The term metacognition refers to an individual’s ability to plan, monitor, evaluate, and make changes to their own learning behaviours in order to confront challenges more effectively. For students, having metacognitive skills means that they are able to recognise their own cognitive abilities, direct their own learning, evaluate their performance, understand what caused their successes or failures, and learn new strategies.
Metacognitive skills are useful across all subjects, because they enhance the way you learn, as opposed to what you learn. They are also teachable; as a result, teachers of all subjects should help their students to develop them.
Although metacognition is about students taking control of their own learning, a teacher is still required to help them develop skills and strategies in order to do so. It is recommended that you teach metacognition alongside subject content, rather than having specific ‘learning to learn’ or ‘thinking skills’ sessions.
Your whole lesson needs to be structured in a way that allows students to practise metacognitive strategies. Broadly, you need to split lessons into four stages: You, Plan, Do, and Review.
- The ‘You’ stage involves giving students a lesson starter where they need to consider their prior knowledge on a topic, and any strategies they have previously used to learn about this topic.
- The ‘Plan’ stage consists of setting pupils a task (a learning goal). The learning goal needs to be clear and explicit.
- In the ‘Do’ stage, the pupils will carry out the task, monitoring their progress as they go. It is particularly important to highlight anything they are confused by, because this shows students that confusion is an integral part of learning. Recognising what we don’t understand also leads to better metacognition.
- Finally, in the ‘Review’ stage (usually at the end of the lesson), you should allow your students time to review what they have learnt – how successful was their strategy in helping them achieve their learning goal? What did and didn’t go well? What could they do differently next time, and what other types of problems could they use this strategy for?
In order for students to develop new metacognitive strategies, learn from their mistakes, and reflect deeply on what they have learnt, the tasks they are given need to be difficult (but within reach). If pupils are given something challenging to do, they are more likely to remember information from this task in the future than if they are given something too easy. The important aspect here is to ensure pupils are encouraged to go through the three phases of planning, monitoring and evaluating. The following example can help you gain a better understanding as to what this should look like in everyday practice by using metacognition compared to everyday teaching process without using metacognitive strategies.
Example lesson plan – Maths
In everyday teaching
In a Year 1 classroom, a group of students were provided with a tube of Smarties. They were invited to open the box and then instructed to sort the content according to colour. Once they had achieved this they were then asked to create as many additions as they could using the colours. The students ended up with many different calculations. The use of mathematical language was positive as were the recordings made by the students.
Using metacognition
If we are more conscious to support students’ metacognition then the lesson should start in a more open way by asking: What Maths can we learn from a tube of Smarties? We can give students some time to handle the Smarties and to think of ideas. We can then focus on their planning by getting them the best way of approaching the problem. We can then collect a different range of ideas from the students and get the class to consider the best ones. While working on the ideas, the teacher can ask the class (monitor phase):
- Is this the best way to approach the problem?
- Can they think of a different way?
- Are they happy with the way activity is unfolding?
At the end of the activities students can provide feedback on how successful they were and in case they repeat the activities would they approach it differently. (evaluation phase).
The key differences between the two approaches is that the second approach follows the planning, monitoring and evaluating principles, demands more collaborative learning and requires demanding thinking.
Encouraging metacognition in the classroom is a way to ensure that your students are learning effectively. This will help them throughout their lives by developing their resilience, memory, self-awareness, reasoning skills, and problem-solving abilities.
References
Davies, C. (2017, September 10). Master maths with metacognition. Focus Education. https://www.focus-education.co.uk/blogs/blog/master-maths-metacognition
Sword, R. (2021, March 17). Metacognition in the classroom: Benefits & strategies. High Speed Training. https://www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/hub/metacognition-in-the-classroom/