This year, we’re undertaking a yearlong project to support the development of colleagues’ understanding of metacognition. Starting with what metacognition is, and why it’s important, we have met as a staff team each half term to discuss strategies to scaffold pupils’ independent learning and share successful (and less successful) approaches we’ve trialled in our own classrooms.
Considering key mechanisms for effective PD
Whilst we know that it’s important to keep coming back to the same topic, this approach – designed to support colleagues’ cognitive load, provide opportunities to activate prior knowledge and facilitate connections to new learning – can risk seeming repetitive and even boring. So, considering how to ensure that professional development (PD) sessions continue to engage colleagues and motivate them to attempt new techniques, whilst maintaining a consistent focus, becomes important.
Starting points
One potential challenge when considering metacognition is that it is so broad. To make it manageable, as leaders we need to shrink the focus. One way that we have done this is through making use of the EEF’s ‘Metacognition Starter Kit’. This invaluable resource brings together a carefully curated series of resources which provide an excellent starting point for those school leaders seeking to lead PD on this important aspect of teaching and learning.
Time is precious and in incredibly short supply, so having a ‘go to’ tool which links to a range of research-informed resources which we can pick up and use in our PD sessions has saved us a lot of time!
Build knowledge
We used the EEF metacognition animation to introduce the concept of metacognition. This gave a really clear explanation of what metacognition is and the underpinning research-evidence. It allowed us to open up discussions around what metacognition might look like in our classroom contexts – across age phases and curriculum subjects – to help colleagues recognise it and actively supports its development.
Consolidating understanding
We split our professional development programmeA programme is a package of support, including professional development, that helps early years educators to improve particular areas of practice and children’s outcomes. up to allow for shorter sessions which we can then revisit more frequently across the year. This helped us to manage cognitive load by gradually introducing more information to deepen understanding, however it also meant that there was a risk that content would be forgotten between sessions.
We started each new session with opportunities to revisit prior learning, and one of the ways we did this was by adapting the questions from the Metacognition: A brief explainer ‘Follow-up activities’ tool to create a retrieval activity. This allowed colleagues to activate prior knowledge and also enabled us to identify any gaps in knowledge or misconceptions to address during future sessions.
Supporting metacognitive strategies
The Metacognition modelling tool was great for modelling some of the key sentence stems which can be used to plan, monitor and evaluate learning. We then used this to support colleagues to rehearse ‘Think Alouds’ to model metacognitive thinking, and give peer-feedback to ensure that the technique is well-understood before using it in the classroom.
To provide prompts and cues for colleagues to help ensure that some of the strategies we’d discussed were embedded into practice, we adapted the ‘Supporting Independence Through Questioning’ tool to make a display in each classroom across school. This helped remind both pupils and teachers to use questions to consider the planning, monitoring and evaluating of their learning, and encouraged these types of discussions to take place more frequently in our classrooms.
Overall, the Metacognition Starter Kit has been a fantastic resource to kick start our thinking and planning regarding how to support our colleagues’ PD – hopefully whilst still allowing us to ensure that our professional learning sessions are learning and engaging so that we never hear: “Not this again!”
Further reading/watching
EEF blog: A Balanced Approach to Professional Development | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)