What is Metaxagogy? Sneak Peak of Chapter 7!

I am a high school student in some accelerated tracks, but only a lightly advanced math track and I am getting a B, to the disappointment of my mother.

I show up to every class, learn that day’s formula solution strategy, and I apply it to the thirty practice problems quickly and efficiently. I do not understand, but I get all the right answers.

I do fine on quizzes and tests, but the only skill I have is pattern recall. If I see this, I do that.

I hate it. I keep that opinion to myself, but I am sure my face and my calculator games say it all. I do want to do a good job, and I mean well, but the teacher and I are butting heads. I believe it is because I am bad at math.

Senior year, I crossed the hallway to the science lab and took a physics class.

Mr. Dylan sets a spring-loaded mechanical ball bearing shooter on the counter.  He demonstrates how someone would measure its force by firing the ball straight up against a measuring tape. He then turns it, tilts it down, and points it to the middle of the classroom. Hanging from a string is a piece of paper with a circle cut out of the middle.

“Your quiz today is to set the height of the circle so that the ball bearing flies through the center.  You only get one try.  Ten points for going through the circle or zero points for missing it. Get a partner and do the math, check it twice. No redo.”

We rush to measure the angle of the shooter, the distance to the paper, and the force applied to the ball. I checked the formula six times because I know I am bad at math and it will be very hard. 

I had gotten it right the first time. It was not hard. For the first time in years, I finally got the point of math.

When I left for college, I avoided taking math, because this physics class experience was not enough to correct the negative sense of identity I had developed. I chose a major that only requires a single math class, full of material I did in high school.

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I thought I was bad at math, and I was wrong. I chose a career based on that faulty assumption. Today, when my coworkers need someone to do math, they come get me.

In the workplace, everything is a story problem with relatable factors and high stakes results. I understand the factors because I live in the environment that created the math. I built the formula because I need it to solve a problem I value. I bet my continued paycheck on the solutions, and I can sanity check the results by testing them against reality.

The truth is that I love math. Not enough to go searching for more math, but there is no feeling more satisfying for me, than making ambiguity into certainty with the power of data.

Application and relevance were always the missing link. Over the years, I have met a thousand people at work who graduated university thinking they were bad at math and they were all wrong. My own mother failed algebra in high school, and when she finally went to college, she became one of the most respected tax accountants in the state for two decades.

The answers to my motivation issues were always available, just down the hall. What I needed was a bridge between the lack of application in pedagogy and the required utility of andragogy. I did not get that.

Why Metaxagogy?

Metaxagogy is my word for the study of educating humans of ages twelve to twenty-four. It is specifically the navigation between the cognitive and neuroscience-based practices of pedagogy and andragogy, in the places that benefit from the overlap.

I theorize that by looking at this field separate from their three different institutions (middle school, high school, undergraduate university/college), we can better respond with instruction focused more on developmental needs, which will also be better for the modern workplace.

When I look at the motivational crisis of high school and undergraduate universities, I see an opportunity to borrow the methods of adult learning. If we focus on teaching methods, the power to address the problem is available to any educator with a classroom of students. Let us take those best practices and walk them back through the developmental phases. We can create a scaffolded experience of skill development that targets a more adult cognitive outcome.

This idea would bring developmental responsiveness back to the classroom, from its more common home in the institution’s structure, administration, and extracurriculars. If done, we should see higher motivation, grades, and attendance. Also, higher graduation rates at the university level. The result should be higher value for students, especially against university tuition and fees.

This book is my proposal for a first draft model of Metaxagogy. That vision is full relevance-based, cognitively aligned instruction by the end of undergraduate university. The nearly decade-long training efforts we already use through the school system to prepare students for content mastery would be shifted. We would instead enhance student competencies and skills associated with autonomy, relevance, and identity.

The problem is that their cognitive development begins demanding relevance, autonomy, identity formation, application, and contribution while many educational systems continue relying on methods designed for dependency, compliance, and delayed meaning.

The Framework

The transition from pedagogy to andragogy could hold three phases, similar to our current middle school, high school, and university division. The shift in instructional methods would break into four components: lesson framing, identity projects, social methods, and meta-instruction.

Lesson Framing is about answering questions of utility as the brain increasingly calls for more concrete and authentic solutions. Identity Projects are major academic projects that allow students to develop their own sense of identity with increasing importance to the experience of a course. Social Methods tap into growing emotional and socially aware brain development to encode knowledge and skills into long-term memory. Meta-Instruction is the skills surrounding the act of learning that are taken on in addition to acquiring content.