Promoting Teachers' and Students' Metacognitive Skills: Developing an Intervention Program

Abstract

Pro-Me-ToM (Promoting Metacognitive and Theory-of-Mind Skills) is an Erasmus+ collaborative project funded by IDEP (Foundation of European Programs for Lifelong Learning) and has been conducted by researchers from five countries (i.e., Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and Romania), aiming to both investigating and to promoting teachers’ and students’ metacognitive skills. Within this project a well-designed educational intervention has been developed, translated and applied in five countries. Specifically, this research project aimed to enhance such skills as metacognitive skills, epistemic beliefs and theory-of-mind skills of both teachers and students. These critical skills are examples of students' higher-order thinking, and are expected not only to help students to "learn how to learn" throughout their lives, but also to enable them to interpret human behavior in order to coexist functionally with others. This paper describes a specific educational intervention program implemented through “Action Research”. The training program consisted of 12 (2-hrs) sessions, it has been implemented in the five participating countries, and all participating teachers and their students were administered a pre-and post-test (still being analyzed). This paper focuses and presents the pillars of the training program as well as examples of the intervention program content and tools.