The Mathematics, Science and Technology Education Group (MSTE) is pleased to invite you to attend a presentation by Dr. Ian Mitchell, Monash University:

Unpacking Sophisticated Pedagogy: Promoting Metacognition by 
Building Students’ Awareness of the Existence and Roles of Big Ideas   

1:15 pm, Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Duncan McArthur Hall, Room A333

Everyone is welcome

Download the Poster

Dr. Ian Mitchell will be at the Faculty of Education as an MSTE Visiting Fellow from January 21-25, 2013. 

He co-founded the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL) at Laverton Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia in 1985, and received a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2011 in recognition of his PEEL work. For 13 years, he taught school part-time while also working at Monash University, where he now teachers full-time.

View Dr. Mitchell's profile on the Monash University website

Abstract:  Since 1985, teachers and academics in the Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL) have been researching ways of generating metacognitive learning. From the first year of the project, it was clear that this involved issues of student change that were complex and not addressed in the literature. Over time, experienced PEEL teachers develop a learning curriculum that runs parallel with their content curriculum. In recent research we have been unpacking this and have framed ten interconnected “Journeys of Change” that the teachers set out to achieve. These will be discussed in the presentation. One of these is Building understanding that classroom tasks should always be linked to the relevant big ideas and key skills. A driver for this was the realisation that students commonly do not perceive the existence of big ideas that (should) provide purposes for tasks, let alone reflect on what they are doing against these. As we explored this journey, we realised that our own thinking had been underworked on what we meant by big ideas, where they could come from, what teachers could do with them and what teachers could ask students to do with them.

Queen's has a site licence to the PEEL website at http://peelweb.org