Developing Metacognitive Discussion Skills
By Nathan Burns
An examination of the ways in which metacognition can be used to improve the standard of discussion in the classroom
Welcome back to the final article in this metacognitive series covering strategies. Over the last few months, we have looked at strategies to support planning and monitoring, developing student evaluation skills, your own questioning and how we can help to build the metacognitive thought processes into our lessons. And no set of strategies would be complete without considering the way that we can use group work and discussion to further students metacognitive thinking.
You will be familiar with the drill by now, but if you have yet to read the very first article in this series (link) on metacognitive theory, then you really ought to read that first. It does not really matter in which order you read all of the strategy articles, but it is important you read and understand the theory behind these strategies first. Once done, then you are ready to get cracking.
Unlike the other articles, which focussed on 3 or 4 main strategies, there are a few more provided in this article. As with any group work, there are crucial things that you need to consider. Will the seating plan work? Are students in the correct groupings? Have you balanced out the attainment levels of each group, or do you want students grouped by attainment? Is the task sufficiently clear? What are the task boundaries for both the content and individual behaviour? All of these crucial factors come before considering effective metacognitive strategies, as without these successful foundations for group work, the metacognitive strategies will not work at all!
So, on to the strategies!
Quiz, Quiz, Trade
This strategy is based upon providing students with a range of different cards containing metacognitive questions, for example, those provided in the previous strategies article (link). The idea here is that each student is given one card with a metacognitive question, which they must then ask another student. That student will answer, and then in turn will ask the first student the metacognitive question that is on their card. After they have done this, they will swap cards and then continue to ask others in the group or around the classroom.
To make this task easier, you will probably want to have used these questions before in a whole class questioning scenario so that they are familiar (ish!) with students. Equally, or additionally, you may wish to put answer sentence starters on the back of these cards, so that students are able to construct a better response to the question.
The beauty of this strategy is it ensures that the participation ratio – that is the number of students forced to consider and respond to a set of given questions – is markedly increased versus cold calling a handful of different students within the room. However, you are unlikely to hear responses from all students, so you make want to listen in to one or two students to gauge their answers, much like you will select one or two students in particular to cold call.
Working Backwards
The focus of this strategy is to provide students with a completed task or solution, and challenge them to work backwards to the original question or provided task. Here, students will be focussing in on the strategy used (and the hints that this provides over the type of task originally given), as well as the steps taken, the final content provided in the answer/solution, and the likelihood of different questions/tasks being presented to them.
This type of task is most suitable for students once they have mastered the content of a given topic – if students are not solid on the content requirements of a topic, there is little chance that they will be able to complete this task, even working together.
Through identifying key parts of the solution/answer, students are in essence looking for all of the metacognitive clues which hint towards a particular question or task. Through working backwards, it will help to illuminate to students the stages and thinking that they ought to be doing when they are completing this, or a similar task/question, from scratch.
Odd One Out
Though I really should not have favourite strategies, this certainly is one of them! Putting together this type of task is quick and straight forward, and due to its open-ended nature generates a huge amount of discussion.
The odd one out task is a ‘does what it says on the tin’ type activity. Simply provide students with, roughly, four different options, and ask them to identify which one is the odd one out. The most important thing that you need to do for this activity is ensuring that all of the options are as suitable as each other. Where there is one clear odd-one-out, the value of the task (and deeper thinking that it would generate) significantly reduces. The best type of odd-one-out activity is where there is more than one option which appears to be the odd one out. This will generate the richest discussion for the group and stimulate the most metacognitive thinking.
If you decide to take on using odd one out activities in your classes, I recommend splitting the workload with colleagues. Would it be possible for you to create the odd one out activities for one unit, if you have a colleague who is generating them for a different unit?
Partially Worked Examples
This strategy works similarly to the working backwards strategy written about above. In this task, rather than providing a group with a final solution or answer, students are instead presented with a partially completed solution or answer.
Within the group, students need to work together to fill these gaps. Again, students will need to draw on their understanding of alternative strategies that can be used, as well as the different steps (content wise) that would need to be taken. Students will also need to evaluate the validity of what they are inserting at each point, ensuring that it maintains content sense.
Overall, this strategy is arguably a little easier for students than the working backwards strategy, as the partial completion of answers/solutions within this strategy makes it an effective scaffold for students.
Find Someone Who
This is another one of those strategies which can be put into the ‘does what it says on the tin’ category. The aim of this strategy is for students to find someone who has done a certain thing. These may include:
Someone who has used an alternative strategy to the one that they employed.
Someone who chose the same strategy as the one that they employed.
Someone who dropped marks in their answer for the same reason.
Someone who had an area for improvement which is their area of strength.
By grouping students together in certain ways, it will stimulate a certain type of conversation that you want. For example, by grouping together students who used the same strategy, it will allow students to discuss the reasons for choosing that strategy, as well as their agreed strengths and weaknesses, and general utilities, for that strategy. Equally, getting students who used different approaches to discuss why, and the relative utility, strengths and weaknesses of their chosen strategy, would also be very beneficial to students.
Talking Heads
The final strategy is that of talking heads. In this strategy, students are presented with 3 or 4 different responses to a question (often displayed as speech bubbles from heads – hence the name of talking heads). Within groups, students will need to discuss the different answers, and determine which are the ‘best’.
Determining which are the ‘best’ responses can of course be quite subjective. Therefore, students could be presented with a marking rubric to help them. Alternatively, students could just be asked to determine the best response with no type of rubric, and then cross-group or whole class discussion could take place with regards to how and why students valued certain facets of each of the answers.
So, there we have 6 of the best strategies to stimulate metacognitive discussion in your classroom. I would re-iterate, as I did at the start of the article, that it is crucial to get conditions in place for effective group work, before moving on to use these metacognitive strategies. If conditions for group work are not effectively cemented, you will not see any benefits from using these metacognitive strategies.
