An objective understanding of one's own growth leads to metacognition and the promotion of self-growth
At our school, we use “Ai GROW” not only to monitor the development of the skills that children will need to survive in an uncertain and unstable future, but also as a tool to support the improvement of students' metacognitive abilities.
Before we introduced “Ai GROW”, we used a different company's system to record events and activities, but with “Ai GROW” we can now also record the “results” of activities, such as “this ability improved through this activity”. As a result, I feel that students are now able to record their portfolios more independently and with a higher sense of purpose.
When the students took the test for the first time, I told them that the importance of competencies was that taking the Ai GROW test was like measuring your weight before dieting, and that it was an opportunity to find out where you were at.
In order to improve your competencies and academic ability, it is very important to improve your meta-cognitive ability by looking at yourself from above, and to go through the PDCA cycle while coaching yourself. For this reason, we have implemented the Ai GROW test before and after major events, and have created opportunities to objectively grasp changes in ability.
I think this has enabled them to reflect on what activities they carried out at each event and how these activities led to growth in their own abilities with a high degree of accuracy. This reflection is also very important for improving the educational effectiveness of subsequent events and activities.
Furthermore, in order to develop their competencies, in 2021 we had the third-year students actively participate in volunteer activities and seminars outside of school, using after-school hours and holidays. We also set up a place for them to present in their own words not only “why they participated in the activity” but also “how their competencies changed before and after participating” each term. During these presentations, students were asked to use the competency names measured by “Ai GROW” to report on their experiences, for example, “Through this experience, I was able to improve my ability to set goals. However, I still lack the ability to express myself clearly, so in my next activity, I would like to improve my ability to express myself while being more conscious of communicating clearly to those around me.”
While the students have become able to clearly verbalize their own growth, there are still some abstract expressions that remain. Therefore, in order to deepen their understanding of the competencies measured by “Ai GROW” and to accelerate their growth in competencies, we thought that it was necessary to “evaluate using a rubric” and “be able to verbalize each competency while making it concrete and abstract”, and we conducted the following classes.
First, the students became evaluators and listened to speeches given by international students at the All-Japan International Student Japanese Speech Contest, which is organized by the Japan University of Economics Speech Contest Office, and evaluated the speeches while looking at the rubric. This was to make them realize that “the content of the speech (its message) is more important than the loudness of the voice or the quality of the pronunciation”.
In order to be able to clearly verbalize the competencies of “Ai GROW”, we selected seven of the competencies measured by “Ai GROW” (creativity, logical thinking, self-efficacy, expression, flexibility, exercising influence, global citizenship), and asked each team to create a rubric for evaluating one of these competencies.
I think that these activities (concretization, abstraction, verbalization) also contributed to improving the students' metacognitive skills.
One of the results of this was demonstrated during the principal's interviews. In the winter of their third year of junior high school, when they were about to enter high school, the students faced interviews with the principal. At that time, all the students were able to talk about their strengths in a concrete way, looking at themselves from above, saying things like “I have these strengths. I want to do 〇〇 in the future by making use of these strengths”. I think this was also thanks to “Ai GROW”.
I believe that not all competencies are high, and that the uneven distribution of abilities is an individual characteristic, and that it is important to further refine this individuality by actively challenging yourself to activities both on and off campus, and by complementing each other in collaboration with others. For this reason, it is essential to have opportunities for mutual evaluation that allow you to objectively understand your own individuality while also being aware of the strengths of others. In the future, when restructuring existing events and extracurricular activities, I would like to be more aware than ever of “what competencies we want to develop” and “what improvements we need to make to achieve this”.