Decades of evidence have demonstrated that metacognition, or the process of thinking about one’s thinking, is one of the most powerful strategies for improving learning outcomes. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly than just outcome achievement, metacognition plays a critical role in how learners know how to adapt, apply, use, and refine knowledge and skills. This is especially important once learners leave the structure of the classroom and are expected to manage their own learning in complex, dynamic real-world contexts such as the workplace.
The Next Level Lab developed the Reflecting on Your Learning in the Workplace toolkit to help workers exercise contextualized agency, such that they can actively manage and modify features of their contexts to support their best learning and work performance. It has been designed for young people in an internship program, but it could be adapted for other workplace learning contexts, such as an apprenticeship, an ongoing professional development setting, or other on-the-job settings where it would be helpful to have dedicated space for workers to reflect on their learning.
The toolkit’s learner survey focuses on metacognitive prompts that invite learners to 1) reflect on how their physical, social, and cognitive contexts interact with their learning and performance, and 2) use these reflections to think strategically about how they can modify these contexts to improve their learning and performance in the future. It works best when it is used multiple times over the course of a learning experience – for instance, an eight-week summer internship program might choose to have interns complete the survey on a weekly or biweekly basis.
The supervisor checklist at the end of this document is meant to be used in conjunction with the learner survey tool. It asks supervisors to evaluate their intern’s performance at the beginning and end of the program. This provides a means of assessing whether a supervisor has observed any changes in their interns related to dimensions of contextualized agency over the course of the program.