Mazur decided he needed to force his students to think more, so he made them teach each other. As a professor of physics at Harvard, Mazur was working with some of the most educated undergraduates in the world and yet, as he discovered, their lack of understanding was truly shocking. That's exactly what Eric Mazur decided to do. So share the wealth! If you really want your students to be better learners, then let them walk a mile in your shoes. That's exactly what makes an expert learner. Now sit back and watch me lift all the weight." Teaching is hard work - you have to be constantly engaged and aware of your process and how to improve it. You're like a personal trainer who says, "I'm going to help you meet all your fitness goals. However, it's far too easy for your students to kick back, disengage, and wait for you to simplify the material for them. To succeed, you need to think about your own thinking (How did I learn this? How have I taught this before? What worked and didn't work?) as well as your students' thinking (What do they know? What will keep them engaged?). The only problem is that most classrooms are set up to promote metacognition in the teachers, not the students. If you want your students to learn as much as possible, then you want to maximize the amount of metacognition they're doing. Metacognition (or thinking about thinking) is the secret to and driving force behind all effective learning. In this report, 600 pages of research culminate in a single word, which the NAS identifies as the key to effective learning: metacognition. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed everything we know about learning in a paper called How Students Learn.
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