I think metacognition with musicians really comes into play with practicing. Often times, practice is when we need to analyze our cognitive processes. While teaching, I can explain metacognitive knowledge when discussing their practice techniques. For example, I can tell them to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in the practice room (person knowledge): "I'm really bad at memorizing my pieces", or "I'm really good at seeing a piece of music and analyzing the chords involved". I can also use metacognitive regulation to explain good practice techniques. For example, I can tell them to plan what practice techniques would work the best for which piece (for the slow piece, I should practice breath support, and for the quick piece, I should practice diction), to monitor what works well (practicing diction isn't working well for this quick piece, maybe I should work on making the phrases legato first), and then evaluating (I'm sounding a lot better on the slow piece, so practicing breath support really works). The difficulty in teaching metacognition this way is that I can't really monitor whether or not they're doing it - I can't sit with each student at home while they practice. I can bring this into the choir setting in different ways. For example, I could have the soprano section work together to come up with a strategy to fix a section they are struggling with. Or, I could utilize task knowledge by having the students help me choose pieces, and try to figure out which are too difficult or too easy for the choir ("this piece is in a foreign language, so it might be more difficult").
In a choir setting, I believe that critical thinking may be more beneficial. I remember in high school choir, we did a lot of critical thinking. My teacher would point out a problem - for example, the choir is going really flat in measure 19 - and ask us to figure out why the problem is happening and what we can do to solve it. In other words, we used the IDEAL problem solving steps: we had to identify the problem (which sometimes the teacher would do for us), define the goal ("we want to be in tune in measure 19"), explore strategies ("maybe if we think upward as we are singing downward, it will help our pitch"), anticipate outcomes ("if we do that, we might get confused and go sharp"), and look back and learn ("that worked well - let's always try to remember to think up as we sing down"). Critical thinking really comes into play here, specifically with problem solving strategies. Though metacognition is helpful, I think of that as more of a personal skill rather than for an entire choir - though, as I explained above, it can be useful for the choir setting.
Deductive ("lead/bring out of in latin") reasoning involves a set of information which implies one conclusion, which you can conclude or deduce given the information presented....
ReplyDeleteInductive ("lead/bring into") reasoning involves reading into the information given. There's more than one possible cause or thing in common. It is true that this is considering lots of specific things and seeing one or more general characteristics they have in common.
Practice time and study time (the time when you're learning) is pretty key for metacognitive processes and strategies. When you're learning something, it's important to know what you don't know, and evaluate your process.... When you're performing, I do see that critical thinking in achieving that goal and solving potential problems would be very important.
I agree with your comment about how the book's example of inductive reasoning was a bit confusing. Inductive reasoning involves going from a specific case and deriving a general rule: you go from making observations to creating a generalization. The most common type of inductive reasoning involves collecting evidence from observed phenomena, then drawing conclusions about the phenomena based on the collected evidence. So the example in the book talks about how a teacher might give the class a set of souvenirs. The students will observe the souvenirs and make specific observations about the souvenirs. From there, the students will see what the souvenirs all have in common and then create a generalization about the souvenirs. For example, the students might observe how each souvenir comes from a different country (a specific observation). Then, they can make a general statement by saying, "All souvenirs are from foreign countries." (This can always be proved wrong in the future).
ReplyDelete