Research School Network: Metacognition and Self-Regulation Amy Martin-Mills discusses metacognition and explains how metacognitive talk can be used within writing lessons.

What is the desired outcome of a child’s primary education? The National Curriculum (2013) states that it ​“provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens”. Schools visions, aims and values often advocate happiness, independence, and readiness for life beyond the primary environment. If all children left Year 6 with the aforementioned qualities, educators everywhere would be thrilled. However, the question is, how can practitioners make this a reality? Although there is not one thing that can tick every box, supporting children to develop metacognitive strategies and the skills to self-regulate is a brilliant place to start.

The EEF have published research around the importance and impact of metacognition and self-regulation, stating that the use of such strategies could incur +7 months progress (if used effectively). A low cost, high impact strategy that is not only research informed, but also can support independence and academic progress is the dream educators world-wide have been longing for! So, what is it, how does it work, and how can you include it in your everyday practice?

Self-regulation is the extent to which a learner can identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as being aware of the strategies they use to learn (EEF, 2021). Metacognition is an element of self-regulation and can be defined as ​‘the process involved when learners plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours’
(The Cambridge Education Team). When you dive into the research, there is an abundance of strategies for educators to adopt, to encourage the development of metacognitive and self-regulative strategies.

One such recommendation by the EEF, is teachers modelling their own thinking, to help pupils to develop their metacognitive and cognitive skills. This is referred to as ​‘metacognitive talk’, which in simpler terms can be defined as ​‘a person saying out loud what they are thinking whilst they are carrying out a task’, (The Cambridge Education Team). The concept sounds simple enough yet is an artform in itself, that must be mastered in order to have the desired outcome.

Research is brilliant, but what does this look like in the classroom? Consider a writing lesson, in which the learning objective is ​‘To write a descriptive paragraph’ (of a provided picture). The first thing that springs to mind when modelling how to complete this writing activity is the inclusion of adjectives, expanded noun phrases, relative clause etc. It is not uncommon for educators to dive right into the nitty gritty, without considering how they (as ​‘expert writers’) got to this point, skipping over vital learning opportunities.

Using metacognitive talk, a modelling session can be transformed from 100% teacher led, where children are passive in their learning and not developing the necessary skills to become independent learners, to shared modelling in which children are developing and using the self-regulative and metacognitive strategies to become independent learners. Metacognitive talk for such a lesson could be as follows;

Whilst modelling, teachers also need to be articulating their own thought process in order to demonstrate to the children that adults don’t just ​‘know the answer because you are old’ (as one child kindly said), but instead that you are using the metacognitive and self-regulative strategies you have developed to support your own learning needs. An example of such articulation may be as so;

The use of metacognitive talk not only de-mystifies the notion that the only reason teachers can write so well is because they are adults, but also begins to teach children the necessary metacognitive skills.


The OECD sums up the importance of metacognition and self-regulation in one simple sentence; ​“To often, we teach students what to think, not how to think’. With the proverb,​“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”, demonstrating that it is unequivocally true that we provide our students with a lot of information over the span of their education, but to enable our learners to be ready for the wider world, we should be equipping them with the necessary metacognitive skills to become independent lifelong learners.

References:

The Cambridge Education Team: Getting Started with Metacognition
https://cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswmeta/index.html#:~:text=talking%20out%20loud%20can%20help,are%20carrying%20out%20a%20task

Education Endowment Foundation: Meta-cognition and self-regulation Guidance Report https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/metacognition

Mevarech, Z. and B. Kramarski (2014), Critical Maths for Innovative Societies: The Role of Metaognitive Pedagogies, OECD Publishing. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264223561-en

OECD Insights: Debate the issues. Focus on metacognition http://oecdinsights.org/2014/10/28/want-to-improve-your-problem-solving-skills-try-metacognition/.

This article was written by Amy Martin-Mills, JTMAT Primary English Lead and Year 5 teacher at Shobnall Primary & Nursery School.