Teaching Metacognitively

Abstract

A growing body of research and theory highlights teachers' use of their metacognitive knowledge and skills before, during and after instruction. This chapter describes what is involved in teaching metacognitively, it explains why teaching metacognitively is important, it describes and illustrates metacognitive techniques used in my own teaching, and it explains procedures for developing other teachers' metacognition about their own instruction. Teaching metacognitively involves teaching with and for metacognition. Teaching with metacognition means teachers think about their own thinking regarding their teaching. It includes reflecting on: instructional goals, students' characteristics and needs, content level and sequence, teaching strategies, materials, and other issues related to curriculum, instruction and assessment. Such thinking occurs before, during and after lessons in order to maximize instructional effectiveness. Teaching/or metacognition means teachers think about how their instruction will activate and develop their students' metacognition, or thinking about their own thinking as learners. This chapter focuses primarily on the former, teachers' use of metacognition in their instruction. First it examines some of the components of teaching metacognitively. Next it explains why teaching metacognitively is important. Then it reviews the literature on metacognitive aspects of instruction. Next the chapter describes some of the metacognitive teaching strategies I use in my undergraduate educational psychology course, and finally it describes some of my approaches to helping other teachers instruct metacognitively. Specific examples of some of the approaches are included in appendices at the end of the chapter. The metacognitive strategies included in this chapter transcend content domains and can be used in virtually all subjects. The goal of this chapter is to increase understanding of the role of metacognition in teaching and to suggest practical techniques teachers can use to think metacognitively about instruction. Some readers of this and/or the following chapter will notice that a constructivist perspective permeates my views of the role of the teacher and how to best construct and organize instructional material for use in a course.