#116 - Metacognition, A Teacher's Perspective

Hi Everyone

I promised that this issue would look at metacognition from a teacher’s perspective. To do that, I’m going to share some of the content from a recent training session I was invited to provide as part of a new professional development pathway for teaching staff at St Christopher's School in Bahrain. It was the first of 4 sessions, so forms the foundation of what follows for them over the next few months.

I shared with the group some of the reactions I’ve had to ‘metacognition’ over the years, which demonstrate how varied knowledge levels and a willingness to develop the skill in students are, from school to school. Here are four such reactions;

? What am I supposed to do with something so intangible, I want resources I can pick up off a desk and ‘use’ with students.

? There’s not enough time to have ‘thinking about thinking’ sessions, we have a curriculum to get through.

? We tried using the ‘reflection cycle’ templates, but they didn’t really work.

? I’ve started using metacognition as one of my classroom strategies but it only seems to help some students.

You can see some level of resistance here, albeit at different levels, but each one of those comments is based, at least in part, on a misconception in relation to what metacognition is, and how to go about developing it in students. I hope over the next few months to help everyone, not just teachers taking part in the course, but readers of this newsletter as well, to gain a greater appreciation for their role in the development of metacognition.

The only place to start with this topic is inside learners’ heads! You cannot refer to metacognition without examining what goes on in a student’s mind as it’s the reflections they have about their own learning that are the key to achieving academic progress. David Boud made a point about this, which is just as relevant today as it was at the time when he spoke about teachers setting up ‘planned learning situations’ for their students.

He and his team pointed out that; ‘What emerges from the learning activity will be determined more by the learner, than by the person who designed the activity’. (Promoting Reflection in Learning - A Model (p36) 1985, David Boud, Rosemary Keogh, David Walker).

That seems a bit of a kick in the teeth for a teacher whose spent hours designing something novel and interesting for their students to do, but very true nonetheless, that we cannot disregard the impact of the unique mental profile that each student carries with them into the classroom. The situation is made even more tricky by the fact that this includes a vast unconscious store of information from early childhood, as well as any previous conscious learning.

So next time you’re faced with a class of students, ignore the obvious uniform, behaviour, chatter etc, and picture them instead simply as a set of floating brains. That’s the essential part of each student you’re trying to connect with, and the greatest influencer on their learning. Those minds are not just waiting for us to fill them up with knowledge however, so we often have to wrestle students' thoughts away from whatever is currently preoccupying them, before they’re ready to learn.

One really important point to keep in mind about those students in front of you, is that whatever age they are now, they all started out as very effective learners. We’re all born with some level of cognition (allowing for potential developmental delays as a result of illness, trauma or other disadvantage), which allows us to learn some very sophisticated concepts, like language, problem solving, social conventions etc, from birth onwards.

We’re using ‘cognition’ to do that, (from the Latin ‘cognoscere’ meaning to know, recognise or learn), as a natural, inbuilt skill, which requires very little effort, but enables us to rapidly accumulate a massive database in our sub-conscious brain. David Geary refers to that natural download of information during the early years, as ‘folk learning’, because its purpose is to help children work out how they fit into the particular social culture that they’re born into. Others might call the same thing, ‘primary’ learning. (Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science.?Educational Psychologist, 43(4), 179–195.)

So…the obvious question is; what happens when they start school?

To cite David Geary again on this, he states that each culture also has its own desirable knowledge store, important for passing onto the next generation, which he calls ‘cultural’ learning. Schools are the structure through which this is achieved and varies from country to country. This is sometimes known as ‘secondary’ learning. (Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science.?Educational Psychologist, 43(4), 179–195.)

Secondary learning requires conscious engagement in a way that was not required pre-school and is, if you look at it closely, almost the polar opposite of what children are used to. Primary learning is unconscious, effortless, driven by curiosity, and gathered directly from personal experience, before being put to use somehow. Secondary learning on the other hand is very much conscious, requires effort, is driven by the teacher’s expectations and learners are ‘taught’ with subsequent assessment in mind.

The point is that every child has real potential to succeed as a learner, but in a formal setting like school, where they are being ‘taught’ by others, something more than inbuilt cognition is required to ensure that learning is a conscious process leading to long-term memory storage that permits future recall. Meta-cognition is the key, but few students possess it automatically, so we have to consider how best to help them develop it. ?Please join me next time to think more about why this skill is so essential and how to naturalise its use in the classroom. You could subscribe so as not to miss an issue or hit the bell on my profile to be alerted about new posts. Either way, I hope to see you soon.

Warm regards

Liz

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