My latest area of fascination within education is metacognition and I was very grateful to attend a course last term hosted by our trust associate research school. I came away with more ideas than minutes in the day and with a colleague from geography we put together a CPD session for the Humanities department. In this blog there is an overview of our take on metacognition, the action points that we decided on, and copies of any resources that we made for the training session or for implementing our plans afterwards. They are mostly history specific but have so far been tweaked and trialled in Geography and English.
The purpose of metacognition
We tagged this “understanding how to learn” because whilst “thinking about thinking” sounds great, it still needs further explanation. To be metacognitive is to understand how we learn and to do it in the most effective, efficient way possible. Metacognitive strategies aim to teach students effective methods of learning (particularly revision) and simultaneously increase their motivation and resilience in the face of difficult content. Perkins (1992) outlined 4 types of metacognitive learners and so successful teaching of metacognition would move a pupil from Level 1 to Level 4 in time for their exams.
- Tactic/passive – little understanding of how to revise or engagement with it (typically boys).
- Aware – they will know which kinds of activities they like to do but they don’t know why. Their revision doesn’t help them progress because they can’t identify what to change.
- Strategic – they can learn and plan revision strategies that are specific to them and the things they need to learn but struggle to be flexible and change in the middle of a sequence.
- Reflective – they monitor their own progress and can tweak what they are doing within an activity or schedule based upon their strengths, weaknesses, and progress. They can do their own marking.
We’re planning to introduce this from Year 7 so that by Year 11 they have had the opportunity to practice, move through the levels, and it is now automatic. Tom Sherrington wrote a great blog on turning revision strategy into habit so that it doesn’t add to the pressure of Year 11 (motivation, strategy, habit).
Delivering metacognition
Typical metacognition strategies are dual coding, spaced learning, interleaving etc (see Dunlosky’s overview of T&L techniques), and lots of schools do that already, including mine. I want to focus on teaching metacognition explicitly, by which I mean teaching students what we were taught about activities and learning when we trained; we plan lessons so that activities build on each other and students should plan revision in the same way. Therefore, the resources focus on explaining the purpose of activities, how to create their own sequence of revision (like a recipe), and how to evaluate it for success or areas of weakness (the “plan, monitor, evaluate” aspect of learning).
The 4 groups of activities that we settled on may be simplistic, but it’s working as an introduction. It is these that need adapting for each subject, particularly the third group “explanation”. For History, it means applying the facts that they’ve learnt to the question they’ve been asked but it doesn’t work for all mark schemes.
Resources:
KS3 lesson: It introduces the idea of metacognitive learners and models a basic revision sequence so that students can start becoming familiar with different types of activities.
KS4 lesson/booklet for home: It explains the activity groups and recommended revision sequences (“recipes”). Students could swap out activities depending on their evaluation of their learning or an activity’s success.
Department notes: A summary of notes on metacognition, action points for delivery, and expectations of metacognition from Year 7 to 11.
Metacognition & parents
Personally, I believe that training in metacognition should be extended to parents. Some parents are actively involved in helping their child revise, some want to help but don’t know about the subject/revision techniques, and some had a poor experience of school and so do not. Whichever it is, I believe that most parents would benefit and welcome first-hand experience of revision strategies so that they feel more comfortable steering their children through revision at home. Simply having encouragement and help with retrieval practice/low stakes testing would be beneficial for many students. In an ideal world we might hold open revision sessions, but practically it might be better just to send the booklet and a letter home.
Hope it’s helpful! @RidleyHistory
A short and not at all exhaustive list of interesting reading
Cambridge Assessment International Education, “Metacognition” https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/Images/272307-metacognition.pdf
D Perkins (1992) Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child
EEF guidance report, Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning – https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/metacognition-and-self-regulated-learning/
Huntington Research School, “Metacognition assisting revision” – https://researchschool.org.uk/huntington/blog/metacognition-assisting-revision
John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan and Daniel T. Willingham (2013) “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology”
Tom Sherrington, “Studying successfully: motivation + strategy + habit” – https://teacherhead.com/2019/05/19/studying-successfully-motivation-strategy-habit/
Tea & Learning 