Trial and Error
This is an example of how to self-direct, which does not mean to go it alone. It means, instead, that you are active in your learning. You might need help with each step below, and most steps are more effective with expert guidance and feedback.
Situation:
As part of the end of the year, you’ve been assigned a practice Regents Exam in English. The exam is posted to Castle Learning, so you start there with the multiple-choice questions on reading passages. For this example, we’re sticking with that Part 1.
Steps:
- Assess Your Performance | First, you finish the assignment and note your score. You set aside any questions you missed or had difficulty answering, regardless of score. Castle Learning does this automatically; otherwise, you would seek an expert.
- Diagnose Greatest Need(s) | Castle Learning provides the correct answer and its explanation for each question. With an expert’s help, you can identify patterns and diagnose needs. In this example (which is drawn from a real-life example), there are two patterns: authorial tone and figurative language.
- Peruse Available Resources | You’ll always have resources available in the classroom or online, and usually both. In this case, we can search Google for help identifying tone. I’ve embedded a screenshot of the results below. Then we look carefully through these results for what will help us meet your needs.
- Practice and (Self-)Assess | The second link in this example gives you an online exercise. Luckily, it also gives you the correct answers and an explanation, just like Castle Learning. This is an excellent autodidactic resource. In other instances, you can rely on an expert to give you the assignments and any necessary feedback.
- R.E.M. | Let’s see if this works as an acronym: reflect on your process; explicate the correct answers, model writing, central skills, etc.; and metacogitate on your learning. This is the key, because the goal is improvement, not just an increase in quantitative success. In other words, this is where you make the learning permanent, regardless of score.
Here is a screenshot of what you would see in this example for Step #3:
The first link is a PDF, and it would be an effective exercise for anyone looking to improve their ability to identify tone. It would require an expert’s help to score, though, which is why that second link is the real find: an interactive, automatically scored exercise. It’s short enough to do quickly, but the explanations are thorough enough to fuel effective metacognition.
What’s even more helpful is that this website has more exercises related to this Regents prep. The first one is on identifying tone:
But you would also find, with a simple bit of searching, an exercise on figurative language:
Five questions each, with explanations for each question. The exercises are scored online automatically. It’s the best kind of resource, and it happens to fit our example perfectly — and remember, this example comes from a real student. With a resource like this, you can much more easily get through the three parts of that final step.
Step #5: R.E.M. (Reflect, Explicate, Metacogitate)
- Reflect on the process. The better you get at searching online, the better your resources will be. You also need to codify a system for evaluating resources quickly. It took me about five minutes to find that website for the student who needed help with figurative language and tone. You can find expert resources just as fast, if you practice.
- Explicate the results. Explicate means to give a detailed explanation, but its root is more helpful here: It means to unfold or unravel. You need to unfold any feedback you get, whether it’s automatically generated by a site or provided in person by an expert. Imagine that you are laying that understanding out in front of you.
- Metacogitate about the learning. You can also think of it as being metacognitive, but then you lose the awkward verb and the “R.E.M.” acronym. Anyway, this is the key: understanding your learning choices, cognitive strengths and weaknesses, etc., in the context of improvement.
As I said, it’s possible to find exceptional resources in only a few minutes. That’s the potential of Google (or any other search engine). You’ll also have plenty of resources provided in class, from textbook lessons on grammar to printed self-assessment forms. It’s about resource management, really — repeated trial and error with the help of peers and other experts.
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