Teaching Metacognitive Skills

Adapt­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo, here are con­sid­er­a­tions when inte­grat­ing metacog­ni­tive strate­gies into your teach­ing. Remem­ber, you don’t have to do it all at once. Some­times, less is more! You can also con­tact the cen­tre for teach­ing and learn­ing inno­va­tion (CTLI) to help brain­storm ideas on how to get going.

	Be inten­tion­al about teach­ing metacog­ni­tive skills. When design­ing your course, iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties in which to incor­po­rate strate­gies to teach metacog­ni­tive skills. For exam­ple, you might decide to build metacog­ni­tive strate­gies into an assign­ment, or around your midterms. Decide when to focus on self-reg­u­la­tion skills and when to focus on guid­ing learn­ers to think metacog­ni­tive­ly about course con­tent.
	Be explic­it when teach­ing metacog­ni­tive skills. Talk about metacog­ni­tive skills with your learn­ers; define metacog­ni­tion and explain why devel­op­ing metacog­ni­tive skills is impor­tant dur­ing and after col­lege. If you have struc­tured your course so that spe­cif­ic themes, rela­tion­ships or con­trast­ing per­spec­tives emerge, give learn­ers your road map or use activ­i­ties such as a con­cept map to help them iden­ti­fy it them­selves. In oth­er words, don’t assume that learn­ers will auto­mat­i­cal­ly see rela­tion­ships that might be obvi­ous to you.
	Encour­age goal set­ting. Prompt learn­ers to con­sid­er why they are tak­ing your course, what grade they want to earn and how they plan to achieve that goal. For exam­ple, have learn­ers work in groups to brain­storm strate­gies for earn­ing an “A” in the course.
	Devel­op ways for learn­ers to “stop and take stock” dur­ing class. Dur­ing class, ask learn­ers to pause for 1–2 min­utes and think about what they are doing at that moment (i.e., tak­ing notes, engag­ing in off-task activ­i­ties, work­ing on anoth­er course). After the pause, this could be a good time for learn­ers to ask ques­tions.
	Prompt learn­ers to think about how they pre­pare for class. At the begin­ning of class, show a slide with the prompt “How have I pre­pared for class today?” Ask them to write their answers to a set response option. Show­ing mul­ti­ple response options enables learn­ers to see strate­gies that they might not have thought of on their own. Talk about your expec­ta­tions regard­ing class prepa­ra­tion and why that is impor­tant to their learn­ing.
	Empha­size the impor­tance of learn­ing ver­sus get­ting the cor­rect answer. After pos­ing a ques­tion to the class, give learn­ers time to dis­cuss how they arrived at the answer they chose. Specif­i­cal­ly, ask them to con­sid­er their process, the main rea­son for choos­ing the response, why they dis­card­ed oth­er pos­si­ble steps or answers, how con­fi­dent they were about their answer, etc. Fol­low up with an expla­na­tion of why you have asked them to spend time on this.
	Link the pur­pose of an assign­ment to course objec­tives and pro­fes­sion­al skills. When giv­ing an assign­ment, ask stu­dents to think about why you chose that assign­ment and how it relates to their pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment. See Tables 1 and 2 in Tan­ner 2012 for prompts.