Metacognition in the Classroom: More Than Thinking About Thinking

Barbara Friedlander

In education, metacognition helps students become more effective learners by enabling them to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning. It also helps students identify the strategies needed for solving problems. Metacognitive strategies foster self-regulation by allowing students to take control of their learning and adapt strategies as needed. This also enhances student engagement with the content, leading to improved information retention and academic success.

What Metacognition Is (and Is Not)

Metacognition is often simplified as “thinking about thinking.” However, it is a complex process of monitoring and controlling one's thoughts to achieve a goal. For students, the goal is learning.

Metacognition is linked to self-regulation, and for good reason, as both involve monitoring and controlling, and have a positive impact on learning. The primary difference is that metacognition requires monitoring and controlling one’s cognitive processes, whereas self-regulation focuses on monitoring behaviors and emotions.

What Metacognition Is
What Metacognition is Not
Active monitoring and regulation of cognitive processes—requires conscious effort
Simple awareness, automatic thinking, or a passive process
Developed and improved through instruction, reflection, practice, and experience
Fixed mindset or related to overall intelligence
Employed in academic contexts to enhance learning with self-regulation strategies are applied across a broad range, helping to manage behavior and emotions
Emotional or self-regulation

Creating a Metacognitive Classroom

A metacognitive classroom is one where students are encouraged to reflect on their thinking and learning processes and where students feel comfortable taking risks, making mistakes, and discussing their thought processes and learning strategies with their peers. Self-awareness, self-reflection, goal setting, strategic thinking, collaboration, and continuous feedback are key characteristics of a metacognitive classroom environment.

Activities that are hallmarks of a metacognitive classroom include:

Examples of metacognitive prompts:

Planning: What resources can I use to help me? What can I do to overcome this challenge? What is my goal for this lesson? What do I already know about this topic? What questions do I still have?
Monitoring: Do I need to adjust my habits or use a different strategy? Do I understand what I have read so far? Does this make sense? What can I do to help me understand? Am I reaching my goal? Do I need to make adjustments?
Problem solving: Can I explain how I solved this problem? Why did I choose that approach? Could I have done something different?
Evaluating: Did I reach my goal? Did I choose a fix-up strategy successfully? Do I need to change my learning environment? Do I need to learn a new approach?
Reflecting: What part of the lesson was the most helpful? What are my strengths and weaknesses in this area? What stood out to me today? How did my mindset affect my work today?

Teaching Metacognitive Strategies

Teaching students to be aware of their thinking enables them to monitor their understanding of texts. Their awareness allows them to employ strategies to deepen their understanding and repair it when understanding breaks down. Explicitly teaching and modeling metacognitive reading strategies helps students monitor their understanding of the text before, during, and after reading.

Examples in Action:

Planning and goal setting
Before
During
After
Set a purpose for reading, preview the text, and generate questions
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Set a goal for the lesson and develop a plan to achieve it
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Activate prior knowledge related to the topic
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Making connections
Before
During
After
Connect to prior knowledge, personal experiences, and other texts
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Recognize patterns, themes, and relationships within the text and across other texts
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Relate the text to real-world issues and events
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Monitoring comprehension
Before
During
After
Constantly ask questions: Do I understand what I have read so far? Does this make sense? What is the main point? Can I rephrase what I just read?
x
x
Model how to identify areas where you're struggling or confused
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Realize when you need to reread a section or adjust your reading pace, summarize or paraphrase after a section of text, make, revise, and confirm predictions, make inferences, construct mental images, ask and answer questions
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Use note-taking aides and teach students to annotate text (graphic organizers, annotation tools)
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Revising, clarifying, and repairing understanding
Before
During
After
Use a fix-up strategy to repair understanding: reread, slow down, or read aloud, use text features and context clues
x
Seek clarification when encountering unfamiliar vocabulary: break words into parts, ask for help, use reference tools
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Refer to the reading plan for strategies
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Questioning
Before
During
After
Generate questions about the text
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Use questions to focus students’ reading and guide their understanding
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Formulate questions that require critical thinking and drawing inferences (I wonder why…)
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Summarizing
Before
During
After
Identify the main ideas and key details of a paragraph or section of text
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Take notes, use them to condense information in writing or in a discussion
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Use graphic organizers to support summarization
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Visualizing
Before
During
After
Create mental images of the text’s content (characters, setting, events, actions)
x
Use visual maps to aid comprehension
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Use text structure to visualize how the author organized information
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Overcoming Challenges While Implementing Metacognitive Strategies

Implementing metacognitive practices can be intimidating for teachers. Information about metacognition was not part of most teachers' teacher prep courses, so a lack of awareness and not knowing how to begin are common challenges. Hopefully, this article has increased awareness and helped teachers see that much of what they already do lends itself to incorporating metacognition into their teaching. For example, teachers already understand the value of thinking aloud when modeling reading strategies, so they routinely incorporate metacognitive prompts (self-questioning, monitoring, reflecting, planning, goal-setting) into their teaching, making it a habit rather than a separate activity. As mentioned earlier, creating a supportive learning environment where constructive feedback and a growth mindset are the norm helps when teachers and students are learning to implement new strategies.

Ensuring students are using the metacognitive strategies can be another challenge. To help students integrate metacognitive strategies and habits into their learning, teachers must always provide clear explanations of the strategies and when and how to apply them. Creating checklists in the form of bookmarks reminds students to set goals, plan, monitor, reflect, and evaluate before, during, and after reading. Anchor charts hung around the class with metacognitive prompts remind students of the types of questions they can ask themselves. Finally, creating self-assessment in the form of checklists, rubrics, reflection journals, or exit tickets is an example of ways to assess students' use of metacognition.

Metacognition plays a crucial role in helping students become more effective learners by enabling them to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning. By fostering self-regulation, metacognitive strategies allow students to take control of their learning and adapt strategies as needed. This enhances student engagement with the content, leading to improved information retention and academic success.

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