What is it?
Metacognition Strategies are ways to help students understand how they learn and to think about the way they are thinking in class. This can take place by modeling how to think about a problem, and then having the student think out loud to follow their thinking and help guide it. Other strategies include checklists, rubrics, graphic organizers, and other self-created diagrams to help students get their thinking on paper.
When to use it?
These supports are great to introduce at the beginning of the year to give students ways to engage with their classes and their content before they dig into their work. They can also be given as students need because different supports can help with different subjects and of course with different students.
Who to use it with?
These supports can be done with any student, but certain supports can work better with other students. Teachers can discover this through working with their students and trying different supports to see which ones work the best.
How to progress monitor?
Progress monitoring can be done through watching grades, summative and formative assessments, working with the student, and self-grading from the student.
Implementation:
These strategies can be implemented in a multitude of ways. The easiest way would be to present a selection of strategies to the class in a direct instruction model to give students a feel for each strategy. It is important to follow up with students to see if they are using the strategy and to help them implement them into their routines.
Above is a list of different metacognitive strategies that can be useful for students in class. Simply talking about the strategies is not enough, so teachers need to walk students through the process and give them a chance to try the strategy with work from their classes. The picture on the right is an example of a poster that could be hung in the classroom to give prompts to students on how to start answers that use metacognitive strategies. Teaching students how to use these sentence starters while working can help provide them ways to think about their work they might not have tried before.
Citations:
Brozo, W. G., & Flynt, E. S.. (2008). Content Literacy: Motivating Students to Read in the Content Classroom: Six Evidence-Based Principles. The Reading Teacher, 62(2), 172–174. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.www2.lib.ku.edu/stable/20203098
Gorlewski, J., & Annable, J.. (2012). Research for the Classroom: Becoming Self-Editors: Using Metacognition to Improve Students' Grammar Knowledge. The English Journal, 101(3), 89–91. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.www2.lib.ku.edu/stable/41415461
Graham, S. & Harris, K.R. (2016). A Path to Better Writing: Evidence-Based Practices in the Classroom. The Reading Teacher, 69(4), 359–365. doi: 10.1002/trtr.1432
Gorlewski, J., & Annable, J.. (2012). Research for the Classroom: Becoming Self-Editors: Using Metacognition to Improve Students' Grammar Knowledge. The English Journal, 101(3), 89–91. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.www2.lib.ku.edu/stable/41415461
Graham, S. & Harris, K.R. (2016). A Path to Better Writing: Evidence-Based Practices in the Classroom. The Reading Teacher, 69(4), 359–365. doi: 10.1002/trtr.1432