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Metacognition and
self-regulation
According to the Education Endowment Foundation, metacognition and self-regulation are among the most impactful approaches schools can use to improve outcomes.
Having spent much of the last 20 years researching and working with these ideas, I agree.
But teachers are not always clear about what ‘metacognition and self-regulation’ actually means, or what it looks like in the classroom.
This isn't surprising, because there is a lot of confusion in the research literature about these terms. Even the EEF's definitions aren't always as clear as they could be.
Getting the terms straight
Three terms, three powerful ideas:
Metacognition is monitoring and controlling your thought processes. Not simply "thinking about thinking", which is true but useless as a guide to teaching. In practice it means helping students become aware of how they think and learn, so they can plan an approach, monitor how it's going, and evaluate progress against their goals.
Self-regulation is the mirror image: monitoring and controlling your feelings and behaviours. It's about developing knowledge of yourself – trying out techniques, finding what works, checking in and taking action so that you're in a state where you can learn effectively and cope with difficulty without becoming overwhelmed.
Self-regulated learning is what happens when you apply both to learning itself: monitoring and controlling your thoughts, feelings and behaviours so you can learn more effectively and get things done.
It’s important to understand the theory because then you can apply the ideas in practise, rather than taking strategies off the shelf. A school working on "metacognition" alone will miss the emotional half of why students give up.
I've written about this at greater length in an article for the Chartered College of Teaching.
What it looks like in a classroom
The general principle is simple: make the invisible processes of learning visible, and therefore learnable. Here are some of the practical tools and strategies I train teachers to use.
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The metacognitive check-in: Students learn to notice what their thoughts are doing – racing, distracted, staring into space, stuck in negative self-talk – to monitor how that changes across a day, and to take action. ‘Sitting behind’ your own thoughts and watching them go past is a teachable skill.
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Think-alouds: The teacher models their thinking while working through a problem or activity, including false starts and dead-ends. Then students practise it themselves, in pairs. This simple practice allows teachers to ‘see inside’ their students' heads, and enables students to hear what effective thinking actually sounds like.
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A shared language of learning: You can't monitor and control something you can't describe. So a vocabulary of learning needs to be taught explicitly, like any other set of key words. This works best when it is co-constructed with students at a whole-school level, rather than handed down on a poster.
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Plan, monitor, evaluate: Metacognitive regulation attached to a real piece of work: set goals and success criteria, identify strategies, build in checkpoints, evaluate honestly against the criteria, rinse and repeat.
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Thinking tools: A rich repertoire or practical strategies students can use to gather, organise and order their thoughts.
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Thinking Moves A-Z: A wonderful resource developed by Roger Sutcliffe and colleagues. Twenty-six named moves, each with a question attached. A memorable shared vocabulary for monitoring and controlling your thinking that translates an abstract concept into a series of concrete ‘moves’.
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Metacognitive questioning and talking points: What's the difference between concentrating and becoming absorbed? Is it possible to force yourself to concentrate? Metacognition is something only experts do – true or false? Using prompts for discussion such as these help students develop an understanding of their own minds.
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Meditation and guided visualisation: Meditation is perhaps the purest form of metacognition there is, and the evidence for it is compelling – improved focus, increased reading comprehension and reduced stress and anxiety. Just taking a few minutes each day to notice the thoughts that enter and leave your mind can work wonders.
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Transfer plenaries: Pausing a lesson to ask - ‘How is this different to how you learn in Maths/Music/French? How is it similar?’ When used regularly, this simple practice can help students ‘join the dots’ and learn to see that, despite the clear differences that exist between subject disciplines, underneath it all, the process of learning is strangely familiar…
What changes for students?
Students who get into the habit of monitoring and controlling their thoughts, feelings and behaviours:
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become more effective, independent learners
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perform better academically
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are better equipped for a life of learning beyond school
And there's a bigger point behind the evidence. When you become aware of your thought patterns, you can make a conscious effort to change them. In that sense, metacognition and self-regulation are the beginning of freedom. They enable you to overcome your programming and carve out new ways of thinking and being.
How I work with schools:
Every school has a different starting point, so the work is always shaped around your context. It usually combines some of the following:
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Getting the ideas straight: Training for teachers, leaders or a core team, so that everyone is working from the same definitions and knows what they're looking for.
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Translating into practice: Subject-by-subject work on what this looks like in your classrooms, rather than a generic model that teachers have to convert themselves.
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Demonstration lessons: Because it's much easier to recognise good practice than to describe it.
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Resources: Alongside the resources mentioned above, Activate, a card-based professional learning resource on self-regulated learning, is often the backbone of a year's work. (See Publications)
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Implementation support: Coaching, review points and evaluation, so the approach is still running in two years' time. This is the part most schools skip, and it's the part that decides whether anything changes.
Interested in metacognition and self-regulation?
If your school has tried this before and it hasn't stuck – or you'd rather get it right first time – let's talk about what this might look like in your context.
Fees work on a sliding scale depending on the size of your school.
The easiest way to find out Imore is to drop me a line, or schedule a free 30-minute call to talk it through.
