Self-talk can be a great way to plan, monitor and evaluate your learning. You might find yourself doing it subconsciously, or work from a checklist. You might do it out loud, or hold an internal monologue, or, like me, even conduct a dialogue with yourself!
Like any form of metacognitive strategy, successful self-talk is context dependent and works on a continuum, from instruction to independence. The EEF highlight this continuum in their updated Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning guidance report. This blog will share approaches that will help move pupils along this continuum.
I talk: modelling expert thinking aloud
Effective pupil self-talk starts with the teacher. Pupils need to know that experts engage in this behaviour. And while experts may not always verbalise their thinking, teachers need to do this to make it explicit.
We need to make ‘visible’ the processes of planning, monitoring and evaluating our learning. Planning – thinking before the task what the best approaches will be and what might help us to be successful. Monitoring – assessing our own progress and adapting accordingly. Evaluating – looking back at how we did and how successful our strategies were. Making changes as a result.
And we can also think about the fact that we approach any learning task or opportunity with particular knowledge: Knowledge of self – what we know about ourselves, how we feel about a task, our experiences of being successful. Knowledge of strategies – being able to choose the right tools for the job. Knowledge of the task – what we know that will help us in this particular task, rather than any generic strategies.
1. Define Your Learning Objective 2. Select an Appropriate Task 3. Script Your Thinking 4. Integrate Questions and Prompts 5. Engage Students in the Process 6. Reflect and Adapt
After teacher modelling, we move pupils further towards independence by releasing some responsibility. We might start by encouraging pupils to work together. You can see some examples in the grid below of peer questioning, where pupils can support each other to develop metacognitive behaviours.
This kind of approach can work in two ways:
Pupils reflect out loud on how they are planning, monitoring and evaluating.
Pupils learn some of the questions and prompts that they can ask themselves independently.
There are a number of talk structures and frameworks that can be used to support this. For example, the EEF share ‘What I Know, What I Need to Find Out, and Where I’ll Look’ as one example.
You talk: supporting independent self-talk
And then we move towards independence. Again, this should start with the use of scaffolds. Often, these scaffolds can take the form of questions that ask pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate. There are some generic questions that can work in many contexts, such as:
What is the best approach? (plan) How am I doing? (monitor) How did I do? (evaluate)
But we also need to look at the context-specific nature of metacognition. We can provide specific prompts, but also teach pupils how to adapt these generic approaches for their context. In a writing task, we might use the following questions:
How am I doing compared to my last attempt? How am I doing compared to my original plan? How am I doing compared to my general writing targets? How am I doing in relation to audience, form and purpose? How am I doing in relation to the marking scheme?
One of the challenges here is that we may not always ‘hear’ the self-talk – it can be internal – so we need to check that it’s happening. We could follow up by asking pupils to talk through their thought processes or to annotate their work with some of the questions they were asking.
Developing self-talk is a valuable way to support learners to become independent. With modelling, scaffolds and a shared language, teachers can foster an environment rich in self-talk.
