Prior to my working at Connecticut College, I worked at another college in a program specifically for students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Most of these individuals had a track record of struggling to learn, and the goal for those of us who taught and advised the students was to teach these students how to learn so that they could be successful in college. In addition to using explicit instruction methods and incorporating a high level of executive function support and development, we incorporated how to use metacognition into our content classes.
Simply put, metacognition is thinking about your thinking for the purpose of improving your learning. This second part is critical – it’s not merely a pondering, philosophical exercise (no offense to philosophers), but rather one with an explicit goal. We think about our thinking to understand it better – its strengths and weaknesses – so that we can learn better. We can teach students how to do that. Equally important, educators can use it to evaluate and improve their teaching.
We think of our highest performing students as exceptionally smart, intelligent, bright. The strength they really share is being metacognitive about their learning. They may not know the term, or have ever consciously thought about what they are doing to be successful, but they are being metacognitive nonetheless. It comes innately for some students – or at least they develop the ability fairly independently – while for many others, its development needs the guidance and support of others.
Let’s look at metacognition in a little more detail. Metacognition involves constant monitoring of determining the task hand, the best way to approach it, how you’re doing, should you be doing something different. Then reflecting on the entire process, and when necessary, cycling through again with any needed adjustments. This requires understanding oneself as a learner, knowing options of strategies to use, determining which ones to use and when, evaluating whether they’re being effective or whether a different strategy is needed. It’s being able to gauge when you understand something and when you don’t, and if it’s the latter, then being able to figure out what to do to aid comprehension. It’s knowing when the process you’re using to monitor your learning is effective and being able to adapt your monitoring if it’s not.
Different analogies can be used with students to help explain this concept of metacognition. For some, what is described in the paragraph above reminds them of seeing yourself in a mirror, looking at yourself in a reflection in a mirror, looking at yourself in a reflection in a mirror and so on. Others describe it as “driving your brain” or “dissecting your learning.” And one of my favorites, “doing therapy on your learning” – you can’t just take things as how they appear on the surface, but really break things down to see and understand what’s really going on, how are you helping or hurting yourself, what should you be doing differently.
Having a growth mindset, the belief that the ability to learn can be increased and challenges overcome with effort, goes hand in hand with being metacognitive. After all, using metacognition focuses on the process being used, the journey to success, not just the end goal. A metacognitive approach shows that hard work does pay off. And with a growth mindset, one has the patience and resilience to work toward that payoff – what Carol Dweck, Stanford psychologist and growth mindset guru, describes as “the power of ‘yet’.” I can’t do it . . . yet.
During Camp Teach & Learn at the end of May, there will be a workshop on using metacognition to teach and teaching metacognition as well as a workshop on developing a growth mindset in your students.
