Implementation of Metacognition Strategies
By Nathan Burns
Read Nathan Burns’ practical guide to effective implementation of metacognitive strategies in your classroom.
Welcome back to the final article in this series on metacognition. Having covered metacognitive theory, and a whole range of different strategies that you can quickly introduce into the classroom to stimulate metacognitive growth in your students, this piece is going to take a different tac. In this piece, considerations on implementing metacognitive strategies, from an individual teacher perspective, and going to be covered.
So often, implementation is covered at a faculty, year or school-wide level. Typically, how a classroom teacher goes about implementing strategies into their own classroom is ignored. Instead, teachers are just expected to take an idea and run with it – but there is so much more to it than that!
This piece will be exploring key considerations when implementing ideas into your own classrooms, specifically in relation to metacognition. There is no fixed order to these ideas, and it may be that you do not need to consider all of them, too. So, pick and choose whichever ideas work for you in your journey of metacognition implementation.
Understand the theory
The very best advice that I can give when implementing metacognitive strategies is to understand the theory. I often forget that actually, metacognitive theory can be fairly complex. If you go and read my first article in this series (link) hopefully it will make plenty of sense, though! The better you understand the theory, the more that you understand why different strategies are being used, and therefore the better you understand which parts of each strategy need to be emphasised when introduced in class, to maximise the positive metacognitive benefits.
Take your time
As with any implementation, time is required to go through a number of stages. Firstly, you need to get your head around the theory and the strategies that you want to be using in your class. Once you have done this, you need to find an appropriate time to introduce the strategies into your lessons, and then you actually need to give it a go. Once you have done this, you will need to take some time to consider how it has gone, and improvements that you are going to make moving forwards. All of this takes time, and there are a lot of stages to go through. If you use the strategy once and it doesn’t go well, then take some time to reflect on this (be metacognitive, even) and then give it another go. Do not expect these strategies to embed in your lessons straight away – give yourself some time!
Pick an easy class
We all have a class (sometimes more than one) who make it a little harder to implement new pedagogical strategies with. Perhaps their behaviour is a little more challenging? Perhaps you only see them once a fortnight? Or perhaps their attainment is a little lower, so they may not be the first class you attempt a new metacognitive strategy with? Whatever it may be, make sure to choose the class that you try out your new strategy/strategies with, carefully. If you pick the wrong group and it goes horribly wrong, then it may put you off trying out these strategies for a little while – and considering how powerful they are to student learning, we do not want that to happen!
Pick the correct strategy
This may seem obvious – pick the correct strategy! But there is more to it than that. Which class are you going to be using as your ‘guinea pig’ group? Once you know this, you need to consider specifically which part of metacognitive thinking that you are going to be developing with them. Do students really need to be working on their planning? Or is it their ability to evaluate that really needs to be worked on? Whatever it may be, ensure that you choose an area that students in that class really need to be working on, in order to maximise impact.
Seek out support
You may be the only member of your team, or even school, to have engaged with these articles on metacognition. You may be the only member of your team or school that is even aware of metacognition. However, this does not mean that you have to do all of this implementation and improvement on your own. Once you have decided on a class and some strategies that you want to try out, why not invite in colleagues to do a little observation of you? It does not matter whether this colleague truly understands metacognition, as long as you tell them what they should see, and then get feedback on whether that was evident or not. This little bit of observation could work wonders for you with your implementation, especially as we make the invisible, visible!
Don’t overdo it!
Once one strategy goes well, it is very tempting to dive straight in there with several other strategies. However, this is something that you do not want to be doing. Each strategy will take some time to embed, and it will also take you time to get familiar and super confident with it. So, by all means, go on and introduce different strategies, but do not try to do too much all at once. The last thing that you want to do is undo all the good work you did with the implementation of the first strategy!
It is also important to consider the impact on students. Some of this metacognitive thinking may be quite new for them, so consider how each new strategy that you introduce may impact them.
So, there are a few pointers for you to consider as you continue your metacognitive journey. Hopefully these pointers, alongside the practical strategies, will allow your classroom to bloom in metacognitive thought and discussion. Hopefully these articles will also be a good guide for you to refer to, and something to pass on to colleagues, to support them on their journeys, too. If you ever need help and support, do just drop me a message on X – @MrMetacognition.
Good luck!!
You can read more articles by Nathan Burns here.
