As a school this week we have been focusing on our metacognition, which one of our Year 2 children described crisply as, “Thinking about thinking”. Although many writers struggle to define this key intellectual characteristic, essentially metacognition is a type of thinking in which children reflect on their learning and on their own cognitive process.

Recent research suggests that fostering metacognition is one of the most effective ways to help students become successful and independent learners. It can be applied to any subject and across all levels of performance. This is because metacognition often involves developing children’s ability to reflect on how they think and how they learn best, not just what they think and what they have learned. The metacognitive strategies that students cultivate in their science class can therefore be applied in Music lessons, on the sports pitch, and so on. 

In many educational settings, backed by a goodly dose of pseudoscience, educationalists have responded to the findings that metacognition has such a marked impact on pupils’ outcomes by trying to teach it as they would stand-alone or subject-specific skills.  To me, this one-off, tick-box approach is rather naive and largely ineffective. If metacognition is to truly be a way of thinking, it needs to be part of the school’s culture and a habit of mind that is nurtured and embedded over time. It also needs a common language for talking about learning across the school, so that little by little, pupils develop the attributes that enable them to think metacognitively.  Hence, encouraging the children to think metacognitively is very much part of our marking and feedback practice, our questioning in class and, as teachers, we are also trying to model metacognition in our own practice, but how might parents support their child’s development of this type of thinking too? 

• Help your child to identify what does and doesn’t work well – Working alongside your child to identify what is going well and why, and where improvements might be made. It is important to stress areas where progress is being made, rather than focus only on the next set of targets. We need to do more of what is working well, as well as put a stop to unhelpful approaches.
   
• Reflective thinking – Ask your child what they would do differently next time if they experience a setback or make a mistake. Would they work harder next time, seek support earlier, prepare over a longer period of time, read instructions more carefully, etc? This will help increase their self-awareness – a key aspect of metacognitive thinking. Remember to celebrate successes too. It is important to unpick the factors behind progress so that we can employ them elsewhere.
   
• Build on their reflexive thinking – This type of thinking involves becoming aware of biases and prejudices that sometimes colour our judgement. In an age-appropriate way, you might encourage discussions about society or moral dilemmas, and this will help enable children to challenge their own biases and become adaptive thinkers. It also helps them begin to realise that for so many of life’s big questions there is rarely a simple right/wrong answer.

As young people’s conceptions of thinking are so malleable, together we have enormous power to foster metacognition – with all the benefits this may bring for their intellectual development, learning and performance long after they have left All Hallows. How exciting!

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