Research School Network: Thinking about thinking Teaching ourselves to learn
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Thinking about thinking
Teaching ourselves to learn
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by Staffordshire Research School
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Lee Taylor
National Professional Qualification (NPQ) Facilitator and Leadership Coach
Lee Taylor is a former Headteacher and Multi-Academy Trust Senior Executive Leader with nearly 40 years’ experience in education, including 20 years in senior leadership. An education researcher since 2001, he is recognised for securing rapid school improvement, most notably moving a school from Inadequate to Good, with Outstanding for Leadership.
He now works exclusively in leadership development, delivering on all of the NPQ programmes and coaching school leaders nationally and internationally. His work focuses on creativity in education, pupils as leaders, equality of opportunity and co-operative, research-informed leadership. Originally trained in music, Lee is a published author, classical composer and pianist. He is currently writing with a focus on coaching for young people.
Above all, he values his role as a father and family member, a perspective that continues to shape his approach to education and leadership.
I (the one on the left!) have been working in school-based education for forty years including two stints as a headteacher and finally as a senior executive leader of a MAT.
My research has covered many topics, but I have a special interest in creativity and co-operative forms of learning and leadership. The picture selection below may not be a typical example of one found in an education blog but bear with me!
Meta (self) cognition (thinking) is the holy grail of education. I would argue that this is the ultimate ambition of any teacher: to enable one’s pupils to be able to educate themselves for life without the need for external instruction; to be able to learn anything that is needed and wanted without a teacher at their side.
Don’t be too concerned though – you are not putting yourself out of work, but you may be changing the way you think about thinking.
The EEF has published key findings and produced a toolkit which helps teachers think about a different approach to their pedagogy via a focus on metacognition.
Support teachers to understand the importance of using strategies to develop their pupils’ metacognitive knowledge
Teachers are encouraged to ‘know’ their pupils’ prior learning and gather information about them, including any SEN needs (for example) and other personal considerations which may impact on the pupils’ learning.
In the ‘Meta’ world, we are encouraged to go further than this. Great learning isn’t just about teachers knowing their pupils. Research tells us that we should help pupils to understand themselves and use metacognitive strategies to develop their own approaches to learning.
With this in mind, pupils should be helped by the teacher to explore their learning, to know what their strengths and weaknesses are, what motivates them and what threats and opportunities are around them.
This obviously requires thoughtful planning, monitoring and also teachers giving students the opportunity to evaluate themselves with the teacher providing scaffolding, yes, but also modelling their own thinking and learning processes.
Recommendation 2
Explicitly teach pupils metacognitive strategies, including how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning.
Teach the pupils to explore and draw out what they already know, and to seek out what really motivates them to want to learn something new.
Without intrinsic motivation then there will be no thirst to be quenched. ‘What is in it for me?’ requires a personalised response.
Recommendation 3
Model your own thinking to help pupils develop their metacognitive and cognitive skills .
As a teacher, model the way you would learn something if you didn’t already know it.
Ask yourself questions out aloud and then attempt to answer them. This supports pupils to understand how we make sense of things which we do not yet understand.
Admit to what you know and what you do not know yet.
Work through the examples as a whole class, small groups and individuals (depending on how the learning is set up). Devise thinking scaffolds and show how you keep a track of your thoughts to avoid cognitive overload (Sweller 2011).
Recommendation 4
Promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom .
Set up structured conversations between pupils so that they can think out aloud without being negatively judged.
Help them by modelling the use of with specific language, paraphrase to check understanding and create a ‘coaching culture’ within your classroom.
The main subject being taught here is ‘self’ so try not to get bogged down with curriculum subject knowledge too soon into the metacognitive process.
Remember, most people spend most of their lives trying to work out who they actually are and what their purpose is, so do not be over demanding of the children in front of you. Thinking, and thinking about thinking, requires focused practice.
Pupils are having to relearn the intrinsic learning methods they had as a toddler and that they often have since forgotten!
Recommendation 5
Set an appropriate level of challenge to develop pupils’ self-regulation and metacognition
Co-produce the challenges and goal so that they are personalised and appropriate to the needs and abilities of the learner.
If the task is not relevant AND interesting to the learner then it will be done half-heartedly to satisfy the teacher rather than themselves.
Seek out the quick wins to establish a sense of growth, progression and joy in pupil’s self-discovery. We want pupils to want to learn and find the wonderful pleasure in learning something new.
Ensure feedback given is focused on actually feeding forward from the challenging task, not a critique of what has just happened but an opening up for the way ahead. The EEF Guidance report: Teacher Feedback to improve pupil learning reminds us to help prepare the pupils to USE the feedback in their learning (Recommendation 3).
Recommendation 6
Explicitly teach pupils how to organise, and effectively manage, their learning independently
Teach organisational skills.
Show pupils what you do to learn – about your pupils as an example.
Go to different sources and explain what each new discovery means to what you thought you already knew.
Give them, and create with them, a personalised learning toolkit so that they can practise using it as they increasingly approach their learning from a position of knowledge. Once they have the toolkit, they can practice selecting and using the tools until they have a mental model of how to approach their learning, without having to refer back to this.
Show them what they have the potential to learn when they use their kit and ask them to choose something they want to learn outside of school to practise their approach.
Recommendation 7
Schools should develop effective implementation processes to promote metacognition and self-regulated learning
CPD changes its meaning with regard to metacognition. If it is good for the pupils (8+ months additional learning in one year) then it is good for the staff. Teachers are as much learners as pupils are and they require support and permission to use explicit metacognitive strategies themselves. Imagine a school where all of the staff were motivated and enabled to learn all of the things necessary to provide every pupil a great education!
Going back now to that original picture at the top of this blog: make learning fun! Do something that is engaging in for pupils to hook the learning onto emotionally.
If we, staff and children, are not enjoying what we do then we have to question the validity of our actions.
Meta-cognition is about recognising our life long learning journey and the truth and enablement within.
