Research School Network: Talking Metacognition How can we promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom?


Talking Metacognition

How can we promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom?

by Durrington Research School
on the

As a history teacher I’m certainly prone to talking (and particularly arguing) more than the average person. I would say many of my history colleagues share those traits, and indulge them through the lessons they teach.

Talking in the classroom in general has long been a point of conjecture. Teachers have at points been harshly disciplined for the crime of talking too much and latterly encouraged to talk more as direct instruction has gained traction. Children talking in the classroom has at points supposedly signposted an effective lesson and in almost identical circumstances a lesson out of control.

A little know corner of the EEF’s Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning guidance report may help us in picking through this conjecture to find some advice on how best to structure talk in our classroom. The guidance report has five key recommendations, and recommendation five is:

Promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom”

Essentially the guidance articulates how teachers can use the questions they ask, the discussions they guide and the type of talk they model as a strategy for developing students’ metacognitive capacities. For example, by asking students probing and challenging questions teachers can help students to reflect deeply on their learning. In their 2008 paper The Value of Exploratory Talk” Mercer and Dawes explain how this type of talk is an ideal way to share and develop learning.

For example, if I was teaching students about how to assess the usefulness of an historical source I could just ask them the answers to the questions that would reveal its relative usefulness, like:

Who wrote the source?”

Are diary entries written to be read by the public?”

If he says the people of London were hysterical during the Blitz, what does that mean?”

These questions are all good and would help to decode the source. However, with exploratory talk I could ask questions that would probe the answers more deeply, such as:

Why should historians consider the author of a source?”

Do you think that is more or less important than when it was written?”

What has been most helpful to us in judging the usefulness of this source?”

Here students are being taught a greater awareness of the strategies I am teaching them to use in a particular domain, and by extension being taught ways to improve their metacognitive knowledge around this particular task and the strategies associated with it.

There are further useful models for how we can promote the sort of talk that builds and helps students practise their metacognitive skills. Robin Alexander has developed the idea of Dialogic Teaching in which students learn to reason, discuss, argue and explain. The approach was part of an EEF-backed project which involved thousands of schools. You can read about the project in more detail here.

Part of his model is to identify six basic talk repertoires for effective teaching and learning:

- Talk settings

- Everyday talk

- Learning talk

- Teaching talk

- Questioning

- Extending

Guiding these repertoires are principles which highlight how they can be done effectively, for example that talk should be cumulative and purposeful.

To build on the idea of talk being cumulative, according to Alexander the classic form of teacher/​student interaction looks like this:

Teacher asks question – student gives response – teacher provides explanation or feedback

With dialogic teaching, rather than the teacher giving feedback on the response or layering their own explanation over the top, they ask further questions eliciting discussion and dialogue, thereby moving beyond closed questions and answers. The benefit here is that students think more deeply about the learning and are forced to manipulate the ideas they are sharing.

Another model for developing this more metacognitive talk would be to use Socratic questioning. As the name suggests, this literally dates back to ancient Greece and is based around the idea that we should probe learners rather than simply accepting their answers. It has six levels which look like this:

1. Asking them to clarify. Could you explain?

2. Challenging and probing assumptions. Do you agree?

3. Demanding evidence. Can you give me an example?

4. Looking for alternative viewpoints and perspectives. Is there another way of looking at this?

5. Exploring implications and consequences. What would happen if?

6. Questioning the question. Why did I ask that question?

Ultimately then, to build metacognitive skills in our pupils we have to incorporate its principles into so much of what we do. By its nature it encompasses so many teacher/​student interactions. However, the adaptations to teacher talk are accessible to all and while not necessarily easy, is an intervention all teachers can build into their practice.

Chris Runeckles is an Assistant Headteacher at Durrington High School. He is also an Assistant Director for Durrington Research School and is delivering our training on Memory and Metacognition.

More from the Durrington Research School

Show all news

This website collects a number of cookies from its users for improving your overall experience of the site.Read more