On metacognitive modelling – 7 Top Tips

Here are a few things I have found useful when explicitly explaining my thought processes in the classroom. It’s definitely not a definitive list, and I’d be really interested in hearing your top tips too.

1. Make sure students are fully engaged in the process. You can help by not asking students to copy what you are writing as you are writing – if they are furiously trying to get down what you write they can’t focus on what you are saying. They might have a great exemplar in their books, but haven’t processed how it was written, or the choices you made when writing. To ensure they have a copy, I either take a photo of the completed example for them and / or type it up for when they need to refer to it.
2. Particularly when starting out, plan what you are going to model before you start. To begin with I often practised modelling my writing before a lesson, jotting down notes and sometimes even drafting paragraphs to help me consider the process first.
3. However, don’t over plan either! It’s important for students to see you explicitly explain the drafting process. When I’m writing I often cross out words and ask the class to think of a more academic or precise way of articulating what I have written. If we can’t, then we think about ways of being able to solve this successfully.
4. Question students about their thinking too. For example, if I ask students how we can begin a paragraph to show that we are tracking logically through and extract, I’ll ask them why they made their language choices. If we are analysing a text, I question them about how and why we use tentative language when explaining their ideas. If we are skim reading a text to find evidence to answer a question, I ask they why they chose a particular quotation and how is answers the question. Asking students to write their ideas and answers on mini whiteboards can be a helpful way of getting the whole class engaged, checking for understanding and generating discussion.
5. Make deliberate mistakes, or ask for better alternatives! In my experience, students love the challenge of trying to improve on your work. Make sure you ask them to verbalise their choices, so they become used to explaining their thought processes.
6. Explain and demonstrate the strategies that you use too – I struggled with spelling for years and I’m honest about that to students. I explain the reason I am much better now is that I actively think about how to spell and have lots of different tips and tricks that I use to help me remember – for example, knowing that the word “believe” always has a “lie” in the middle of it and learning the meanings of root words.
7. Gradually step back so that students are doing more of the verbalised modelling than you. I found that as students became more confident they were happy to share their work and demonstrate the thinking behind it. Although it wasn’t my initial intention, I found that we developed a shared “metacognitive language” to articulate our thought processes.

You can find out more about metacognitive modelling in my linked blog.