Open-Ended, Metacognitive Conception of Classes for the Advancement of Nonconformity and Creative Thought

Instructional methods incorporating metacognitive or open-ended elements have been gaining popularity, but synergies between the two have rarely been explored. Created with the aspiration to boost students’ knowledge of the knowledge creation process, a conceptually new and structurally open-ended instructional model is proposed here. For that purpose, the squares on Heer’s version of the Bloom taxonomy pyramid were turned into steps on which the class climbed from its base to the top. Each step stepped on opened the content initially hidden from view, but corresponding to cognitive and knowledge dimensions intersecting at it, thus turning the content coverage into an open-ended adventure. Both the students in undergraduate and graduate programs in bioengineering and the faculty peers were in favor of the open-ended model of instruction and, based on distributed online surveys, they preferred it over traditional lecturing. In agreement with the adventurous character of the instructional method, frequent detours and diversions from the straight path of the subject were demonstrated as vehicles for the creative thought. As the students ascended along the learning taxonomy pyramid, the content became less foundational and more in need of discussion, analysis and weighing of pros and cons. At the same time, the students would get increasingly connected with the ideas of broader epistemological and ontological relevance. The intellectual pinnacle of the class was achieved at the peak of the pyramid, where the metacognitive and the creative intersected. There, the students were acquainted with the penultimate learning objective, which is the necessity for a professional to question the premises of one’s profession through one’s professional output, alongside providing practical results therewith.