Metacognition is thinking about our thinking. It’s the driving force behind effective learning for kids from age 3 to high school and advanced learning and on through a productive life.
As with growth mindset, it requires us to engage in a healthy struggle as we each develop this valuable life-long tool. We must think about current materials and tasks, dig into them, breaking them apart to understand what we already know, scrutinize them, then rebuild them to develop new understandings.
So what do we do the encourage and develop of metacognition? It’s a 4-part process:
| Plan and Organize
skim and preview tasks breakdown the parts decide how to proceed |
Self-Monitor
check your progress troubleshoot problems ask for help when truly ‘stuck’ |
| Self Reflect
assess our strategies Think-Pair-Share-Compare with others |
Direct Our Own Learning
know what we know know what we need to move forward |
Metacognition requires self-reliance, but also needs a partnership with others to share thinking processes. It requires hard work, struggling at times, and going beyond that is familiar to us to understand what is needed to deeply understand concepts. It develops resilience as well as puts us in charge of our own learning.