Activate your students’ metacognitive skills
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
Metacognition, linked to self-awareness, is the process of reflecting on our own thinking and learning. It involves self-regulating processes like planning, monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting. This helps us and our students become more self-regulating, independent, and successful.
What does metacognition mean for students?
For students, having metacognitive skills means they are able to recognise their abilities, direct their own learning, understand what causes their successes or failures, and learn new strategies.
For practical reasons, metacognition can be divided in two distinct dimensions: metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation.
Metacognitive knowledge
Metacognitive knowledge indicates what learners know about learning:
- Students’ awareness of their own cognitive abilities 👉 "I have difficulty purely memorising capital or river names in geography", or "I'm really good at writing an essay, but I am not so skilled at summarising or quoting."
- Students’ knowledge of particular tasks 👉 "The concepts in the chapter we are reading are complex and difficult to apply”, or "This paragraph is unclear."
- Students’ awareness of appropriate strategies they can apply to the task 👉 "I will scan this chapter and add questions to the parts I don’t understand. Then I will ask my teacher to help answer my questions, or provide me with more resources."
Metacognitive regulation
Metacognitive regulation indicates what learners do about their learning.
It describes how learners monitor and control their learning process. If a student notices that a particular strategy is not working for her, for example, she could independently (or with your support) decide to try out a different learning strategy.
The cycle of metacognitive regulation can be divided into three interconnected phases, with 'reflection' always at the centre. Each phase requires students to work on distinct areas of self-awareness and self-regulation. This might not come automatically: there is a lot you can do to help them become self-aware, and gradually more in control of their learning.
Phase 1: Planning
What is it?
During this phase, students think about the learning objective set by their teacher, how to approach the given tasks, and about which strategies they are going to use.
At this stage, it is helpful for learners to ask themselves targeted questions:
- What am I being asked to do?
- Which strategies should I use?
- Have I used strategies before that could help?
How can you help as their teacher?
As their teacher, you can support students by reminding them to take some time to think about planning their approach to a new chapter, subject, or learning objective. In order to do so, remind them to think about the three questions here above by writing them on a digital board, or on a simple whiteboard. You might want to ask students to write them down too.
With LessonUp, you can start your lesson with three digital open questions that students can answer privately in their own digital space. You can choose to keep their responses private, share them with the entire class or smaller groups, and provide personalised feedback.
You could decide to put a ‘What am I being asked to do?’ question at the centre of a mind map, and ask your students to answer it in their own words. Once every one has answered you could discuss the responses together, give comments and suggestions, and group answers in different categories. In LessonUp, you can do so by dragging and dropping them. Make sure your students fully understand the learning objective before they start thinking of strategies to achieve it.
Phase 2: Monitoring
What is it?
During this phase, students implement their strategy plan and self-monitor their progress towards achieving ‘their’ learning goal. Thanks to metacognition your learning objective becomes also their learning goal, towards which you are all working together.
Some learners might decide to make changes to the strategies they are using, if they notice that these are not working for them. As students work through all the tasks, it helps to ask themselves:
- Is the strategy that I am using working?
- Do I need to try something different?
- What should I do next?
How can you help as their teacher?
Help your students assess whether their strategies are effective. Before they begin a new task, guide them to anticipate potential challenges and think about how to avoid them. If you’re using LessonUp, open questions or mind maps are great tools to help students identify possible issues.
During the task, encourage them to stay focused on the learning objective, and in LessonUp, clearly display the objective above each slide. Remind them to keep the goal in mind, helping them reflect on their current progress, next steps, and how to achieve them. Support their growth by providing targeted feedback on their strategies and using effective questioning.
How can you apply effective questioning with LessonUp?
Open questions
In LessonUp, open question answers can be made anonymous, enabling students to work in a safe digital environment without the pressure of raising their hands in front of the class.
The spinner
The digital spinner can be used to completely randomise participation. As the spinner decides whose turn it is to be questioned, there are no arguments about anyone being singled out.
Quiz questions
Targeted clusters of well-thought quizzes are a great tool to quickly assess student learning. In a quiz question you can simplify things and indicate the correct answer within the mix.
Phase 3: Evaluation
What is it?
During this phase, students evaluate how successful the strategy they used was in helping them to achieve their goal. Students could ask themselves:
- How well did I do?
- What didn’t go well? What could I do differently next time?
- What went well? What other types of tasks can I use this strategy for?
How can you help as their teacher?
As their teacher, you can support students by reminding them to take some time to evaluate if their strategy worked for them. In order to do so, remind them of the three questions here above by writing them on a central digital board, or simply on the classroom's whiteboard.
If you use LessonUp, create a simple, straightforward exit tickets with two or three open questions at the end of your lesson: "Write down 3 things you could do differently next time", and “write down 2 things that went really well using this strategy”. This brings your lesson cycle back to the initial learning objectives. Check if your students have hit their own target. If not, discuss what isn’t clear and help them out.
It might be interesting to help your students evaluate their learning by working with clear success criteria related to your main learning objective. Let your students ponder on whether they can match the indicated criteria, and to what extent. With LessonUp you could create a really nice slide with three clear success criteria, and ask your students to drag and drop a minimum of one star to a maximum of five stars to each criteria, based on how well they can match it.
Interested in trying out 10 proven learning techniques to improve learners' metacognitive skills?
