about learning when I eventually earned a place at university.

I attended all the lectures, took notes, but my handwriting was abominable. Any attempt I made to study my scribblings came to nothing if I left it too long. I panicked at this, for I wondered how on earth I was ever going to learn from my hopeless note-taking.

I often wonder what learning’s about

I thought up a plan. By accident I’d found that I could remember enough of a lecture to make sense of even the most undecipherable writing in my notes, provided it was read the day I wrote it. What I’d to do was obvious. I’d to learn to write tidily. But there was no way I could write tidy notes quickly enough during a lecture. So every evening after lectures I transcribed my messy scribble into copper-plate handwriting, a style of my own design. I then had a tidy set of lecture notes that I could read and understand even weeks after I’d attended the lecture.

As well, I found that, through the process of transcribing, I learnt from the proximal thinking that I'd done. Writing comments from readings of relevant texts helped me further. This particular aspect of study practice was brought to mind most recently when reading Vivian Yonkers’ and Tony Karrer’s thoughts on “writing forces learning”.


Further ploys I developed were drawing on my interest in music - I’d played violin as a child. I found that this instrument was not the most relaxing one to play as a break from study. The guitar was better. Short 20 minute to half an hour intervals of studying with 5 to 10 minute musical sessions in between meant that a 2 to 3 hour study session was made easier and often seemed to speed past. So by having frequent breaks in my study, I was able to learn from published guitar tutors how to play folk-style and classical guitar - a bonus!

All the study methods I’ve summarised here, and more, I used through my undergraduate years. Erudite educators use the term metacognition to describe these tactical approaches, strategies learnt that help us learn, some of which we may hit upon by accident.

How do we entice our students to use their ability to learn how to help themselves to learn?