Martin and Patricia Buoncristiani
Keeping Thinking Front and Centre Metacognition is the key
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he more we learn about the human brain and how it works the more important looms the idea that students need to think about how they are thinking. Art Costa and Bena Kallick describe students lacking these thinking skills as follows: “Students often follow instructions or perform tasks without wondering why they are doing what they are doing. They seldom question themselves about their own learning strategies or evaluate the efficiency of their own performances. They have little or no motivation to do so. “Some children virtually have no idea of what they should do when they confront a problem and are often unable to explain their strategies of decision-making. For these children learning is reduced to episodic rote learning and memorisation, primarily directed at passing tests and getting through school.”
Teachers Matter
Metacognition or ‘thinking about one’s own thinking’ is recognised as an essential skill, but helping students understand and control
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how they think is difficult; after all what goes on in students’ minds is known only to them. When we help students understand how their brains work and give them the strategies to make them work better they are more likely to think effectively and take control of their own learning. To do this we need to use the language of thinking.
reaching or justifying our conclusions – the student asks himself “Should I analyze this data or make a prediction?”
What am I thinking about?
Conduct We also need to think about how we conduct ourselves to support our thinking, by considering such dispositions as persistence, striving for accuracy, gathering data effectively, or thinking flexibly. How we behave while thinking is an important aspect of our thought process. Our behaviour when working alone is different from working as part of a team; it is different when gathering data rather than thinking creatively.
Metacognition is thinking about how we think so we can improve the way we think by understanding, monitoring, evaluating and regulating our thought processes. Basically, there are three objects of metacognition – the content of our thinking, the cognitive skills we are using and our conduct in support of our thinking. Each of these objects has its own language and structure. Content We sometimes need to focus on the content of our thought – what we are thinking about right now. It might be knowledge we already possess as we try to recall some specific information; it might be a concept we are trying to understand; it might be a problem we are trying to solve; it might be plans we are trying to formulate. We think about the content of our thoughts in order to monitor the progress of our understanding, or to check for consistency with other knowledge. The language and structure of the content of our thought is that of the discipline we are thinking within. For example the student asks himself “Do I understand the term ‘inflation’?” Cognition Sometimes we need to think about the cognitive skill being used - the type of thinking we are using to achieve our goal. We do this to ensure that the appropriate thinking skills are brought to bear on our problem and to sharpen these skills for future use. We may also need to seek alternative means of
There are many descriptions of cognitive skills that list different types of thinking. Perhaps the most familiar to educators is Bloom’s Taxonomy and its more recent derivatives. Table 1 lists a modification suggested by Richard Mayer.
Art Costa and Bena Kallick studied the behavior patterns of successful people and distilled them into a set of 16 dispositions or habits. These Habits of Mind provide both a structure and a language for discussing behaviors that promote skillful thinking and are listed in Table 2. Thus, when we think about our own thinking we focus on content, cognition and conduct. The words about the discipline, the words describing the cognitive skills and the words of the Habits of Mind provide a language and a structure to get students talking about metacognition and begin controlling their learning. Table 3 summarises the objectives and intentions of metacognition.
Strategies for the Classroom Teaching about metacognition Both Flavel and Butterfield have shown that even preschoolers have demonstrated the ability to perform simple metacognitive tasks. There is growing evidence that young