Metacognition - often summed up as “thinking about how we think” - has become an increasingly prominent concept in schools around the world over recent years.
Often the focus with metacognition has been on older students, but a new research project from an international schools group is applying it to the earliest years of formal education.
Nord Anglia Education is running Flag Time for children aged 3 to 6, with the aim of helping them to ”understand how they think and learn best”.
The project, involving 21 Nord Anglia schools around the globe, explores how structured “moments of reflection” can help pupils to assess their own learning.
Metacognition for the youngest pupils
Flag Time is a 20-minute daily classroom routine. Teachers place a flag with each child’s name and picture on it in a part of the classroom where a specially chosen task is waiting. Each day children work individually or in groups with others who share an interest or a need to develop the same skill.
At the end of Flag Time, pupils reflect on their progress and set personal learning goals - the idea being, as Nord Anglia puts it, that they are “building a habit of continuous improvement from the earliest years”.
The Flag Time research project is led by Dr Anne Baldisseri, head of School at Avenues São Paulo in Brazil, who along with colleagues has been developing the concept for 12 years.
Her team wants to understand how ”self-regulated learning” encourages children to reflect on their progress and set learning goals, and also how greater independence helps early learners to take an “active role in their education”.
The team has found that metacognition-based approaches in the early years are helping teachers to set higher expectations and better understand each child’s learning.
“Research shows that metacognition plays a critical role in student success, yet its application in early childhood education remains under-explored,” says Baldisseri. “Flag Time provides young learners with the structure and language to reflect on their thinking, understand their own strengths, interests and needs, and make intentional choices about their learning.
“By embedding these practices into daily routines, we are nurturing self-awareness, independence and a foundation for lifelong learning.”
‘The most amazing time for metacognition’
Any suggestion that the early years stage is too early for metacognition is rebutted by Emma Coleman, Nord Anglia’s professional development manager and research lead. The early years are, she says, “the most amazing time for metacognition” because younger children are “very self aware” and “capable of an incredible amount”.
The initial impetus for Flag Time came more than decade ago, from seeing some four-year-olds struggle with reading.
“We just felt so sorry for those students that wanted to play and didn’t want to read, and we had to pull them out,” says Baldisseri.
Staff would try to find “something they really wanted to do” instead. When the child returned to reading, it was approached in a different way, perhaps alongside another child whose company they enjoyed.
In other words - without initially calling this metacognition - Baldisseri was hitting upon an approach where children were more conscious of different contexts for learning and how they responded to them.
So how else might this play out in a school?
Baldisseri talks of a child drawing a penguin who is not happy with their sketch - the idea in their head is not matched by reality. The teacher tells them it’s OK, that maybe they just need to move the penguin’s head along; the teacher is helping them to see that wrong turns are a normal part of learning, to express what they’re not happy about, to have the language to express what they want to do next.
Baldisseri likens it to an adult professional sitting through a company presentation about an important new idea for all staff. However, the boss knows every employee really well and has “set up places for you to go and learn that concept with people that maybe you’re going to learn best with in that moment” - you might not even know or particularly like these peers, “but they have a similar need or interest”.
Skilled teacher interventions
Through Flag Time, teachers are helping children to “know the objective of the work that they’re doing at their little table, linking it to some objective from the curriculum, so that [the children] could be more aware...of how the activity is linked to something that they want to improve”.
This is skilled, demanding work for teachers, who have to be acutely aware of each child’s individual circumstances and prepared to deviate from tried-and-tested approaches.
Baldisseri gives the example of setting up learning “stations” for early-years children, each with a different type of activity. If a child never goes to the painting station because they do not like to get messy, the choice might seem that you either accept they will never go there or force them to do so, with the risk of upsetting them and making them cry.
With Flag Time, however, there is another way: the child might like horses, so you make painting all about horses and take them to the painting area with one of their best friends.
“They kind of don’t even notice that they’re painting,” says Baldisseri. “It helps them understand that their own learning process in something that they were previously refusing to do - to understand that if they try, and if they have a great space to try something in, they might be successful in it.”
For teachers, she says, the “biggest paradigm shift” is that planning “becomes really significant”: how activities are set up has to be carefully thought through in advance. Assessment, meanwhile, is less likely to be standardised and take place upon completion of an activity - through a worksheet, for example - and is instead conducted more “in the moment”.
‘A golden thread through every aspect of school’
But for Nord Anglia, Flag Time and metacognition are not just about the early years: they predict knock-on benefits for students all the way up to the oldest, aged 18.
“If you emphasise something in the early years, then it does add power to it through the rest of school,” says Coleman. “I think having some kind of a golden thread that weaves through every single aspect of school life, right from 3 to 18 - something that is so impactful for children and their learning - is huge.
“If you miss the early years - or think they can’t do it because they’re too young - then you’ve missed such a massive trick.”
The hope is that habits and techniques started young will “flow through the rest of the school and create that culture of thinking, learning and metacognition - and that’s what’s really powerful”.
Or, as Baldisseri puts it: “We really want students to have a voice and be more independent and bring agency to their learning - but if they’ve been doing this from the beginning, it’s just natural for that to happen.”
Research findings will be published by Nord Anglia in summer 2025, including recommendations for how teachers can integrate metacognitive strategies into early-years learning.
Flag Time follows another Nord Anglia metacognition research project carried out with Boston College. It started in 2023, with first-year findings published as Building Better Thinkers, and complements Nord Anglia’s research collaboration with Project Zero, a research centre at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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