#103 Metacognition for Success

Hello Everyone

Unless you’re a new subscriber (and if so, you’re most welcome), the word metacognition is one that you’ll be familiar with by now. But have you ever stopped to think more deeply about the full significance of needing metacognitive skills in order to achieve success, and that other ultimate goal for most of us, happiness.

The idea behind metacognition has been gradually gaining traction since the word appeared within education several decades ago. Often though, the process has been ‘formalised’ in order to create a framework that can be ‘used’ by schools to improve the academic results achieved by their students. That tends to detract from the natural metacognitive process in daily use for the rest of us.

So, why do students need metacognition in order to learn effectively? Why do they need to be taught how to think differently? Why do so many still leave school with poor academic results? What is the impact on adult life of not being able to think metacognitively? How is metacognition essential for achieving success as an adult? How do you develop it further?

You can see that although my passion lies in supporting learners to develop metacognition, the driving force behind my work has always been about more than just helping them to achieve higher than expected results. That happens of course, but what’s even more important is what changes inside each individual with regards to what they feel they’re capable of.

Metacognition is a process that is available for every one of us who has at least some level of mental capacity, including those who have faced barriers to learning. The word ‘cognition’ encompasses all the mental abilities that we use to ‘learn’, either naturally as small children or later in the more formal environment of a classroom, and the prefix ‘meta’ indicates going beyond that ‘learning’ in order to analyse how we’re doing it.

That requires some recognition of ‘self’ and a belief that improvement is both desirable and possible for us. It also helps if we understand how the learning process works, something we did perfectly naturally pre-school, but which requires more conscious ‘thought’ in a formal setting. We also have to recognise that we have personal control over our thoughts and need to be mentally (and preferably emotionally) invested in order for our brain to pay attention.

If you read through that last paragraph again, you’ll begin to see where the problem lies for many of our youngsters in school as well as for some of us as adults.

Not everyone has a positive self-concept, in other words they don’t have a strong enough belief in their own worth or in their own ability to succeed.  Metacognition relies on us believing that we can do better and that we’re worth the conscious effort required to make the necessary changes.

Some of us who were very skilled ‘learners’ before we ever went near the education system through the natural use of our cognitive abilities, nonetheless lost the plot when confronted with being ‘taught’, the polar opposite of what we were used to. The effective use of metacognition under those circumstances requires an understanding of the learning process, but no-one ever explains how that works.

Finally, ‘schooling’ often become just a passive experience of being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, all within a specified behaviour framework. Learning should be an ‘active’ experience, but if the individual is not mentally and emotionally ‘involved’, the learning is not likely to stick. Metacognition is unfortunately discouraged by the very nature of the way we teach in schools.

A student in school (or an adult out in the big wide world), needs metacognition in order to reason effectively about why something’s not working for them, be able to take look at potential alternatives and change their approach in order to achieve a different result. Think about the impact on mental health and well-being for individuals who can think and act independently, make wise choices for themselves and change things up when necessary to achieve improvement.

That’s what developing metacognition is all about whoever you are. So why not subscribe for further editions of this newsletter, or hit the bell on my profile so that you don’t miss future posts on the topic.

See you next time

Warm regards

Liz