Research School Network: Metacognition and structured talk Chris Runeckles explores how we can support students to articulate metacognitive thinking and purposefully direct their learning

The evidence suggests we can teach pupils to be more metacognitive and develop self-regulation. By adapting our practice, we can help them to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning so that it is more effective. It also suggests investing time in this is worthwhile, both as the potential positive effects are large and because it disproportionately benefits those students experiencing educational disadvantage.

What often eludes teachers though is how to teach it effectively. One of the challenges is feeling as though the teaching of metacognitive thought is an add-on. Something you do once you’ve completed all of the other many teaching practices you have used and made habits of throughout your career. Approaching it in this way generally means it either doesn’t happen or happens very sporadically.

Therefore, to generate the benefits of metacognitive thinking in pupils, we need to find ways to integrate it into our existing practices, rather than creating new ones. A good example is metacognitive questioning. We all ask questions, so just adapting some of them to focus on metacognition doesn’t take an enormous shift. You can find a clip of me demonstrating how I do this in my secondary history classroom here.

Now, this brings up a second challenge around metacognition. Changing teacher behaviours is very difficult, fiendishly so. However, even that is not enough when pursuing metacognition. This is because ultimately metacognition is not about teacher behaviours, it is about what pupils think about before, during and after learning. Of course, our behaviours as teachers target that in order to change it. For example, I ask my metacognitive questions to force students to think metacognitively. However, ultimately I want them to do that thinking independent of my prompts. One way I can do that is through structured talk.

As with questioning, this is not about creating a new teaching behaviour, but adapting an existing one. I use paired talk (or talk partners if you prefer) as part of my general teaching practice. The usual format this follows is write, pair, share. Here is an example (I’ve taken out some instructional parts which I would have used while building up class habits for paired talk):

​“On your whiteboards write down what you consider to be the greatest challenge the Weimar goverment faced between 1918 and 1923. Include one sentence explaining why. You have 30 seconds to do this independently before you will share this with your partner. Start now.”

​“I want you to now tell your partner what you wrote, your partner will listen and then they will share their own. I will ask at least three pairs to feed back to me on what their partner thinks and their explanation. Turn and talk.“

This is useful in two ways, first it is using structured talk as a tool for thinking about and learning the history. Second it is also creating an opportunity for structured talk within a disciplinary context. It would lead on to further disciplinary talk as we had a class discussion probing, developing and challenging different judgements.

The introduction of metacognition to this mix, would be to use the same method to push students to think metacognitively rather than directly about the history. For example, I might want them to use their metacognitive knowledge of a particular second order concept (for example significance), to help them plan a written response more effectively. Here I’m stepping back for a second from the historical content to think deeply about the concept and a disciplinary skill. I might do this after showing a question, but before we start planning it in detail. For example (again there are blanks here that would need to have been filled through previous teaching, particularly around historical significance):

​“On your whiteboards write down how you decide which factor is the most significant one before you answer a question like this one. You have 30 seconds to do this independently before you will share this with your partner. Start now.”

​“I want you to now tell your partner what you wrote, your partner will listen and then they will share their own thoughts. I will ask at least three pairs to feed back to me on how their partner chooses their most significant factor. Turn and talk.“

Here then I am asking the pupils to think about and articulate not the historical facts or their judgement, but the process they go through (or perhaps don’t!) when planning in history. This part of the discipline is of course taught by teachers, but speaking from my own experience, not necessarily something I would always have prompted pupils to articulate either directly to me or to each other. By weaving the explicit teaching of metacognitive thinking into structured talk in this way we both emphasise its importance and encourage them to think this way independently once the prompt of the structured talk is removed. Ultimately, it is not creating a new practice, more adapting an existing one to incorporate metacognition.

This is just one example of how we can use metacognition practically without it becoming ​“another thing”. There are as always caveats, it does take time away from teaching content and time is always pressured. Also, it needs careful planning. The first example would be easier for a history teacher to come up with off the cuff than the second. However, if we want our pupils to think more like an expert and have more tools available to purposefully direct their learning then the weaving of metacognition into structured talk is one way we can achieve this.