What’s the ‘meta’?
Lots of words are used to explain theories of education, and in fact the language is often the part that puts teachers off. Our time is valuable and for many the idea of doing lots of reading and research beyond all the planning, marking and data analysis we have to do is just a no. However, understanding how we can help our students become independent learners is obviously a workload win! ‘Metacognition’ is a term often used in school and in teaching advice at the moment. It is often described as ‘thinking about your thinking’ which is not a particularly helpful description for some of us. Understanding its difference to other areas of our teaching can help us plan better lessons. Research shows that transferable successful independent learning involves three key processes: Cognition Metacognition Motivation We have all of these things in our tool set at my school, it’s just being clear which tool is for which and therefore how we can utilise them together to help our students le