“When teachers cultivate students’ abilities to reflect on, monitor, and evaluate their learning strategies, young people become more self-reliant, flexible, and productive.”
- Developmental psychologist, Marilyn Price-Mitchell (2015)

As teachers think about how to equip all students to be successful in and beyond the classroom, research suggests that one key component of student success -– metacognition –- deserves our attention.

Simply put, metacognition is the ability to monitor and reflect on our own thinking and learning. According to Nancy Chick at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, “it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance.” She adds that it includes, “a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.”

Metacognition challenges us to think about:

• which strategies can aid learning;
• how to use those strategies;
• how to evaluate progress; and
• whether we need to adjust our thinking.

Metacognition and success

Though not yet in widespread use in classrooms, metacognition can be a key component of student success.

Explicit instruction of metacognitive strategies has well-documented and positive impact. Students who practice these strategies are able to transfer their learning to new contexts. Students also become aware of their strengths and weaknesses in many aspects of learning, including problem-solving, reading, writing, and test-taking.

Researchers have also linked metacognition with success beyond the classroom. In a recent issue of Scientific American Mind, cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming (2014) suggests that metacognition and reflection can support success in a variety of domains, including memory, insight, decision-making, and confidence.

Metacognition in the classroom

In their 2014 article, “The Boss of My Brain,” Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers maintain that teachers must not only know about the benefits of metacognition for students, but they must be willing to incorporate explicit instruction of metacognitive strategies into their classrooms:

“Two key words here are explicit instruction. Most children are not naturally metacognitive, but all students, from struggling learners to high performers, can benefit from being taught how and when to use a variety of cognitive strategies to monitor and improve their learning.”

Wilson and Conyers note that students instructed and skilled in metacognitive strategies are able to ask fundamental questions that support learning:

• What are my learning goals?
• How am I going to learn this?
• How will I double-check that I have it right?
• How does this new content fit in with what I already know?
• How well do I know this? Can I apply this new knowledge or skill in other subject areas or situations?

Metacognition in action

As an instructional coach, I am currently working with two teachers who are exploring the power of metacognition and reflection in their classrooms.

Franklin Cox, English teacher at Mountain Heritage High School, made it his yearlong goal to incorporate more opportunities for student reflection as part of the writing process.

He has included reflection assignments as part of students’ research projects, and students included these written reflections in their project portfolio. I also conducted one-on-one interviews with his students to gather their thoughts about a number of questions, including:

• What did you learn about yourself as you worked on this project
• What, if anything, could you have done differently in order to produce a better quality product?
• If you could give your teacher one suggestion for improving this project/assignment in order to support your learning, what would it be?

Tiffany Golding, a math teacher at Madison Middle School, is also interested in knowing more about her students’ experiences in math class. She and I identified a set of questions, and I asked students to share their responses to questions like these:

• How do you feel about math class this year?
• What supports do you think would be most helpful when you are struggling in math?
• What are you willing to do to make your experience with math more successful?

Both teachers plan to review the interview data, looking for information about how to adjust instruction to support all students to be more successful. By simply making time to ask students to share their learning experiences, teachers can introduce metacognitive strategies and promote a positive classroom culture characterized by respect and reflection.

Five tips to integrate metacognitive strategies

Supporting metacognition does not require time-consuming changes to your instruction. Consider these simple ways to add opportunities for metacognition and reflection in your classroom:

1. Use pre- and post-assessment questions.
   Ask students to identify what they already know or their current thinking about a topic or problem: “What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?” Follow the lesson or unit with post-assessment questions: Before this lesson, I thought…, but now I think that….”
2. Integrate opportunities for reflection.
   Provide short reflection questions that ask students to think about how they learned. These could be exit tickets or brief journal responses. What were the three most important things you learned this week? What was the most difficult or confusing part of what we learned today? What types of learning activities work best for me? Why? What test-taking or study strategies worked well for me? What could I do differently next time?
3. Ask students to apply learning.
   Look for opportunities to ask students to think about how what they have learned in your class can apply to other disciplines or in other life contexts. How is this problem like others you have seen before? How could you use what you’ve just learned in other situations?
4. Think out loud.
   Model metacognition by thinking aloud as you work through a problem or question. Students benefit from hearing how adults manage their thinking as they try to solve problems, including where to begin, and how to move forward when you make a mistake or are confused about the answer.
5. Listen to students’ experiences.
   Interview your students about their experiences (or ask your instructional coach to interview them and share the data with you). You may be surprised by the insights you can gain about the way students think about themselves as learners, and students will benefit from being asked to think metacognitively.

Be sure to check out these reference articles for more interesting reading about metacognition and its relationship to student success:

Chick, N. (2015). Metacognition. Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University. Retrieved from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/

Fleming, S. M. (2014). The power of reflection: Insight into our own thoughts, or Metacognition is key to higher achievement in all domains.” Scientific American, September/October, 31–37.

Price-Mitchell, M. (2015). Metacognition: Nurturing self-awareness in the classroom.” Edutopia, April 2015. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org / blog/8-pathways-metacognition-in-classroom-marilyn-price-mitchell

Wilson, D. and Conyers, M. (2014). “The boss of my brain: Explicit instruction in metacognition puts students in charge of their learning.” Educational Leadership, 72(2). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ publications/educational-leadership/oct14/vol72/num02/%C2%A3The-Boss-of-My-Brain%C2%A3.aspx