Metacognition means thinking about your thinking.

Metacognitive methods focus on helping our students to think about their own thinking and learning. Instead of relying on the teacher, students learn how to “drive their own brains”. They’re able to manage skills like making a plan for learning, meeting deadlines, monitoring their learning, and evaluating when they need to change what they’re doing.

This involves teaching strategies such as setting goals, and encouraging students to monitor and evaluate their progress.

Metacognition is often linked to self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to being aware of and managing your motivation towards learning. The idea is to give our students a range of strategies to use for effective learning: to equip them with a metacognition toolkit.

It can be difficult to get it right with metacognitive approaches (but it’s worth the effort!). These approaches require students to take more responsibility for their learning, and to become more aware of what they need to do to achieve.

A helpful way of looking at it is “scaffolding”. The idea is that the teacher initially provides support to their students when introducing a concept, and then gives less support so that the students are able to manage their own learning.

How to use metacognition in the classroom

Metacognitive approaches are highly effective. They’re simple to implement, but they do require careful planning to get it right.

This approach is usually more effective when taught in collaborative groups. This is because the students can support each other, and the process of thinking out loud in discussion supports the metacognitive process.

Here are some pointers on how to use this method in the classroom.

 Ask questions

• When a student answers a question, ask them: “How did you decide that?”.
• At the beginning of a task, ask your students: “What’s your plan?”.
• During a task, ask your students: “How’s it going?”.
• At the end of a lesson, ask your students: “What did you find difficult? What worked well? Where else could you use this skill or concept?”.
• You could encourage students to keep a learning journal to reflect on their learning.

 Think about thinking about thinking

• Teach your students what metacognition is.
• Use metaphors to explain what it is and why it’s important (driving a car is a helpful metaphor).
• Teach your students study and revision skills.

 Get lots of practice

• Give plenty of opportunities to practise.
• Make sure that these opportunities go across different topics and lessons.
• Embrace challenges and confusion in your classroom, to give your students practice on how to recognise things they don’t understand.

 Talk through problems

• Talk through your thinking strategies out loud.
• When you make a mistake, work through it out loud with your students.

What does the research say?

The evidence shows us that methods that promote metacognition are highly effective.

The Educational Endowment Foundation rates this method with an effect size of 0.66 (which is high). Their definition of metacognition includes learning to learn, or study skills, and they note that it’s particularly effective for lower-achieving or older students.

John Hattie’s research gives it an effect size of 0.65 (which is high). Hattie notes that there are two layers to problem-solving: applying a strategy, and selecting/ monitoring that strategy.

In Shayer and Adey’s research, metacognition is one of the six parts of a Cognitive Acceleration (Let’s Think) lesson. Students are shown a problem or demonstration, and are asked to give an explanation. This uses their cognitive skills. The teacher then asks the students something like: “How did you get that answer?”, which encourages the students to think about their thinking process. In other words, this uses their metacognitive skills.

Here’s the brain-based explanation.

Researchers at the University College London looked for links between metacogitive skills and areas in the brain. They found that people who had better metacognitive skills had more grey matter in their anterior prefrontal cortex. Research is ongoing to find out more about this.

We also know that metacognition is linked to a part of the brain called the Executive. It acts as a “sensible guide”, knowing what should be done. It is responsible for:

• Working memory.
• Attention.
• Cognitive flexibility.
• Reasoning.
• Problem solving.
• Planning.

These are all essential skills for effective learning, and they are skills that aren’t fully developed until we are about 25 years old. Many of these skills are included in the definition of metacognition (planning, evaluating, monitoring, etc). It makes sense that helping our students to develop these skills will help them to learn more effectively.

Want to find out more?

Here is a video of Dylan William that discusses this in more detail.

Below is a video of Dr Josh Walker on metacognition. Dr Josh Walker is from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at Austin.

Here’s a video which looks at what metacognition is, and why it is important for effective teaching and learning. It is resented by Claire McKenna, Kevin Crotty, Garrett Spellman, and Paul Mullane from Technology Teaching.

There is more helpful information about metacognition and the value of developing metacognitive skills in the classroom here and here.

Image credits

Header image: https://www.tes.com/sites/default/files/images/news_articles_migrated/0880.wellington2.jpg

Metacognition image: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-pathways-metacognition-in-classroom-marilyn-price-mitchell

Scaffolding image: http://www.rilmac.co.uk/scaffolding

Discussion image: http://www.weteachwelearn.org/2016/05/lets-talk-about-it-facilitating-whole-class-discussions/

Students in discussion image: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/rethinking-whole-class-discussion-todd-finley

Brains image: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/metacognition-gift-that-keeps-giving-donna-wilson-marcus-conyers