There is a separate note that discusses cognitive skills and the role expertise plays. You can coach and help improve, develop skills. You can lay out a training program for the individual to follow. You can monitor and provide feedback. But, skills are not something that can be memorized and answered with a multiple-choice quiz. At the end of the day, a skill is something someone does. There are different types of skills.

Our thoughts…

• Do not attempt to explicitly teach cognitive skills without some study and preparatory effort. You can unintentionally cause damage. Reading a few articles or spending a weekend will not be sufficient. There is a whole body of work and science on cognitive skills and their acquisition. You may or may not know the science. If you do not, back away slowly from the car, arms raised, no sudden movements.
• Teaching a cognitive skill is itself a cognitive skill and must be approached as such. When you start, you will be naïve, then a novice, and slowly progress up the ranks of expertise. Doing it once or twice in an unsupervised way in a course, will not justify the claim of expertise. Sorry. Best to assume it is a journey of learning, prepare for it, and embrace the cognitive skill of teaching and assessing cognitive skills.
• Identify the prerequisite skills and their level. What is needed when the course starts.
• Identify the skills that will be developed (directly or indirectly) as part of the desired outcomes; how the students need to be transformed.
• Review upstream courses to determine if the skills will have been developed through conscious, deliberate measures. If not, either try to fix the pipeline or alter your course.
• Try to provide reinforcement and replication opportunities for skills which were primed or started in upstream courses. The students need to practice, reflect, and gain experience using the skills. If there is no reinforcement, the skills will revert back to the naive level.
• Recognize that not all of the students will be at the same point in their development for any skill, and that each student’s skills will be at different levels of development. This information can be used in the design of assessments, design of lectures / labs / tutorials, and remedial activities for the students.
• Plan and execute a simple assessment as soon as possible in the course to determine the incoming skill levels of the students. Do not assume you know. The assessment should be used to adjust the course (if necessary).
• Discuss the cognitive skills related to the program/course at the beginning of the term and how they will be dealt with during the term.
• The students should be aware of the skill development aspect and they should know how they are progressing.

• Be aware of the skills and levels needed by downstream courses. If possible, include reinforcement and deliberate practice activities for these skills; even if the activities are not 100% relevant (e.g., slightly alter existing tasks to include a reflection or minor deliverable that is skill related).
• Consciously address the specific skill transformations (type and amount) needed in your course in order to satisfy the course outcomes and support this with the necessary scaffolding, feedback, reflection, repetition, deliberate practice and coaching.
• A skill-building course should be supported by subsequent, downstream courses. When this is not done, it is unlikely that any improvement will stick; there are not enough hours in one course for any skill to be improved to the point of retention. It has made us sad to watch the degradation in the students’ cognitive skills back to their baseline upon entering university.
• We have heard many senior instructors voice “they learn by doing”, “they learn by observing” and that the students do not need any explicit teaching in cognitive skills. We disagree with these instructors. We also know that these instructors have never studied learning, or looked at the science related to the acquisition of cognitive skills. We also know that these instructors did not appear interested in learning about learning either. Sad. It is sometimes hard to teach old dogs new tricks.
• It is important to explicitly discuss cognitive skill acquisition and development with the students. You need to be transparent and actually discuss this; not just tell them.
• It is important to encourage self-practice in other courses. The students need to see the commonality and value of the skills; of higher levels of performance. If the students learn to self-reflect and self-coach, this helps with life-long learning.
• It is important to encourage self-practice on work terms. The students need to see the value of the skills in the work force. The students also need to practice during this time period. They cannot take the term off.
• Time must be carved out of the course for the skill work; the extra assessment discussions, any special assessments, and the ability to repeat, repeat, and repeat.

Further reading

• Brown, P. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2017). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Mariner Books.
• Dreyfus, H., & Dreyfus, S. (1980). A five-stage model of mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. (Supported by the U.S. Air Force, Office of Scientific research (AFSC) under contract F49620-C-0063 with the University of California) Berkeley.