nitive skills.

Course Title: Facilitating Learner – Centered Teaching

Course Code: Prof. Ed.1

METACOGNITION: THINKING ABOUT THINKING

“Children must be taught how to think, not on what to think.” - Margaret Mead

Lesson 3: Metacognitive Instruction

OBJECTIVES: After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

 explain fundamental principles to teach metacognitive skills,

 identify metacognitive strategies for a particular lesson; and
 Operationalize metacognitive processes in a given situation/context.

Principles of Metacognitive Instruction

Developing metacognitive thinking among students needs the creativity of the teacher. Using metacognitive strategies
facilitates how learners learn. As studies have proven, metacognitive teaching practices enhance the learners' capabilities to transfer their
competencies in leaning new tasks in new contexts (Palinscar & Brown, 1984; Schoenfeld, 1991).

Moreover, metacognitive teaching practices make learners aware of their strengths and weaknesses as they learn. Knowing their
strengths give them the confidence to pursue a task. Knowing their weaknesses lead them to strategize on how to overcome their limited
knowledge and how to source out the needed information for the task.

To effectively develop metacognitive skills among learners, Veenman et al. (2012) recommend three fundamental principles.

Metacognitive instruction should be embedded in the context of the task at hand in order to allow for connecting task-
specific condition knowledge (the IF-side) to the procedural knowledge of "How" the skill is applied in the context of
the task (the THEN-side of production rules).

Learners should be informed about the benefit of applying metacognitive skills in order to make them exert the initial
extra effort.

Instruction and training should be stretched over time, thus allowing for the formation of production rules and ensuring
the smooth and maintained application of metacognitive skills.

Principles for effective metacognitive instruction

Cognizant of these principles, teachers can plan their lessons well to ensure that as the learners undergo classroom activities, they met cognize
their learning. Leading learners to think metacognitively gradually leads them to become self-regulated learners.

Metacognitive Teaching Strategies

Varied metacognitive strategies to teach learners to undergo metacognitive thinking have been proven effective. These include the following:

1. Graphic organizers are visual illustrations displaying the relationships between facts, information, ideas, or concepts. Through the
visual displays, learners are guided in their thinking as they fill in the needed information. One good example is the KWHLAQ chart, a

Variant of the KWL chart. It is useful during the planning, monitoring, and evaluating phases of metacognition.

2. Think aloud helps learners to think aloud about their thinking as they undertake a task. The learners report their thoughts while they do it.
With the help of a more knowledgeable learner, the errors in thinking and the inadequacy of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge
can be pointed out, giving the learner increased self-awareness during learning

.3. Journalizing can be used together with think aloud. In a journal, learners write what was in their mind when they selected an answer and the
reasons for their choice. Later, they write about their realizations where they were wrong and what should have been considered in answering.
Finally, they resolve on what to do the next time a similar situation/problem arises

.4. Error analysis is a "systematic approach for using feedback metacognitively to improve one's future performance” (Hopeman, 2002).
Asking the learners where they are correct and wrong provides avenues for them to evaluate their thinking. It results in a learner's
metacognitive knowledge of own mistakes and making use of them to improve future performance

.5. Wrapper is an activity that fosters learners' metacognition before, during, and after a class. In a reading class, before the selection is read, the
teacher asks about the theme of the selection based on the story title. While reading the selection, learners are asked if their assumptions were
true. After reading, the learners are asked what made them comprehend or not comprehend the story

.6. Peer mentoring is a proven metacognitive strategy as many learners learn best when studying with peers who are more informed
and skilled than them. Novice learners, by observing their more skilled peers, can learn from the metacognitive strategies of their peer
mentors. The use of cooperative learning strategies is helpful toward this goal.

EXPERIENCE:

Teaching metacognitive thinking strategies to learners is a must if teachers want them to be self- regulated learners. Several studies have shown
the benefits of metacognitive instruction. Goh (2008) cites her study (Liu & Goh, 2006) that proved metacognitive knowledge can be increased
through classroom instruction. The work of Goh and Hu (2013) demonstrated a causal relationship between metacognitive instruction and a
statistically significant improvement in listening performance. In another study, students' use of metacognitive skills in problem solving-
with five main processes that encompass an emerging substantive theory, namely: understanding the problem through sense
making; organizing and constructing useful information from the problem; planning solution strategies by identifying, conjecturing, and
selecting strategies; executing the plan; checking the process and strategies undertaken, and reflecting and extending the problem-has
facilitated the development of Filipino students' problem-solving heuristics (Tan& Limjap,2018).