ABSTRACT
There are many ways to fail a test. You can not know the answer because you forgot to revise. You can not
know the answer because you chose not to revise. You can not know the answer because you didn’t get around to revising that particular bit. You can not know the answer because you were away during that particular lesson. You can not know the answer because you just didn’t ‘get’ that particular aspect of the curriculum. You can have got things wrong and revised the wrong thing. You can have revised well but just forgot it in the exam. You can have run out of time to answer the question even though you knew the answer. You can have misread the question and answered it wrong. You can have revised it but that particular bit just didn’t stick. You can have tried to revise it but your notes just didn’t make sense. You can have revised it, memorized it and regurgitated it well but had it down wrong in your book in the first place … . And there are as many ways to get ten out of ten as there are to get
zero out of ten. Lifting the lid on children’s brains, peering in and asking, ‘How did you
get what you got?’ is what metacognition is all about and it is a vital cog in the ‘learning school’ machine. What’s more, research has shown a link between metacognition and intelligence.1 Yet it is often overlooked in the headlong rush towards covering the curriculum (although I once came across a lady from New Zealand who had been a ‘metacognitive teacher’, whose job was to help children genuinely think about what they were seeing when they visited an art gallery). Helping children develop effective metacognition can be broken down
into two important areas, as identified by the man who coined the word, Stanford psychologist John Flavell.2 These are ‘metacognitive knowledge’ and ‘metacognitive strategies’. With metacognitive knowledge, students learn about, for example, their preferences in the learning mix we described in Chapter 22. Do they work best in the evenings, on their own, in quiet,
etc. … ? In other words, as the ancient Greeks put it at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Know thyself’. Encouraging learners to reflect, in advance, on their learning can be useful, with questions like, ‘What will be the best way for me to approach this challenge?’, ‘What are the likely obstacles to me doing well?’, ‘What needs to happen for me stay motivated to do this task?’ and ‘How will I benefit from doing well in this task – what’s in it for me?’ When it comes to metacognitive strategies, also known as ‘metacogni-
tive regulation’, it becomes a question of helping the student reflect on the thinking processes that they may use to address the challenge. These could include questions like, ‘What do I already know about this area?’, ‘Have I faced challenges like this before?’ and ‘If so, what did I do to address them?’ Once the work is underway, metacognition continues with questions like, ‘Am I on target with this task?’, ‘Do I understand what I am doing?’ ‘What can I do to help myself better understand this?’ and ‘How will I remember these key pieces of information?’ (For more on metacognition and memory see the next chapter.) As a teacher, you can encourage children to develop these metacognitive
practices by questioning them and encouraging them to question themselves in this way. Constantly asking, ‘How did you get that?’, is a powerful way to encourage such reflection in the classroom and far more useful than leaping in with a ‘Not good enough’ or even a well-intentioned ‘Well done’. Metacognition has a key part to play in the process of goal setting, as we
constantly ask ourselves whether we are on course towards our chosen goal or not. So, an important step as a teacher is to make sure you align your goals for them with their goals for themselves. For example, a tutor once told me about one of the students in her class at a sixth form college who was a talented student orally and a great speller but who was not achieving the grades he was capable of in his written work. This was because he kept using ‘odd words’ in his essays and she couldn’t fathom why. So I asked him. He knew exactly why and was able to give me a perfectly straightforward reason. He started off by telling me that his spelling was atrocious and, when I pointed out to him that his tutor had told me that his spelling was good, he replied by telling me that it was not true but, because he had a good vocabulary, if ever he came across a word he couldn’t spell, he just put in a word he could spell. When I asked him why, he told me that, when he had been at secondary school, every time he had an essay handed back to him it was covered with red pen! In other words his goal for a piece of work was not ‘highest grade’ as the tutor had assumed, but ‘least red’. The quality of the work was further down his list than his desire to avoid getting things wrong.
