Thinking Moves A-Z: Metacognition Made Simple

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Evidence suggests the use of ‘metacognitive strategies’ – which get pupils to think about their own learning – can be worth the equivalent of an additional +7 months’ progress when used well. Comprehensive. All cognitive moves (that Roger is aware of!) are encompassed in the A-Z. They are applicable across all areas of the curriculum and all phases from early years to secondary. And they are just as useful in everyday life as they are in school. School Improvement Liverpool (SIL) supports educational settings to enable children and young people to be safe, develop, learn and achieve. To this end, we have developed a collaboration with Dialogue Works with a view to enhancingacademic progress, especially for lower attaining and disadvantaged students.

Following the closure of schools in March 2020, Diane Swift, Director of Keele and North Staffordshire Teacher Education ( KNSTE, where I am a tutor), took the decision to engage our Associate Teachers (ATs) with Thinking Moves A-Z, an approach to teaching for metacognition. It proved to be a very positive experience for all, as I will attempt to explain below.Obviously, the real benefit of Thinking Moves is increasing the children's ability to explain their thinking and it is encouraging from visiting lessons, listening to their discussions and looking at our students' written responses that the moves are becoming ingrained and part of the language of learning in our school. Our next step is to evaluate this process further and to develop the role of metacognition and self-regulation into our developing social and emotional learning programme and the evolution of agency focused curriculum, which we have begun this year.

My teacher prompts us in class but I find myself using them independently in other subjects and in my revision. Through immersing children in the visual world of metacognition, all children – regardless of age and stage of development – are supported in their learning. 3. Break it down into manageable chunks However, when it comes to the skills of thinking and learning, there is no common language and the concepts are shrouded in misconception. Do children learn visually, kinaesthetically . . . ? Are there different levels to learning? Based on the belief that we are all thinking and learning all of the time, Thinking Moves has been implemented at Alfreton Nursery School. Thinking Moves provides the language to explain the process of thinking and has thus provided a common framework on which to master learning. 1. Develop and model a shared vocabulary Thinking Moves A – Z is a structured approach to thinking about thinking – a framework for metacognition. In this video, Roger Sutcliffe explains how it works. Give you practical guidance on how to embed Thinking Moves in your school’s overall approach to teaching and learning.

At Fortune Kindergarten, in Shanghai, we have been introducing Thinking Moves to our K2 classes since the beginning of this school year. As the year has progressed in K2 classes, we have been integrating the language for these Thinking Moves into our P4C (Philosophy for Children) enquiries and regular classroom lessons. Along with asking children: “What did we just learn?” or “What did we just do?”, we can now ask children, to think about the way they are learning and help them focus on the kinds of thinking they are employing, by asking: “What kind of thinking did we do?” and “How did this help us learn?” A small cadre of enthusiastic teachers took the initial online Thinking Moves training with Roger in 2021. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) found metacognition to be a low cost and high impact approach to supporting progress. They also linked it to self-regulation, an area which is ever present in early years frameworks. In their findings about metacognition the EEF stated; When we talk about the progression of mathematical understanding we have a shared language. We all understand what it means to engage in addition and subtraction. Phonics, science . . . all areas of learning have a common linguistic foundation.

The Education Endowment Foundation found that “evidence suggests the use of ‘metacognitive strategies’– which get pupils to think about their own learning - can be worth the equivalent of an additional +7 months’ progress when used well. However, while the potential impact of these approaches is very high, particularly for disadvantaged pupils, less is known about how to apply them effectively in the classroom.” I think that this may be because many people either have never heard of metacognition or they believe it to be more academic and confusing than it really is. In reality, it is something we do all the time and every day. DialogueWorks is an educational company that has specialised for nearly 30 years in the advancement of more thoughtful pedagogy. So, he set about creating a scheme that was simple and memorable, practical and complete – one that could be used by teachers to teach thinking more systematically and effectively, but also by learners to manage their thinking and, thereby, manage their own learning and lives better. Metacognition is everywhere and in everyone from birth. It was when I started researching metacognition that I realised just how amazing brains and thought processes are from birth to five. I genuinely think that from birth to five our minds make more rapid development than in any other time in our lives. Even from age 3-5, a child’s brain will make more metacognitive progression than that of a student undertaking a PhD. It is this that led me to create a metacognition approach to teaching, and my complete daily and weekly approach in my preschool class is now based on metacognition. In particular, an approach called Thinking Moves. The experiment continues at KNSTE as, sadly, some of our ATs are still compelled to spend more time than usual out of school. But the project itself is a reminder of how adversity can be the mother of creativity; Di Swift had very little time to VARY a teacher education programme to function in the absence of regular opportunities for teaching in school, and yet FORMULATEd a plan that will, I think, after some careful WEIGHing- UP, lead to a lasting improvement to our programme.NACE Associate Amanda Hubball, Deputy Head and More Able Lead at Challenge Award-accredited Alfreton Nursery School, shares five key approaches to embed metacognition in the early years. This greater awareness of one’s own thought processes and the ability to manage them better is known as metacognition. Approaches that develop metacognition in schools are recognised to have a high impact on learning. According to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF):