Learning Diary - Metacognition!

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1. Write a definition of what metacognition is.!
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Metacognition can be described as ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘learning about learning’.
Metacognitive strategies are a powerful way of increasing student attainment by having students
understand their learning process, with the goal of encouraging students to monitor, evaluate, and
reflect on their learning.!
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2. Write a summary of how teachers use metacognitive approaches and what some of these
are.!
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Metacognitive strategies are implemented by teachers through getting students to think about their
thinking processes, encouraging them to develop their knowledge of themselves as learners. By
teaching students to set goals, monitor, and evaluate their own progress, most relevantly in relation
to subject specific content and tasks as opposed to designated metacognition strategy classes,
they are able to take ownership of their learning. !
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Explicitly teaching metacognitive strategies to students, such as how to plan, monitor, and evaluate
in relation to specific content and tasks, is one such approach. Teachers can also model their
thinking processes and ensure tasks are set an appropriate level of challenge without overloading
the students. Furthermore, teachers can encourage and guide purposeful talk of a metacognitive
nature in the classroom and teach students to be more self-regulatory, through organising and
managing their learning, providing feedback, and supporting the motivation of the students.!
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3. List any challenges to using metacognitive approaches.!
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Teachers’ knowledge of the principles of metacognition, and the strategies that can be
implemented, to successfully cultivate the skills in students is a challenge, but necessary for
successful enactment. Education establishments should have professional development
programmes available for teachers to pursue knowledge and understanding in this area, as part of
a wider school approach to its use, but learning and then implementing such knowledge is a slow
process. It is also then important to get the teachers to buy in to the strategy. Furthermore, new
teachers would find it difficult to integrate these approaches into their practise as they would
possibly not have been privy to the same level of training as their colleagues. Without this
knowledge and understanding, teachers are likely to rely on mechanical or intuitive approaches to
conduct learning in the classroom, which is detrimental to the students’ attainment long-term as
one could consider the depth only superficial, hoping that the students will develop metacognitive
themselves along the way.!
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4. Write a summary of any metacognitive strategies you already use in your teaching and
ones that you might implement following this session.!
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I try to explain to the students why we learn what we do and its wider application to the other
subjects in the curriculum, as well as life outside of the classroom. Any time we are using a skill
that we have previously learned, I use starter activities that will draw on that prior knowledge,
before showing why the prior knowledge was important for finding the answer in that particular
instance. Scaffolding lesson plans in this way, alongside differentiation of tasks within those
lessons and using working examples to reveal my own thinking process, have proven successful in
engaging the students in discussions about their learning on a metacognitive level. I try to achieve
this using material, activities, and exercises that are appropriately challenging for the students but I
do find this difficult to enact in all of my activities as a result of the difference in abilities of the
students in any given class. I do encourage and utilise group work and group discussions in as
many lessons as possible in order to develop their metacognitive skills, which has been one of the
aspects most hit as a result of the global pandemic and online learning and something I believe the
students have missed and enjoy. Self and peer assessment and feedback, as well as teacher
feedback, including strategies such as WWW or EBI, are all implemented regularly.!
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As a result of this session, it is clear to me that I must continue to read about metacognition to
enhance my own knowledge and understanding, as well as keeping up-to-date with the literature
on studies and approaches. Continuing to improve and refine the process of implementing
strategies as part of being a reflective practitioner can only benefit the students. I will use the
literature to help me include strategies for how the students can plan, track their own progress, and
strategies for managing time in lessons to make room for more discussions around the ‘why’ they
are learning what they are.!
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5. Choose three of the tools you have looked at in the last section of this training, 'Explicit
Strategies for modelling metacognition'. Create your own interpretation of the ones that
resonate most with you in your subject, age and stage.!
