#125 - Making a Difference
Hi Everyone
I know that many of you are regular readers and I really value your messages of appreciation and support. It’s good to hear that the content of this newsletter is resonating with so many people, because I started writing it in order precipitate the kind of change that really makes a difference. I’m still producing a weekly piece even after 2 years, due to your continued interest, so thank you!
Almost all of my connections and followers on Linked In, like me, care deeply about the educational and life chances of children and young people. Many are on the look out for what they personally can do to make a difference, sometimes even under difficult circumstances. That’s why I focus on helping parents, teachers and school leaders feel more confident about what they CAN do.
Metacognition has become a buzz word, particularly in education, and yet there still seems to be some confusion over what it is, and how best to apply the knowledge that we have on the subject. It tends to get listed alongside other recently introduced educational ‘strategies’, like ‘retrieval practise’ or ‘interleaving’ without the acknowledgement that metacognition is actually quite different.
The difficulty with metacognition, is that unlike other ideas for effective teaching, it’s not something the teacher can ‘do’ to improve learning in the classroom. The ‘doing’ comes from the pupils themselves. It’s all about what happens inside their heads whilst engaged with learning, so is more challenging for a teacher to find ways of developing metacognitive thinking whilst teaching the curriculum
Of course, metacognition has always been there, we’ve just become more aware of its role in learning due to the work of John Flavell who devised a name for it in the 1970s. In the UK, schools became more focused on the benefits to learners of being able to use metacognition, due to a report in 2018 by the Education Endowment Foundation whose research confirmed how important a factor it was for student progress.
Personal progress, whether it’s by a student in school, a professional building a career, or an individual creating the life they want, is impossible without metacognition. The decision-making part of the brain is constantly making choices, and if we’re lucky enough to have a developed a metacognitive mind, it will also monitor the results of those choices.
If we are used to monitoring ‘results’, we are more likely to notice when a particular choice hasn’t worked out so well. Of course, we then need to be flexible about finding alternative solutions, and be willing to change our minds in order to achieve better results. It’s metacognition which makes that whole process possible, so without it we can make poor choices, and get enmeshed in difficulties that we don’t know the way out of.
If you relate that to learning, you can see why so many students are struggling at school. They are stuck at some point in that process, either finding it difficult to make a choice in the first place, or if they’ve made one, are unaware of the need to monitor how that pans out. Maybe they are comfortable making choices and monitoring them, but are then unwilling to change their minds when they discover something’s wrong.
In my experience over many years in education, and having worked with thousands of students in several different capacities, I’ve found that one thing remains a constant. Simply put, any student who can use metacognition will make progress, and any who can’t, just won’t, through no fault of their own! What I've also discovered though, is that any learner, even those with difficulties, will make greater than expected progress if we teach them how to think differently.
That can be achieved by having a whole school approach to developing metacognition in order to improve individual and school results, or, by an individual teacher making simple changes to classroom practice over time, to naturalise the use of metacognition whilst students are learning. Parents too can play their part in developing metacognition in their children simply through the way they communicate and behave around them at home.
Please consider the importance of this to improving the educational and life chances of the children and young people you care about. The current education system is a hinderance to real learning for many students, but rather than fight the system, I’ve made it my mission to help learners to navigate it more effectively. Individuals who know how to take greater responsibility for their own progress will thrive despite the system.
I hope that you find future issues useful to taking action on this, so please subscribe if you haven’t yet done so, or click the bell on my profile page to make sure you don’t miss a post. I’m also still happy to provide training sessions for schools and will keep you in touch with other events that I’m involved in, so that you can access or read other relevant information that becomes available.
Take care till next time.
Warm regards
Liz
Bilingual Educator/ ESL Text Book Author/ Art Education
1moWe hear you!
Helping schools accelerate and deepen student learning and cultivate well-being through actionable insights, advice, workshops, writing, and public speaking.
1moHi Liz, I think you really clarify the essence of metacognition in this post and the nature of is processes. In several studies (Wang, Veenman, et al) it was seen as being the most influential characteristic of high achieving students. Keep doing what you're doing!