Developing Metacognitive Modelling Skills
By Nathan Burns
Modelling in the classroom can be a tricky business. Nathan Burns offers some suggestions to increase your effectiveness via his metacognitive modelling strategy.
Welcome back to the sixth article in this series, covering everything metacognition! In the first article, metacognitive theory was covered, and in the subsequent four articles, a range of different strategies to incorporate metacognition into the classroom were explored. In this article, and the next two, another dozen or so strategies will be explored.
As ever, if you haven’t read the first article in the series, it is crucial that you go back and read that first. The greater your understanding of metacognitive theory, the better your understanding of the logic behind each strategy, and hence the better your implement the strategies. If you haven’t yet read the other four articles on strategies, there’s no need to read them first (just go back and read them after this article)!
This piece will be focussing on four different strategies to improve metacognitive modelling. Modelling is something done in almost every lesson you teach – if not every lesson. It is often the way that we will begin a lesson, how we address misconceptions or mistakes shown, and how we approach a re-teach following an assessment. It is our best tool in supporting student learning. Therefore, if we can improve our modelling a tiny bit, the power that this can have on our students learning can be huge. That is the aim of the following four strategies.
Explicit Justifications
I shouldn’t really have favourite strategies, but this one has to be one of my favourites. Every single time we approach a problem in life, we make decisions. Every single time we plan a lesson, we make decisions. Every single time we model new content, an answer, or something else to students, we make decisions.
These decisions come about due to significant content knowledge and experience of the domain. In essence, they come about due to expertise. Over time, the decisions that we make become second nature to us – we make them because we know they are the correct ones, as we have tackled similar problems/questions time and time again, and know the most effective route to take to get to a solution.
So often when modelling, we forget to be explicit about these choices. Even sometimes when we are conscious of this, we still won’t be explicit about each of the choices that we do make – often choosing one or two rationales to provide.
Therefore, the focus of this strategy is to be explicit about every decision (within reason, of course!) that you make during the course of your modelling. Additionally, do not just point out to students when you have made a decision (for example declaring that you have chosen to use ‘strategy A’). Rather, explain the rationale behind each choice you make. Share the knowledge and experience that you have. At the end of the day, we wish that students could think like us when they were approaching tasks – but this will never happen unless we explicitly justify the choices that we are making, to our students.
Strategy Comparison
Building from this previous idea is the second strategy of strategy comparison. Once again, over years of study and teaching, we develop an incredibly strong, and intuitive understanding of when to use one specific strategy over another to complete a given task or problem. Given a problem, the most effective strategy for completion will jump straight to us.
However, for our novice learners, it just won’t. What’s more is that students invariable utilise the same approach over and over because it is a) easier or b) the one that they understand better. However, even where a student uses a comparatively simpler method, or is comparatively more confident using one strategy over another, but the strategy is ill suited to the problem at hand, then trouble is going to ensue.
Therefore, this strategy proposes that the teacher models, and commentates, on the use of the different approaches available to complete a given problem or task. From a content side of things, this remains highly effective teaching, as students are given reminders, or re-teaching, over how to use specific methods or complete specific tasks. From a metacognitive point of view, a teacher’s commentary here can help to illuminate to students why one method is more suited to the given task or problem at hand.
This can lead to asking students additional questions, but this will be explored in more detail in the next article (so keep your eyes peeled for that!). It should also be considered that through modelling this to students, it avoids them having to repeat question after question, in order to glean the same information that you have – when one strategy is more effective to use that the other/s. Sometimes this would be a good thing for students to do, but, in the main, if students can learn from our expertise, and not have to work it out themselves, then this is far superior for their overall learning (and how much content you can get through).
Visualiser
The third strategy is one that, due to COVID, we all became very very familiar with. So without telling you how to suck eggs, a consideration of the metacognitive benefits of this strategy will be explored.
Much like the previous two strategies, this strategy focusses in on our knowledge and expertise, this time focussing in on our knowledge of how to lay out our work, crucial steps to show, and the content to include.
Though all of this can be explained verbally, and though it can also be shown on a whiteboard or through a PPT, nothing beats pens and paper under a visualiser, and laying out the work exactly as we would expect students to in their own books. Modelling is of course our way of showing students how to do a certain thing, so if we are wanting them to consider layout, showing methods and other key features, then it makes great sense to dust off that visualiser, and start teaching using it once again.
Model Scaffold Use
Lesson after lesson, we provide students with scaffolds. Sometimes, we use them so frequently, or they are so obvious, we don’t even think about them. For example, handing out multiplication tables, dictionaries or other key, subject specific scaffolds, for example, knowledge organisers.
Once again, we know how to use these scaffolds. We also understand why they are useful and what ‘gap’ they are filling for the student that they are being given to. But does the student know the answer to these three questions? Almost certainly not.
What we will likely do when we give students a scaffold is to show them how to use it. Multiplication grids and dictionaries are typically obvious or have been used by students previously, whilst other scaffolds may be a little more complex and may need specific modelling to show a student how to use them effectively.
This then leads up on to those second two questions. Firstly, do the students know why the scaffold is helpful? Again, this is often obvious, but is something that should be made explicit to students. The second question is even more important – do students know the gap that the scaffold is helping to cover? Again, using a multiplication table or dictionary might make this obvious, but other scaffolds, especially those which are subject specific, may not be. Either way, it is more information which should be made explicit to students. If this information is made explicit, it also allows a student to identify an area that they need to work on. If students don’t know this, they won’t be able to work on a certain area, and the scaffold will become a more permanent structure, whereas it should be being drawn away.
So there we have it – four strategies which you can introduce into your classroom with supreme ease, to yet further improve your own metacognitive modelling. The better our modelling as teachers, the better our students will learn. The more explicit we can be in sharing our expert knowledge, the less time students will spend as novices in the subject area. Good luck with implementing!
You can read more articles by Nathan Burns here.
