What you need to know to develop Metacognition at home

Metacognition in its simplest form is the ability to think about thinking. The skill of metacognition has the potential to raise attainment and create lifelong learners that can help them succeed in all areas of life. So, how can metacognition be developed at home?

Therefore promoting, teaching and allowing for metacognition is of the utmost importance. Luckily, there are many ways to do this for our children at home (or wherever else you may be educating your children). We shall get to those shortly. First, let’s run down ALL of the benefits of metacognition.

Benefits of metacognition

1. Improved attainment - OK, attainment is certainly not the be-all and end-all, but optimising this can bring opportunities for a young person too.

2. Lifelong learning - when a child experiences success in their learning, they also experience increased motivation which spurs them on to learn more. It becomes an upward cycle as they seek to learn more and be more motivated.

3. Improved resilience - this is related to having a growth mindset. The child can select a strategy for a specific task, evaluate its success and then re-select another strategy if required, and ultimately solve the challenge. So, instead of giving up on a challenge, they persevere and overcome it.

4. Emotional and social growth - a knowledge of themselves, the ability to reflect and self-criticise without damaging self-esteem, being motivated to self-learn and study, and the ability to speak with others diplomatically; are all areas that are positively affected by metacognitive learning.

Strategies to support metacognition

So, now let’s look at what strategies we can employ at home to develop these metacognitive skills.

Explicit teaching of self-regulated learning

Children as young as three can be taught the values of metacognition, so start early. You can teach the strategies of reflection, planning, goal-setting, monitoring and evaluating in an informal, verbal way to begin with and then progress this to more formal methods when they are ready.

Challenge and Support

Tasks set for children should challenge a child’s ability and skills. A task that is too easy runs the risk of the child becoming bored. Too difficult and they may just switch off or give up.

In the beginning, you may find that you are providing a great deal of support, which will help build success for your child with small, achievable tasks. You can then build on this, by decreasing support and slowly increasing the complexity of tasks. You could support tasks, such as sentence starters or tables to help a child record their knowledge.

Perkins (1992) identified four different stages of metacognitive learning (tacit, aware, strategic or reflective). A tacit learner merely accepts whether they know something or not, through to a reflective learner thinks strategically based on prior knowledge and continually evaluates their performance to adapt. This concept can easily be built into the task to adapt to the learner. E.g. before starting a topic, ask your child what they already know. When you are studying geography, can the child link what they are learning to science topics of evaporation, for example?

Fostering a safe and secure learning environment

Yes, hopefully, your child already feels safe and secure at home. But this element also alludes to more.

Very often, adults will fixate on the results or what is produced by the child. Whether that be a piece of artwork, ten maths problems or a written report, we look at the end result and praise a child on what has been achieved. To create an environment conducive to metacognition, try to focus your praise on the efforts put in to create the piece of work instead. For example, “Well done, I know you have reviewed your work to make it even better.” or “That’s great. You’ve been working on this all morning.”

Interactive modelling

Modelling is such a powerful tool where we learn from imitating others. And children do this

all of the time. As parents, we are the first role models. Our children will imitate our actions, thoughts and feelings (whether we are conscious of it or not), so we endeavour to be the best role model we can be.

Interactive modelling takes this one step further where the child becomes part of the modelling process.

Let’s say, for example, you are teaching a new strategy for maths. Start by asking your child could watch you as you demonstrate the strategy, explaining what you are doing and why as you go.

Now you could ask your child to:

• explain it back to you with details

• demonstrate the strategy back to you, asking them to explain the process as they do (coach them through this part - asking them to explain how or why at various points)

• Complete some maths problems (some correctly and some not) and ask them to mark your work - they will also need to work out where you have gone on some of them.

The CYP should be much more aware of the need for the strategy and any misconceptions can be dealt with promptly.

Similarly, it is important to model your own resilience to tasks. For example, if they see you struggling with a particular aspect of your work - explain how frustrated you feel and how you are working on ways to overcome the difficulty.

Rules about help

As a teacher, I always had rules about my students asking for help. Not because I didn’t want to help them (I did, honestly), but because I wasn’t always going to be around to help them, so where would they look then?

This meant they invariably asked a friend, looked back in their workbooks, or found an example of what they wanted in a textbook - all legitimate strategies.

The danger of working with a learner on a one-to-one basis is that it is often easier to ‘give’ the answers rather than allow the learner to solve problems themselves. This negates metacognition, making the learner dependent on others for answers. Of course, we are not going to let our learners flounder either, but there is a balance of support to be found.

Overall, promoting the development of metacognition at home requires creating an environment that fosters self-awareness, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. By modelling these behaviours and providing practice opportunities, you can help your child develop this essential skill set.

The area of Self-regulation and Meta-cognition is developing all the time. You can read more about the latest research in the Metacognition and Learning journal, linked here.

Kinder Education has metacognition support in all of its courses and learning resources. A brand new creative writing course is landing in August 2023.

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Written by Halo Writing Services