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Metacognition, chocolate brownies and a very wise bear
With thanks to fantastic colleagues at my primary school for providing INSET, and to AA Milne for inspiration.
Piglet: Pooh?
Pooh: Yes, Piglet?
Piglet: I’ve been thinking.
Pooh: That’s a very good habit to get into, Piglet.
Rather than googling other wonderful Winnie the Pooh quotes, please take a moment to think about one of the most effective learners you have had the privilege of teaching.
· What made them a successful learner?
· How did they acquire knowledge?
· What skills did they employ?
· What traits did they show?
Forgive my presumptuousness, but might I suggest that they were well organised, could plan, could break down tasks, could deploy different strategies to solve problems, were willing to ask for help, worked well with others, could see the bigger picture and could evaluate their own learning.
This begs two further questions. How did our learner develop the requisite knowledge, skills and behaviours? And can you think of another learner, or perhaps many other learners, who, had they been equipped with these skills, knowledge and behaviours, might have had a more successful time at school?
This begs two further questions. How did our learner develop the requisite knowledge, skills and behaviours? And can you think of another learner, or perhaps many other learners, who, had they been equipped with these skills, knowledge and behaviours, might have had a more successful time at school?
Now we have established the existence of a problem, what can we, as educators, do about it?
As Winnie the Pooh might say, we need to think, think, think…
Low cost, high impact
Metacognition and self-regulation approaches are a low cost, high impact way of helping learners to think explicitly about their own learning.
This is done by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating their own learning. Self-regulated learning can be split into three stages.
1. Cognition – the mental processes involved in knowing, understanding and learning
2. Metacognition – the way learners plan, monitor and evaluate their learning
3. Motivation – our willingness to engage and apply skills to learning.
Putting this within a school context might make things clearer…
Perhaps think about preparing children for their Year 4 multiplication tables check.
1. Cognition – learning the tables, chanting them in class, singing times tables songs, playing times tables games
2. Metacognition – noticing the commutative property, doubling multiples of 4 to find multiples of 8, representing questions using arrays or counters, working out which questions you still find hard and practising them, evaluating how you prefer to learn times tables.
3. Motivation – Practising at home and at school, using that times table wall chart, persevering even when the questions seem hard.
As you can see, it is during stage 2 (metacognition) that the skills, traits and behaviours of effective learners come to the fore.
Metacognition
Metacognition itself has three main stages.
1. Planning
2. Monitoring
3. Evaluation.
Think about anything new that you have tried, and you will probably have exercised all three stages of metacognition. My disastrous attempts to make chocolate brownies for the family spring immediately to mind.
1. Planning (finding a recipe, working out timings, traipsing to the supermarket for ingredients)
2. Monitoring (referring back to the recipe repeatedly, peeping through the closed oven door while baking)
3. Evaluation (cutting, querying the strange consistency, realising that you forgot to add the flour…)
Following evaluation, the metacognitive learner (or baker) would change something because of it (I asked my daughter to bake the brownies next time…)
How can teachers help?
Teachers can help learners with the planning stage by encouraging them to:
- • Think about the goal or learning objective
- • Make links to previous learning
- • Consider how they might approach a task
- • Consider which resources may prove helpful.
Asking metacognitive questions when you model learning really helps here. In many cases, the ideas above can be easily rephrased.
- • So, what are we learning today?
- • Have I done anything like this before?
- • Where should I start?
- • What do I need in order to do this?
Thinking aloud helps with the monitoring stage. Model this by asking questions when you work through a problem or produce a piece of writing with your class. My favourites include…
• Is this approach working?
• What might I do differently?
• Who could I ask for help?
The importance of evaluation
Working within a crammed curriculum, it can be difficult to allocate sufficient time for evaluating learning, but doing so is a vital part of metacognition. Evaluating is simply appraising the effectiveness of your plan implementation. Again, this can be modelled by the teacher asking questions of themselves while they explain.
- • What went well?
- • What could I have done better?
- • Can I apply this to another situation?
- • Is there another way to do this?
- • Is there something else I need to try?
Once you have modelled the skills, promote metacognitive awareness within the classroom. Make it manageable by telling the children about metacognition and focusing on particular areas. Teach the children about the strategies they can use to learn and study, and help pupils learn to regulate their thinking while they work. Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) suggests that metacognitive approaches in Science and Maths have proved particularly effective. I have found this a good starting point when modelling metacognition with my Key Stage 2 class. Presenting some of the planning, monitoring and evaluation questions as sentence stems on flipcharts and PowerPoints has helped to embed them and in recent months, I have started to hear children ask those questions when working with learning partners.
A recognised, effective approach
The EEF claims that metacognition is a low cost, high impact approach that can be particularly effective with primary school pupils and could potentially lead to accelerated progress (up to 7 months). I would also argue that developing metacognitive skills is important for children’s personal development and reaches beyond the scope of the school curriculum. Further planning, monitoring and evaluation is the only way I’ll improve my baking skills, anyway. So, please read more about metacognition and self-regulation, and apply what you have learned in your classroom. As Winnie the Pooh might say “It isn’t much good having anything exciting, if you can’t share it with somebody.”
I didn't say that - but I like it!
With many thanks to Mike Kinnear for writing this article.
Mike is a primary teacher and a member of the EuHu teacher board.
