What’s new on Chá Pedagógico?

Column readers, are you ready for some awesome news?

Our February episode broke a personal record. We reached 1.8K views on Disal’s YouTube Channel. Both of us (André & Rudy) are extremely grateful for your support, and we couldn’t be happier to know that the content we create for you is useful. If you haven’t, please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel, watch, like, and share our episodes with your buddies.

We also want to share the fact that Chá Pedagógico is growing, and we’re taking it to important events in Brazil and abroad. It was featured in this year’s Cultura Inglesa Teachers’ Conference, and we’re now speaking at the Global e-future Day to a very international audience of teachers from countries ranging from South Korea to Mexico!

What was the hype about Chá Pedagógico’s second episode of the year?

Everyone is talking about it, and no one knows exactly what to do. Our discussion revolved around the new Brazilian law restricting cell phone use in schools. We explained why this initiative should be celebrated due to the simple fact that more screen time has been associated with decreasing levels of attention and motivation in learning environments. In fact, there’s reliable research showing that kids’ and teens’ linguistic repertoire and even IQ levels have dropped in the last two decades. Coincidentally, that was when smartphones and social media became more popular.

This topic is so trendy nowadays, even Netflix is addressing it in a very transparent and brutal way. Adolescence, a four-episode miniseries co-written by British actor Stephen Graham is a punch to the stomach of any viewer even remotely interested in why kids and teens behave the way they do nowadays. Besides watching the series, we recommend two books on the subject: Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt), and Dopamine Nation (Anna Lembke).

The bottom line is: just teaching a more responsible use of smartphones to kids and teens won’t cut it because they’re not fully cognitively able to control their impulses. If we adults find ourselves always checking our phones and wasting hours on social media and funny videos (because we are addicted), imagine the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. Banning and restricting are the only options that have a shot at working.

Watch the full episode here.

Rudy, André, what about metacognition? Can’t it help students become more aware of their own learning process?

Well, yes, but that depends. First, we need to remember that metacognition is the competency of understanding our own cognitive processes to drive our learning according to our needs. In other words, it’s the idea of learning how to learn better. But how can we learn how to learn better if we don’t know what works more effectively?

In our first episode of 2025, we discussed a useful model created by Noel Burch in the 1970s. It’s called the Four Stages of Competence. The first stage is unconscious incompetence and that happens when our students don’t even know what they don’t know. When they are made aware of these things they don’t know, such as how to make the best out of their study time, they move to the second stage: conscious incompetence. That’s what Socrates meant by “I know that I know nothing”. It means we understand we have to study certain things to become familiar with them. Then, in stage 3, students become conscious competent. That’s when they already know the skill or content and can use it with effort. The last stage is called unconscious competence. This happens when students are very good at the skill or content and can perform without conscious effort.

Watch the full episode here.