#140 Making a Real Difference

Hi Everyone

Whilst preparing this week to guest on a podcast with Samuel Holsten from ‘Brain Tools’, some of the questions I was asked to consider as potential content for discussion, reminded me of how I became focused on metacognition in the first place. I see it as the most important key to academic progress and mental health for children and young people in school, but how did I reach that conclusion?

When I first started researching the learning brain, over 40 years ago, far less was known about the detailed science behind what’s actually happening inside students’ heads whilst in a classroom. The impact of working with the brain’s natural inclinations was however, already a core message early in my teaching career when I was lucky enough to receive extra training, initially with the University of the First Age, and then with neuroscientist Roy Paget.

Even 25 years ago, that focused my attention on what students needed to learn and how they were going to learn it, rather than on what I was going to teach. I piloted what was known at the time as ‘brain friendly’ learning techniques in my classroom and enjoyed the positive response from students who became much more involved in their own learning and were able to make greater progress. I was particularly impressed with the excitement it caused for learners who faced some kind of difficulty and yet now felt more able to access the curriculum.

Fast forward another 15 years, where following several other roles in education, (during which I was promoting more student-centred teaching and learning), I was once again in a position to work directly with students as the Educational Lead for a Local Authority team supporting young people in care with behavioural difficulties. I was able to bring to bear all of my previous knowledge and combine it with the social learning theory on which the team’s ethos was based, to help support these trauma-affected students to gain an education.

I learned how to turn around an individual’s perception of themselves, how to improve their relationship with learning, and how to help them recognise that they had it in their own power to make progress. So, when that project came to an end, I decided that with so many other children and young people struggling to engage effectively, it was worth seeing if schools would be interested in having an ‘independent success coach’ to work with learners that they were most worried about.

Turns out that they were, and so I put together a pack of materials from all the resources I had created over many years, in order to provide some structured activities that could be used during students' sessions. As time went by, I introduced extra resources, which had often been designed to help a particular student, but which subsequently proved useful for others as well. The ‘Learner Success Pathway’ had been born, and working through it with me, never failed to have an impact on student progress.

During this time, I began to notice that whatever difficulty the learner was having, the solution boiled down to the same thing. It was in fact the identical combination that had proved so successful previously with the looked after students. Namely; turning around their perception of themselves, improving their relationship with learning, and helping them recognise that they had the power within themselves to make progress.

In fact, this method was so successful that once I started working with a school, they wouldn’t let me go. They would just wait for a learner to complete their sessions with me, and replace them with another one. As you can imagine, it didn’t take long to reach capacity, running sessions all day, every day across several schools. As the success stories gained momentum, messages from parents and staff started to query exactly how I was helping learners for whom expectations had been low, to achieve so much.

In conversations with school staff, as I described the process that I was using to help learners ‘change their mind’ about themselves, learning, and achievement, the word ‘metacognition’ kept coming up. Schools had become more familiar with this as a description for; going beyond the learning to analyse how an individual is getting their current results and finding a better way to think, in order to achieve improvement. They were right, that’s exactly what I was doing!

That’s when ‘Metacognition in Practice’ became a thing for me, because I swapped from working directly with students to supporting the adults around them; parents, school leaders, teachers and support staff, to develop metacognition in all learners. My emphasis has always been on ‘naturalising’ the ability to think differently, and I have never used the word metacognition directly with students.

I’ve found that helping learners to improve their self-concept is the most important starting point. Students who don’t see their own worth, or don’t believe in their own ability to learn won’t even get started on analysing their own thoughts because they don’t recognise the value in doing so. Students who don’t understand the learning process have no idea where, or why, they’re getting stuck, so won’t recognise where change is needed, and those who have become passive learners don’t realise that they have an active role to play so won’t take responsibility for their own progress. A large proportion of students fall into at least one, if not more of those categories.

Witnessing the evidence first hand, that developing metacognition in students makes a massive difference to what they can achieve, gives me the confidence that by continuing to write this newsletter, I can help you to feel more confident about what metacognition is, why it’s such a vital part of successful learning and how to develop it in learners. I hope that you’ll consider subscribing to make sure that you don’t miss the next issue.

Take care till next time

Warm regards

Liz