#132 - Improving School Results

Hi Everyone

As I mentioned last time, my weekly newsletter is often based around whatever I’ve been doing in the world of metacognition recently, which I can draw on to help you feel more equipped to support the learners that you care about. Over recent years my work has involved supporting parents, school leaders, teachers and learning assistants to look at how their various roles can be used to develop metacognition in children and young people.

This week I delivered a presentation for African School Leaders currently visiting the UK to look at best practice in ‘Structuring Schools for Excellence’. Thank you to the lovely Angelina Ikeako for inviting me to participate again this year in the Golden Links conference, where my interactive talk cum workshop was about ‘Metacognition – The Neuroscience of Effective Learning’.

I felt it was important to link the idea of neuroscience to a more concrete focus on school ‘structure’ and how that contributes to excellence, so we focused on where a reputation for excellence comes from. It’s the results achieved by a school that attracts attention, but the one and only source of those results is the cumulative effort put in by all the students who attend that school.

We therefore need to plan for improving how students learn, making sure that teachers understand the neuroscience that can support progress in academic achievement. After looking at how children’s brains develop from birth, and how they use natural and instinctive cognition to gain information pre-school, delegates worked in groups to discuss how that early learning differs from our expectation for how they achieve once in a classroom.

There’s quite a gap between the way young children run around, follow their own curiosity, experiment, and unconsciously absorb the learning from their own personal experiences, and the sit still, be quiet, do as I say, ethos in most classrooms. The problem is that the brain was not designed to work in the way we expect children and young people to learn in school.

The current structure for education is a fairly recent concept in the annals of time, and is unfortunately not the most effective way for students to learn. For all of us caught up in that system therefore, we need the skills to make it work?despite that flaw, because we care about the impact on millions of students around the world for whom school is either compulsory or considered desirable.

The answer lies in helping students to make the switch from the unconscious absorption of information, to the conscious analysis required for committing an expected curriculum to memory. That means going beyond the natural ability to learn using ‘cognition’, to employing a more meta-cognitive way of thinking that promotes academic progress. All students need the skill of analysing their own thought processes if they’re going to achieve their best possible results whilst in education.

As a group of educators at this week's conference, we analysed the experience of 3 students who were all unable to think in a metacognitive way, but for different reasons. That activity helped us to think about those students who don’t believe that they have the ability to learn effectively, those who believe in themselves but don’t know how to learn effectively, and those who know how to learn but are unable to commit that learning to memory due to a lack of personal involvement.

The audience also shared ideas about what we might hear those students saying which would give us a clue about any difficulty they might be experiencing in relation to changing the way that they think. Things like; I can’t, I don’t know, it’s too hard, I don’t want to, why bother, I don’t get it, I mustn’t make a mistake, I don’t remember, exams scare me, etc.

We also thought about the impact on these students of the stress that they might experience as a result of feeling lost, inadequate, unsure, or like they're failing. A stressed mind is focused on the fear, and is unable to think clearly due to a shift in the brain’s blood supply which happens as a result of the perceived threat. These students were all great learners before they started school, so it’s the expected change from one type of learning to the other that has stymied them.

Through our role as educators we therefore need to help students make that swap to a more conscious role in their own progress, and delegates willingly took part in an activity involving key words and ‘best guesses’, in order to work out how a teacher can help students to successfully bridge the gap. The activity was based on the following questions; How can teachers support students’ belief in their own ability to learn’, ‘how can teachers promote familiarity with the learning process, and how can teachers ensure that students are capable of independent thought??

All very important questions if we want to ensure our learners develop metacognition, and absolutely essential if you want to improve a school’s results. Progress of any kind is only possible through the implementation of metacognitive thought, so I would encourage all school leaders to think seriously about how our knowledge of neuroscience links with how we structure schools for excellence.