Research School Network: Exploring metacognition in reading – what might it look like, sound like and feel like when we teach it?

One of the important messages that comes through the recently published EEF Guidance report on Metacognition and self-regulated learning is that these processes look different in each subject and context. Although the metacognitive cycle of plan, monitor and evaluate generally remains the same, each of these thinking processes looks, feels and sounds different depending on when, what and how we are learning. The EEF trial of ReflectEd highlighted this perfectly. The trial measured the impact of the activities designed to develop children’s ability to monitor and manage their own learning on the numeracy and the reading attainment of the pupils involved. Although it had a positive impact on the children’s maths, but did not support the reading development of the children. It seems that the approaches used were better suited to learning maths.

But what do we mean by metacognitive processes, in contrast to cognitive processes? The guidance report describes cognition as the mental process of knowing, understanding and learning. In reading, this might include the nuts and bolts needed to read; letter recognition, the knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, knowing how text works (words, phrases, lines, sentences, pages, speech bubbles), knowing vocabulary, having knowledge about the world. As Scarborough’s Reading Model highlights, children need to acquire a wide range of knowledge to be able to read with meaning.

Scarborough’s Reading Rope, taken from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Publications/Campaigns/Literacy/KS2_Literacy_Guidance_2017.pdf

The metacognitive processes of reading involve understanding how to use all of these bit and pieces of knowledge; planning how to use them, monitoring and evaluating the success of the outcome. I often think of the child as a conductor in an orchestra – when each section (or strand) is working together in harmony and supporting each other, it sounds great. If the wind instruments lose their place in the music – cacophony! So, it seems that when we teach reading, we have two jobs; to teach the children how to play the instruments they need to read, and then how to conduct the whole orchestra with fluency to achieve magic!

Observing a small group reading session taught to children in Reception this week, after reading the Guidance report, helped me reflect on what this balancing act might look like as we are teaching reading. It was fascinating to see how the teacher skilfully balanced the challenges of ensuring the children were prepared with the knowledge they need to tackle the new text with how she modelled the metacognitive skills of planning to read, monitoring for accuracy and meaning, and evaluation of the successful strategies used.

The session started with some explicit teaching- the teacher revisited a small number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences that would be used in the text. In this lesson, she was focusing on 3 different vowel diagraphs in the centre of words and she had chosen a text carefully to ensure the text contained some examples in. She used a round of flashcards to introduce the diagraphs and asked the children to say the sound connected with them. This was swiftly followed by writing the graphemes on mini whiteboards and scanning through the text for examples.

Next, she moved on to introduce the book. Ensuring all the children were attending to her, she began to explore the title and front cover, asking questions and explaining her thoughts and ideas. She asked the children what they thought might be in the text, and then rapidly moved through the pages, checking on items of vocabulary knowledge, and ensuring she carefully drew their attention to a couple of unusual phrases that she knew they would find tricky to say. She was ensuring the children had all the knowledge they needed to be able to orchestrate all the strands together.

Before the children began to read for themselves, she asked ​“What can you do if you get to a part you are not sure of?” In their responses, the children illustrated their growing metacognitive skills.

“I can ask my friend!” one of them piped up.

“Yes, but before you do that, what can you try?” she nudged further

“We can look at the letter, and rollercoaster.”

“Yes, rollercoasting the letter sounds together often helps. Remember to blend the sounds together quickly to help you recognise the word.”

“If it is a tricky word, we can think of others words we might know that are similar and work it out.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea!”

“And then we can ask our friends!”

“Yes, OK – but remember, you must check that what you are reading is making sense, too. If it doesn’t sound right, you should have another go so you understand what the characters are doing. When we’ve finished, we are going to talk about what happened in the story.”

With this the children started with enthusiasm, each tackling the text, reading aloud to themselves. As they worked, I noticed several of them stop and evaluate their successes and realise when their reading was inaccurate or didn’t make sense. These children were independent, pulling on all the strands they needed and they used a range of strategies to correct themselves. It wasn’t the same for all of them – she was hesitant and tentative. At several points, she stopped and did not seem to know what to do next, waiting for the teacher to help her decide her next step and scaffold her options when challenges arrived. For although she had the nuts and bolts of reading, she hadn’t yet learnt what to do with them.

To round the lesson off, the teacher lead the children in a discussion of what they had learnt from the text and gave them some explicit praise about some of the strategies and processes she saw them use effectively to be independent. The children skipped out of the session, clutching the books –one step closer to being fully independent, fully self-planning, fully self-monitoring, fully self-evaluating readers – magic!