5 ways our AI assistant Maia can help you encourage metacognition
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
If you use our toolkit for teachers, you can always choose whether to create a digital lesson completely by yourself, or with the support of our AI assistant. One of the great features of Maia, our lesson-creation assistant, is that she encourages your students to express their natural metacognitive thoughts, helping them become better learners.
1. Maia encourages you to think about the task learners need to complete
Just like when you enter a search term in a search engine like Google, artificial intelligence only works for you when you clearly indicate what it should do. In computer language, the search term is called a ‘prompt’: the information you give AI to research what you want it to create. Challenging yourself to write, copy-paste, or download an image containing a clear, complete prompt will remind you to think about your lesson’s main learning objective. It will also prompt you to be specific about which task(s) learners are asked to complete.
2. Maia activates your students’ prior knowledge
Maia automatically creates a mind map to activate students’ (sometimes unexpected) prior knowledge. It is a standard feature of LessonUp’s AI assistant Maia, instructed by our education team to make sure learners are encouraged to think about what they already know about a topic. They will be reminded to think of what they know and don’t know about the lesson’s learning objective, and, more specifically, the main task(s) they need to complete.
3. Maia ends with a metacognitive lesson tail
This is one thing the Ontario school system in Canada is doing now—they are integrating metacognitive questions and sections at the end of every lesson plan. They are doing so manually, but with Maia it is done for you automatically. Each digital lesson created with AI assistance ends with three open questions to help students think about their learning: ‘write down 3 things you learnt in this lesson’, ‘write down 2 things you want to know more about’, and ‘ask 1 question about something you haven’t quite understood yet.’
4. For each slide you can assess student understanding
You could use our ‘Ask Maia’ feature to create one to five quizzes on any part/slide of your digital lesson. It takes one click and two minutes of your time to do so, and it gives you the opportunity to briefly assess students’ understanding. You could prepare a cluster of quizzes at regular intervals to check what your students don’t understand, while engaging them in a playful way. It might give you an instant snapshot of what your class is struggling with–very precious information.
5. Ask your students to self-assess as often as you like
You can direct students’ attention towards whether or not they understand what you are teaching. You might ask your students to rate on a scale of one to ten how well they understand something. With primary school students you could forget the numbered scale, because it might be too abstract for them, and use a range of happy to sad faces instead. With the help of AI-generated polls (Ask Maia) move through your digital lesson and poll your students’ understanding of its content.
