How understanding Metacognition can help you navigate homeschooling
So many parents and carers have found themselves like me, during this very strange time of having to support their children’s learning in a home environment. We are trying to very quickly get to grips with the online learning platforms, work out what celebrity online classes are the best and consider ways to ensure that our children keep up some form of daily educational activity.
For many (and I know this is true for me) this all brings with it a sense of anxiety. The voice in my head is saying ‘It has been so long since I learnt how to do long division’, ‘what on earth is a fronted adverbial?’, ‘Do I even know how to pronounce that di-graph?’ what on earth is a diagraph anyway? And how do you spell it?’
The traditional view of education is that schools are a place where children learn knowledge. They learn facts and figures about things, and this knowledge store is gradually built upon year on year. But schools do not only teach knowledge. Their remit is actually much broader. Schools also teach children skills. Skills which are crucial for learning and for life in general.
One skill is called metacognition. Whilst this may sound complicated if we break it down into its component parts it consists of ‘meta’ or knowing and ‘cognition’ or more simply thinking. So it therefore just means knowing about thinking. One way to do this is to encourage children to engage in three steps.
• Planning: ‘what am I going to do?’
• Monitoring: ‘how is what I am doing going?’
• Evaluating: ‘how did I do? What did I do well? What could I do better?’
Importantly, research has shown that developing children’s metacognitive skills can have a large impact on their learning. Indeed, the Education Endowment foundation (a large independent charity which evaluates educational interventions for their usefulness and effectiveness) places metacognition as one of the interventions with a largest impact on educational attainment.
So how can we do this?
Parents and carers are in a perfect position to support children in developing these metacognitive skills and the home is the ideal place to practise being more metacognitive by modelling metacognitive questions at each of the 3 stages or steps.
Step 1 Think of an activity to do and encourage planning
Think of activities to do with your children, these do not need to be ‘educational’ in the traditional sense, as it is possible to encourage your child to consider what they have done with pretty much anything. Activities could include baking, cooking, tidying up, washing dishes, playing a game, doing a puzzle, and even going on the x-box.
Have conversations with your child about what they may need in order to do the activity. The aim of this is to develop skills relating to planning. The questions you might ask could include?
• What would be your first step?
• What materials do you need?
• How do you know you have everything you need?
• Have you done anything like this before?
Step 2 Encourage monitoring
This step is done whilst your child is doing the activity. You want to encourage your child to think about how they are getting on and whether they need to change anything. The following questions may be helpful here.
• Is the activity progressing in the way you would like?
• How are you getting on?
• Do you need to change anything?
• Should you do anything different?
• How will you know when you are finished?
Step 3 Encourage evaluation
Finally, when the activity is done is the time to get your child to reflect and think about what they have achieved. The types of question you might ask here are:
• How well have you done?
• What did you enjoy about the activity?
• What have you learnt?
• What did you find the hardest bit?
• What did you find the easiest bit?
• What could you do better?
• What would you do differently next time?
So this is the approach I am going to take with my own children. We are going to do some fun and interesting activities throughout the week and I am going to encourage them to think a bit more about what they are doing and what they have learnt from doing it. So when they do eventually go back to school I will have supported their foundation for learning and helped them develop life-long thinking skills which will go way beyond the classroom.