The Metacognition Project
Thinking as Art
The Metacognition Project is an ongoing collaborative artwork started in 2008 by Kimberley D'Adamo with students at Berkeley High. Through publications and presentations with Julia Marshall, and through invitations, and teacher-sharing, The Metacognition Project has expanded to classrooms and participating artists across the globe. Join us in making thinking a visible art form!
Protected under Creative Commons The Metacognition Project, Thinking As Art
© 2008, 2017 & 2023 by Kimberley D'Adamo is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Selected Artworks
The Metacognition Project, an ongoing collaborative artwork by Kimberley D'Adamo, is designed to inspire a conversation about the core purpose of learning in schools. Through a series of lessons, participants see creative thinking as the center of the classroom, and their own thinking process as an art form that is iterative, evolving, beautiful and poetic.
Below, you will find lesson plans, readings, videos and examples of student artworks. You are invited to teach this unit, or create an artwork yourself-help making thinking the center of the art room, and help learners see their thinking as an art form!
Artwork by Pre-service Elementary Generalist Teacher
TEAC305 Art Methods, UNL 2021
"When I think, I make a bunch of connections with past things I have heard/learned. I also learn a lot from my peers and my teachers, which is added into my thinking process because I will form ideas from the ones I heard. To represent that, I decided to make the house from the Disney movie “Up”. The balloons in the house represent my thoughts and the way they are wrapped all around each other is meant to represent all of my connections. The balloons that I placed in the clouds were made to represent new ideas/thoughts that people add to my house/brain or that I add when I hear something that I like or agree with I am also a daydreamer, so the house in the clouds represent that in a way."
Placing Creative Thinking at the Center of the Classroom
“I think that sometimes strong thinkers are able to think metacognitively without being taught, but I would not have thought much about it without being taught it. Understanding my thinking process is motivational because it keeps leading me to the next idea, which keeps me interested in learning.”
-12th grade student
Key questions:
"How do creative approaches make the vocabulary of thinking accessible to all students?"
"How do we help students see thinking as fuzzy, imperfect, exciting play?"
"How do we teach students to make their own thinking and learning visible?"
"How do we create communities of thinking in k-12 classrooms?"
Curriculum
Protected under Creative Commons The Metacognition Project, Thinking As Art
© 2008 by Kimberley D'Adamo is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
In Lesson 1, students describe their own thinking process, learn about metacognition, and identify ways they are asked to be metacognitive in each discipline in school. Students will understand that metacognition is a key skill that is being practiced across classrooms in their school experience.
In Lesson 2, students identify academic thinking words that teachers use to describe thinking processes. They then unpack those words, explore the cognitive function happening for each, and design a list of metaphorical or poetic words to make those processes more accessible to all learners. To do this, we 'tour' familiar spaces for students, and identify tools they commonly use that could describe thinking processes.
In Lesson 3, students return to their own thinking, and design a visual metaphor to more poetically describe their thinking process. They explore materials and techniques, and then create an artwork that makes their thinking visible.