Metacognition is more and more popular with teachers and schools across the UK. With new books and blogs on the topic emerging all of the time, ways to build metacognition into the curriculum are highly sought after.
However, getting metacognition into the curriculum doesn’t just mean that faculties have to find ways to implement it within their subjects, it can also be introduced on a wider scale through a tutor programme.
As part of my National Professional Qualification for Middle Leadership (NPQML) over the last 12 months, I introduced a metacognitive programme into pastoral time for two year groups. Labelled the “Learning and Revision Skill Intervention”, the strategies were delivered by tutors to their tutees once per fortnight, on average, across the full academic year.
During lockdown, I produced video recordings of new strategies and uploaded these to ensure students still had access to new, researched-based tactics. This programme had its own curriculum, with a range of different strategies to be taught to identified students and then ordered so as to best support them with key events throughout the year, such as revision for end of year assessments.
So, in terms of strategies, what could you look to include if you were to produce your own metacognitive tutor programme? The following are strategies that I included were:
- Prioritisation Matrix.
- Avoiding distractions.
- Frayer Model.
- Bubble map.
- Double bubble map.
- Multi-flow map.
- Problem-solving grid.
- PMI grid.
- Knowledge Grid.
- Comprehension, connection, strategies, evaluation.
- Directed questions.
- Self-resting.
- Elaborative interrogation.
- Self-explanation
- Interleaved practice.
- Distributed practice.
- Revision no-nos.
So how effective was it, exactly? Well, it’s incredibly difficult to prove that this one intervention alone is responsible for improvements in student attitudes to learning, effort and attainment, but it is highly likely to have had an impact. How do I know this? Because the students themselves told me.
When I ran this programme myself, I got a sample of students to complete a questionnaire at three different points in the year: pre-intervention, mid-intervention and post-intervention. Across a range of factors, including a self-rating of effective working, listing of effective revision and learning strategies, and identifying specific targets - amongst many others. Students in both year groups improved in every factor at both the mid- and post-intervention questionnaires.
One headline figure was that students in both year groups could name twice as many effective strategies at the end of the programme than at the beginning, proving how the programme helped reduce students’ belief in strategies such as highlighting and placing emphasis on self-testing, for example.
All of these positive results were with a lockdown in the middle too, so I’m sure results would’ve been even better if students had been in the building for the whole year.
If you’re thinking about introducing something similar yourself, there are two areas that need a lot of consideration.
1. Staff CPD
The first is training the staff. How are you going to ensure that staff are receiving the CPD that they require on the strategies being delivered to tutees? We might expect tutors to be aware of all of these strategies, such as the ones mentioned above, but equally, they may not be or may have misconceptions within their own understanding. Tutors need to be confident with the strategies before delivering them. Could you take one tutor briefing every fortnight as a mini CPD session to go over the strategies? Could you cover the strategies coming up over a half term in an inset session?
2. Finding the time
The second is around time - tutor programmes are always crowded, so what are you going to sacrifice for this programme? How are you going to ensure that tutors are always going to have time to deliver the metacognitive sessions and activities, without having to rush, and without being pulled out to go and do something else? This programme won’t work if tutors have to rush delivery, or if delivery keeps happening on different days and different times due to other ad hoc events.
Overall, a metacognitive tutor programme is a great way to develop your school’s curriculum, and a superb way to upskill students outside of their subject lessons. With careful planning and staff CPD built-in, you can massively improve students’ metacognitive abilities and their knowledge and use of research-backed revision and learning strategies.
Nathan Burns is an assistant progress and achievement leader for KS3, as well as a maths teacher
