: Metacognition – more than just thinking about thinking What makes a successful learner?
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Metacognition – more than just thinking about thinking
What makes a successful learner?
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by Gloucestershire Research School at the Gloucestershire Learning Alliance
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Jess Hutchison
ELE (Metacognition and Curriculum) and PSS (Partnership Area Lead)
Jess is our metacognition expert with twenty years’ experience in education including senior leadership, headship and leading a DfE English Hub. She is a member of the school improvement team at The GLA Trust and is a BASIC coach. Jess is an experienced practitioner in curriculum development with expertise in early reading and foundation curriculum subjects.
What makes a successful learner? It is a question at the very core of our profession that has been pondered for millennia. Frustratingly there is no panacea or silver bullet but we do now at least have some research-informed evidence, supporting us to hedge our best bets; one of the most promising bets is to develop our learner’s metacognitive strategies.
As an ELE for Gloucester Research School I am often asked questions which start with a variation on the phrase ‘can I ask a stupid question…’. Of course, as we all know, there is no such thing as a stupid question but there is something particular about the discourse around metacognition and cognitive science that makes many people feel like there is.
Teachers should acquire the professional understanding and skills to develop their pupils’ metacognitive knowledge’
Recommendation one of the EEF guidance report on metacognition (EEF 2021) says ‘teachers should acquire the professional understanding and skills to develop their pupils’ metacognitive knowledge’. Yet my experience is that teachers are not always clear about what metacognition means or how to apply it in the classroom. When we do talk about metacognition, we can often be heard saying that metacognition is ‘thinking about thinking’. Whilst accurate in many ways, saying metacognition is ‘thinking about thinking’ is like saying phonics is about ‘sounds’. Yes, there is truth in it but it is also so much more. To describe metacognition as thinking about thinking, doesn’t do enough to help the practitioner in the classroom to support their learners – how does one teach ‘thinking about thinking’?
First, I find it helps to be aware of our own metacognitive processes. When I begin training on metacognition, we often start with a simple memory exercise in which colleagues try to memorise as many images or words as they can in a set time. It doesn’t matter if anyone actually remembers them all; instead the focus of the exercise is to pause and deliberately reflect on the process of remembering.
We then discuss a few pertinent questions – how did you feel when you heard about the task? What were your first thoughts about how to tackle it? How did those link to your knowledge of yourself as a learner? What strategies did you use? Did you change tack part way through? How successful were those strategies?
Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content
We reflect on what this might mean for our learners and how they might approach a new learning challenge, can they all draw on the same skills that we do? How might this be different for our most successful learners and those who find remembering more difficult? Dunlosky explains that ‘teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content’ (Dunlosky 2013) yet so many of our learners, especially disadvantaged leaners do not always have these metacognitive tools in their toolbox.
We acknowledge that as teachers, we are expert learners. For us these skills may even have become subconscious but for our novice learners, they need to be made explicit and obvious. This real-life example of how we actually go about ‘thinking about thinking’ helps to begin to make the abstract concept more tangible. This simple cognitive exercise allows us to pull apart metacognition in a more practical way. It helps us to begin to develop that simple definition of ‘thinking about thinking’ and extend it into a set of components that can be used to develop our learner’s metacognitive abilities.
Dunlosky, in the 2023 EEF Podcast on metacognition explains that metacognition can be thought of as having three components – beliefs and knowledge about cognition, monitoring of your own cognition and control of your cognitive processes.
In the example above, we have done all three; we have applied what we know about learning (eg repeating the words), we chose strategies which we know have worked for us in the past (looking for patterns, rhymes, mnemonics) and we monitored how well we are remembering (eg by self-testing), sometimes changing tack and choosing a different strategy if it wasn’t working.
All of these are the tools of a metacognitive learner, all of these are the tools we need to teach our learners to be adept at using for themselves.
We can now begin to talk about metacognition as a learner’s conscious management of their learning. We have pulled apart that it means knowing about how learning happens, then purposefully deciding how best to go about learning and whilst we are learning, actively monitoring how well we are remembering.
As teachers, when we begin to shape a better understanding of what metacognition means, we can better support our learners to be metacognitive. There are many tools available out there to support with this, the EEF’s own guidance report is a great place to start. In our next instalment we will be looking in more detail at recommendation 2 – Explicitly teach pupils metacognitive strategies, including how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning.
