#45 Metacognition and Home

Hi Everyone

Metacognition has become something of a buzz word within education, sometimes enthused about (where a school feels they know what to do with it) and sometimes rejected as too intangible. After all it's not something you can just pick up off your desk as a teacher and use or apply with your students, so the word tends to engender mixed responses, depending on who you talk to.

The word was originally applied within education to try and describe how students need to think more about 'how' they're learning in order to improve, rather than about the learning itself. In recent years, being able to think metacognitively has been recognised as an important part of being able to make progress as a learner. We are however talking about learning from the student's perspective, not the teacher's!

That makes it tricky for teachers to know how to get inside their students' heads in order to have an impact. Part of the problem is that a large number of students do not develop the ability to think metacognitively for a whole range of reasons. There's also an increase in the number of learners who are finding it more difficult to attend school, behave appropriately when there, or engage with the learning on offer.

Developing metacognition is the starting point for solving all of these issues. Why? Because it involves the ability to find which thoughts inside your own head are not serving you well and being able to change them in order to experience something different. Anyone who doesn't enjoy a happy relationship with learning would benefit enormously from making some mental changes that would support improvement.

That kind of change cannot be applied from the outside, it has to come from inside the learner's own head. So helping a learner to develop metacognition can make a huge difference to what they can achieve. I've witnessed this first hand over many years as an Independent Success Coach working directly with students that schools were most worried about. I watched as so many of them rose well above their own expectations once they learned how to think differently.

I now share my expertise in this field with all those who have some role to play in the lives of children and young people especially those of school age. If you've been following me for a while, you'll be aware that I support school leaders to think about having a whole school approach to developing metacognition in their learners. Alongside that, I also provide separate training for teachers and support staff so that they feel confident about how they can use their roles to develop metacognition.

I also think it's important to include parents in thinking about what they can do to support the learners in their family with this. During lockdown some parents felt the stress of having to teach their children at home whilst not being familiar with the curriculum or understanding modern teaching methods. As parents we tend to hand our children over to the school and then feel we no longer have role to play in relation to their education.

Your influence however can be greater than you might think. There's a lot that you can do as a parent or carer to contribute to the development of metacognition in your child without needing any expertise in teaching. I would like to share 18 different simple things that you can do at home which will help to kickstart any learner's ability to think in a more metacognitive way.

In order to share this effectively with you, I'd like to invite you to join me for an on-line event called; 'Helping Your Child Achieve in School'. It's live, and covers what metacognition is, why so many children don't develop it naturally, and what you can do to give your child the advantage of being able to think metacognitively. The date; Tues 25th April (ie; very soon), the time; 12.00pm (BST) and it's completely free.

Here is the registration link; https://events.lizkeable.com/parents-webinar

All you need do is click here to register, add your details, and then you will automatically receive the zoom link to join the call. You can also copy the link, then paste it into your address bar and click from there. I'm excited to share some really useful know-how with you, so I hope that can join me.

If you need any further incentive; how about this comment made by someone who wrote to me after attending the same event on a previous occasion;

"If only this training had been available when my own children had been at school, I can only imagine how much more they might have achieved and even more importantly how their learning journey may have been more happy and less stressful during their school years".??

Take care everyone

Warm regards

Liz