Blog of The Week
27th January
The Big Reveal: Model, Teach, Practise and Connect
Tricia Taylor
Every Monday morning, we aim to highlight one of the many excellent teacher blogs from the preceding week. These blogs are a great way of sharing good practice that is happening in other schools around the country and beyond.
This week's blog comes from Tricia Taylor (@TriciaTailored) who is a former teacher and school leader (20+ yrs UK/US) and currently an educational speaker, and director of TailoredPractice. Her fantastic new book, 'Connect the Dots: The collective power of relationships, memory and mindset in the classroom', was recently published. A certain edu-book obsessed Assistant Headteacher might have a copy if you would like a look.
https://www.tailoredpractice.com/post/the-big-reveal-model-teach-practise-and-connect
The blog focusses on how, as adults, we are so experienced that we sometimes forget that it seems second nature for us to use metacognitive regulation: planning, monitoring and evaluating our learning. This is informed by our metacognitive knowledge, or what we know about..
Tricia argues we need to be more aware that young people are still developing these important metacognitive skills. She reminds us that;
"We have the gift of age (acquired metacognitive skills) and the curse of knowledge (being unaware of how much we know compared to what students may know). Our job as educators is to help students notice and articulate the strategies they use to solve problems, both successful and unsuccessful, and reflect on that process".
The blog then goes on to give practical suggestions on how we, as experts, can help our 'novices' to learn these essential skills.
Overall, evidence-informed recommendations for improving metacognitive skills include:
- MODELLING: Modelling metacognitive thinking to help learners develop their metacognitive and cognitive skills.
- EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION: Explaining what is meant by metacognition (or thinking about how we learn); explicitly teaching students metacognitive strategies; and embedding metacognitive instruction into content areas, rather than teaching as a separate ‘study skill’.
- VERBALISATION: Verbalising metacognitive talk in the classroom; supporting students to strengthen their articulation skills in a safe environment.
- DIFFERENTIATION: Considering the appropriate level of challenge and need for guidance for the learner’s developmental level (generally speaking, younger students need more scaffolding for this content).
- SELF TALK: Infusing self-talk strategies help learners reframe thinking to impact their attitude and regulate emotion to cope with difficulty.
Tricia specifically focusses on modelling and the Model, Teach, Practise and Connect routine (see picture above).
This blog is a great introduction to teaching metacognitively and has enough practical suggestions that even those of us already well-versed will find comfort in our approach and potentially some new ideas too.