Research School Network: Metacognition approach to narrative writing

The metacognition approach been a key pillar in my development as a teacher. It almost seems obvious, and I think it is the keystone of a good education, but explicitly teaching students how to think when approaching a new, unseen task is paramount for their future lives. It’s not just about that classroom task or even their GCSEs; it’s their ability to use their knowledge and strategies to plan the most effective or efficient way of completing a task, any task. It’s their ability to monitor their progress as they are completing the task (obviously using the plan to support them) and their reactive, adaptive thinking along the way. Finally, it’s their ability to evaluate their plan and decision making at the end of the task, and to have the awareness that (perhaps no) changes need to be made next time.





Metacognition, on a practical level, boils down to three strategies: planning, monitoring and evaluating. Alex Quigley used an analogy at the Festival of Education (Wellington, 2018) that resonated with me. If you have a meeting or event to attend across the county (or country if you’re really dedicated), you will first plan how you are going to get there, what time you need to leave and any other considerations for your journey. When you embark, you will monitor the journey, making sure that you are on time and perhaps referring back to your original plan if required. Here, you will also make some on-the-spot decisions in order to achieve your goal; roadworks diversions or train delays are an example of some reactive decisions that you may need to make during the journey. Finally, you will evaluate the journey afterwards, asking questions like ​“What would I do differently next time?” and ​“Was it a good idea to try and skip the traffic by coming off the motorway?” This is the critical, structured thinking and awareness that allows for improvements to be made in the future.





Narrative writing. Another notorious section of the Language GCSE and an incredibly frustrating thing to teach if you don’t have a class of avid readers who have experience with how characters are crafted or how a plot is structured.





After marking the Language Component One for WJEC, I realised that another difficulty with narrative writing is that an effective piece is a concoction of skills that are independently difficult to master. Furthermore, if any of these independent skills are missing, then the narrative can fall flat. I’ve experienced a plethora of narratives with excellent sensory description and characterisation, but with the absence of a dilemma or any suspense, the narrative was deemed incomplete or unfulfilled and scored below what I knew that student was capable of.





Alongside the barriers that students face, a difficulty for teachers is providing effective feedback for narrative writing. It can be problematic to have a feedback lesson following a narrative assessment when some students have targets around their characterisation or their use of sensory language, whilst others have mastered these but have targets around their suspense and tension or the quality of their ending. It can all start to feel a bit like ​“whack-a-mole”. Luckily, the awareness of these difficulties means that strategies can be implemented to help address them.





I knew that a narrative could not be effective on any level unless the student has learned to use language for effect. Commonly labelled ​“show, don’t tell”, this is the concept of using language to describe a setting or a character’s behaviour, allowing the reader to make their own inferences and form their own opinions. Before students can start thinking about dilemmas, suspense or effective endings, they need to master (or at least become competent with) the basics of descriptive language.





Start by, once more, being explicit to yourself about the skills you want to teach. More specifically, which skills are required to effectively ​“show, don’t tell”? I started small, looking at how to ​“show” a character’s emotion by describing their behaviour and appearance (characterisation skill), using a simple combination of adjectives, verbs and adverbs (writer’s techniques skill) at first. I didn’t move on until my students were competently describing an array of character emotions from anger to excitement. Next, I slowly introduced new skills, such as mood and atmosphere, sensory imagery and settings, again, making sure they are well-developed before moving on. It was only when I felt my students had a solid grasp of descriptive writing that I moved onto action writing, where skills like dilemmas, suspense and effective resolutions were covered.

Metacognition became involved after the students actually had some strategies and knowledge to apply. Within descriptive writing, it started with the students planning which genre conventions they were going to follow, leading them to choose an appropriate setting, then a particular mood and atmosphere (for example, is the train station busy and crowded, or abandoned and sinister?) Following this, the students can consider their choices of sensory language and characterisation description. These should ​‘match up’ to the mood and atmosphere that they selected. The process of thinking would go something like this:





1) Genre: Gothic


2) Setting: Church


3) Mood and Atmosphere: Eerie, anxious, sinister


4) Sensory choices: Lots of candles, macabre stained-glass windows, silence, smell of ash and rotting wood.


5) Characterisation: Male. Slow movements (stumbled, edged, crept), frightened appearance (white face, wide eyes, trembling hands).


6) Writer’s techniques: Powerful verbs to describe movement, simile to describe the windows, personification to describe the candles.





You can begin to see how these independent skills can be taught explicitly, yet can also be placed into a structure for students to follow in the planning and monitoring of their writing. Students can begin to plan by looking at the big picture of their narrative, perhaps a particular genre or mood and atmosphere, then zooming in gradually to the use of a particular technique to describe a particular movement or setting feature. Eventually, students will have mastered a whole bunch of required skills, and have the cognitive ability to plan their narrative from the ground-up, to monitor their progress as they write (including adaptation, new ideas maybe?) and to evaluate the effectiveness and frequency of their planned criteria following the completion of their narratives.





To conclude, I think that alongside modelling and teaching the skills independently, students should be given opportunities to read lots of short stories to help them generate ideas and develop their knowledge of writer’s craft. By isolating the skills, we can (mentally or physically) monitor the progress of each student and use this to inform our future planning.





Lewis Meadows