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Mnemonics are useful for learners of all ages. In English, using PEE (point, evidence, explanation)
as a way to get the students to remember how to structure paragraphs has proven effective in the
past, as has A FOREST PIE (alliteration, facts, opinions, etc) as a means of remembering common
persuasive writing techniques, and ISPACE (-ing verbs, simile, preposition, etc) as a way of
varying the way students start writing their sentences.!
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I believe encouraging and participating in philosophical discussion is beneficial and enjoyable for
the KS4 students in my subject. They are at an age where they are starting to draw parallels and
apply meaning to and from different facets of their education and lives outside the classroom. As a
result, I am quite happy to indulge the students in such questions by making it a topic for an
impromptu but guided/structured class discussion, even if it could be considered tangential at
times, as it enhances their critical thinking and communication skills. I also feel it is important that
the students know that they also have an interactive role to play in their own learning and so they
should feel like teachers are approachable and a trusted source of knowledge on topics thanks to
their educational and life experience to promote their self-confidence to allow them to ask the
question in the first place. English is a subject where we are fortunate enough to study enormously
varied and diverse materials for reading and analysis, giving rise to many opportunities to engage
in meaningful discussions on subjects that are relevant and important, or in some cases not, to
them.!
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De Bono’s 6 Hats were a new phenomenon to me but it seems it would encourage the students to
broaden their scope of curiosity and inquisition in a way that is conducive with metacognitive
theory. As stated above, the students in the classes I teach are of an age where they are able to
consider complex issues from a variety of standpoints, whether ethical, environmental, or one of
the infinite others, and as such encouraging these thought patterns through a novel strategy like
the 6 Hats leads me to think that implementing this would be beneficial for the students.!
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6. Critically evaluate your own interpretation of the tools you created in the previous task.
Please use the seven steps in the 'Plan, monitor and evaluate' section to help you think in
concrete terms about how you would go about doing this with a class of your choice.!
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Mnemonics - for this example I will consider ISPACE sentence starters (-ing verbs, similes,
adverbs, connectives, -ed verbs).!
1. Activating prior knowledge - use a starter activity to have students recount examples of each of
the representing letters in a ‘think, pair, share’ format, have students recall the different types of
sentence structures!
2. Explicit strategy instructions - to be able to write sentences that do not simply begin with the
subject each time using a variety of methods to do so!
3. Model the strategy - show WABOLL, i.e. an extract with monotonous/unimaginative sentence
structure, followed by WAGOLL so that the students know what they are striving for!
4. Memorising the strategy - give a ‘spelling test’ on what each letter of the mnemonic stands for,
do a Mad Libs (fill in the gap) activity to show its wider application and therefore memorisation,
while promoting creativity and fun in the process!
5. Guided practice - class collaboration on themed writing subject led by teacher, should show its
application in creative and more factual formats!
6. Independent practice - setting a writing task for homework, either a story or an article/report,
where the students have to use each of the techniques at least once!
7. Structured reflection - have students peer review their work making sure to point out the
success criteria they are looking for, using WWW/EBI to encourage critical thinking about the
work and promote positivity in review!
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7. Reflect overall on what you have taken from the session and how this might shape your
teaching going forward.! !
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During my own secondary school education, I can still remember to this day the number of
questions I had regarding my own learning and what I was being taught. A lot of those questions
were of the ‘why’ category. My favourite teachers were the ones who indulged my questions and
took the time to explain the process as it allowed me to connect the dots, so to speak, between
what we were learning, why we were learning it, and how that was relevant to life. Though I
respected all of my teachers and their knowledge, I remember resenting those who took the rigid
pedagogical approach all of the time and thus I always try to remind myself of the teacher I would
like to be and why. !
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Thanks to this session, I now understand that this is metacognition and I feel I have a much deeper
comprehension of what it is, the strategies and their application, and the importance and benefits
thereof. I find the subject quite fascinating and I am eager to start reflecting on my strategy
implementation in a more meaningful way, as well explore new strategies to integrate and evaluate
to further develop my capacity as Vygotsky’s ‘more knowledgable other’ in the classroom.