#106 What is Achievable?

Hi Everyone

Regular readers will know that I often refer to naturalising metacognition rather than formalising it, which is a slightly different approach to that taken by other practitioners. My reasoning is that despite the term’s initial creation and application to promoting improvements in education, metacognition is in fact an essential life skill.

Every person who has achieved the success that they desired, has had to apply a metacognitive way of thinking in order to get there. So, if we don’t feel successful (in any endeavour), maybe the answer lies in learning to use metacognition more effectively. When one way doesn’t work, are you prepared to try a different route, make mistakes and adjust as you go along?

You can imagine the unfulfilled life of someone who is unable to analyse the results experienced from decisions that they’ve previously made, doesn't recognise when those results are not what they really wanted, and is unwilling to try a different route to achieve the desired end. It’s all about a willingness to ‘change your mind’.

This is a necessary process whether we’re looking at making progress with a career plan for our professional lives, or with personal hopes and dreams about what we want to do, be or have. It also applies to parents as we aim to support our child’s progress in school, whether that’s for academic success or helping them find a sense of belonging through social relationships. It's also a serious consideration for educators trying to instil a more metacognitive way of thinking into their pupils.

A major contributing factor to what any of us achieve (at any age) is the view we hold of ourselves, in other words our self-concept, and what we feel we’re capable of. Sometimes it’s also about what we believe is even ‘possible’ for us. Using metacognition relies heavily on us feeling that we matter, that success is desirable and that making changes to how we think is the best way to move forwards. Not everyone holds that positive view of themselves.?

To that end, over the next few newsletters, I’d like to review how we can improve children’s self-concept and the way they react to learning, incorporating lessons that we can also take from it as adults in order to think more positively about our own abilities.?

So, as a starting point my first recommendations is; be very careful about what you say both ‘to’ children and ‘about’ them, remembering that they may overhear you! A child’s self-concept is formed at a very young age using information collected sub-consciously from those around them. If they hear negative things said about themselves even in jest, this gets absorbed to create part of how they view themselves. If you want your child to start school with the confidence that they can cope, then check how you are talking to them in the years leading up to that milestone.?

As an adult, you might like to consider whether you started life with a negative self-concept and therefore didn’t have the belief that you were capable of doing well in school. Remember that the view we hold of ourselves forms sub-consciously from our early-years experiences, so however you felt then, was actually nothing to do with you, and doesn’t have to hold you back now! You can consciously change how you feel about yourself at any age, so it’s not too late to start thinking differently.?

If you are an educator, you will have experience of students who don’t do well in school due to a negative self-concept. It’s really important that we help every student to ‘consciously’ improve the view they hold about what they can achieve. That means absolutely no ‘put downs’, a relentless positivity about every student both to their face and behind their backs, and a total belief that they can achieve what they need to, even if they need some support to get there.?That belief will gradually transfer to the students themselves.

Remember that by its very nature, progress requires everyone to change their minds at regular intervals about what they used to think. The same is true of learning, which is a gradual change in perceptions that leads to updates for our internal database. What is essential for either of these things to happen, is a positive self-concept, where we believe that change is both desirable and possible, as well as feeling we’re capable of making it happen and then managing the results.

Having a positive self-concept is just the start of the naturalisation process if we want to improve metacognition for ourselves, our children, or our students. It’s so important to the successful development of this vital life skill that I’m going to continue along the same theme next time to provide further suggestions for how to improve our internal self-talk in a way that enables more effective metacognition.

Please join me then, and take care in the meantime.

Warm regards

Liz