Episode 82: Metacognition and Mastery

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast. Welcome to the School of School podcast.

Robin Potter

The Maths — No Problem! annual conference is back. Join us in London this November. World renowned speakers and experts will gather to discuss maths mastery in the post-pandemic world. Be part of the conversation. Visit mathsnoproblem.com for details.

Andy Psarianos

Okay, welcome back everyone to another School of School podcast. We're here today with the regular crew, Adam and Robin, and of course we also have a special guest today, Craig Parkinson. Craig, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Craig Parkinson

I came into the profession a little bit later. I came in as a secondary maths teacher and I came in in my 30s. I'd done jobs before this and throughout my early career as a teacher I loved seeing pupils learn but I enjoyed seeing how we as teachers developed as well. So it was a natural progression to move into teacher training. So now I work as a Maths — No Problem! trainer, done that for about six years. I also work with Professor John Hattie and his team delivering the Visible Learning+ programme within the UK. I've been doing that for about 11 years. And I also work as a Clifton Strengths coach with Gallup and that's something that sort of ties into all the other things that I've done before. It helped me to be the best version of myself.

Andy Psarianos

That's fascinating. So, Craig, today I think we're talking about metacognition, right? For the sake of our listeners, what is metacognition?

Craig Parkinson

Most people would reach for the standard definition of, "thinking about thinking," which Flavell proposed at conference back in the 1970s. But there's a second part to it. I think people were writing down, "Thinking about thinking," and they missed the second part and it goes on saying, then, "... attending to our thinking." So this idea of meta, and Rachel Lofthouse summed it up beautifully when she said, "Meta is sometimes an echo word," so metacognition is cognition about cognition in the same way as meta language is language about language. But metacognition is just having... If we describe cognition as being able to make progress, metacognition allows you to control progress.

Andy Psarianos

So it's about reflecting partially as well, right? So it's about being aware of your cognition, I suppose, and being able to regulate it to a certain extent. Here's an interesting thing. People always talk about the prefix meta, which comes from a Greek word which, in Greek, it actually means after, right?

Craig Parkinson

Mm-hmm.

Andy Psarianos

So if you were to translate it, it actually means after thought, right? So there you go. There's a bit of interesting trivia for you. Because people always talk about meta as if it's like the thing about the thing, right? But it's actually not what it means in Greek. So anyway, there you go. Little bit of Greek for you, see. Right, so let's get back to metacognition. So why is metacognition important in mastery? Craig, you're the special guest. Why don't you kick us off? Why do you think it's important?

Craig Parkinson

To make progress is probably a good staging post in terms of on a learning journey, you want to be able to answer questions and to know new things. But to then be able to do that thing that requires us to not just follow algorithms and just follow procedural lists of what to do, where we start making choices. I think it's the bit that makes us human. It's the bit that gives us agency with metacognition.

I always think about the three phases of it. So you've got the planning phase of metacognition where before you go into your learning you think, "Okay, so how am I going to go into this and what things do I need to be successful?" So you plan for success. Then you've got the monitoring stage during your learning, "Where am I at? Am I learning? Where am I trying to get to?" And then you've got the evaluation phase afterwards.

And I think when we give pupils, and what's good for the pupils is great for the profession as well, where we give pupils space to plan, not just to rush into it and place to stop off and think and smell the roses of success sometimes and also work out where in the fog you are and also then to evaluate how you're doing, then we can start, probably, celebrating success a lot more. And I think metacognition allows us to do that because without metacognition you're in the binary world of you've succeeded or you've failed, where metacognition allows you to think, "Okay, how might I succeed next time if I've not been successful this time?"

Robin Potter

I'm just trying to wrap my head around this, Craig. What I'm hearing is that metacognition, as it pertains to students, provides strategies to get learners to achieve better outcomes by encouraging deeper thinking. Am I on the right track?

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. It's really about self-awareness, Robin. It's mindfully approaching something so that you don't just get into it in a rote fashion. Sometimes it's easier to think about it, well, for me anyway, if you think about it like learning a musical instrument is a perfect example. If you're just learning the robotics... So, let's say, a lot of people can sit at a piano and play just maybe a very simple tune like Mary had a Little Lamb, for example. It's just like plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink on the piano, one finger kind of stuff. So that doesn't require a tremendous amount of metacognition in the sense that it's just a robotic act. It's like pure muscle memory in most cases, right? You're not really thinking about what's going on or how. A metacognitive musician would be very conscious of, "What scale am I playing in? How does that affect the rest of the orchestration of the thing and how am I going to syncopate it?" It's just being aware of all the elements and being aware and being able to regulate them.

So you're thinking very deeply about what you're playing and even if it's not at a very conscious level, there's a self-awareness of how you're playing, right? And that comes from a discipline of mind which is really about being able to evaluate your own experience and being mindful that you can change that experience somehow, that you're not just showing up and doing this robotic procedure.

So if you think of, I don't know, imagine you're in secondary school and you're doing more complicated mathematics and it gets very procedural at some point. So you're doing something like, I don't know, quadratic equations and chances are you were taught in a very robotic fashion, step one, do this, step two, do that, step three, do that, step four do that, right? So, if you're not metacognitive about it, you will basically come in and just do the steps, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right?

A very metacognitive mathematician might look at the question and say, "Actually, maybe I can approach this in a different fashion," or, "There's all kinds of mental disciplines," or, "This is particularly cumbersome, maybe I can take a slightly different approach," or whatever the case may be. So you're just operating at a very, very different level, yeah? It's about being self-aware of what you're doing, I think. That's one way of explaining it but it's much more sophisticated than that.

Craig Parkinson

When you look at things like the SOLO taxonomy, as somebody progresses through the taxonomy, you start building knowledge, they go from one to many to relate and then the extended abstract, that's where we do start analogizing. That's where creativity comes in and that's when we know when somebody, like Andy, is truly owning their learning. Because you can say it's like this and you give a high quality analogy or an extended metaphor regarding it.

For me, with metacognition, just to pick up on one of the points Andy mentioned, you can be metacognitive even if you're a novice at something. So I wanted to learn to fly a plane but I didn't want to fly a real one because that's really scary so I went into one of the Lufthansa pilot's training to fly an A320 but I had no idea how to fly a plane. But I was metacognitive all the way through and after about four or five hours flying time, because I was in charge of my own learning and I knew where I was at and where I was trying to get to and had planned things, I asked the flight instructor how I was getting on and they said, "We were commenting that we've never seen anybody be so capable of self-improving as you've been." And it was because I was using the SOLO taxonomy to help me to do that but I knew that I was a novice.

So I knew there were things that I needed to know and I knew the type of feedback that I wanted. So you can be really metacognitive even if you're a novice. A child aged three learning to put a coat on by themselves can do it in a metacognitive way. So metacognition is not something to be saved for experts at all, is it?

Adam Gifford

I remember being told, and this is... I like it because it's all fitting in to everything that we are saying here. And I really like... I'm not just saying this, Andy, because you're a proud Greek but I like that idea about the afterthought. I like that idea about meta. I remember being explained once, I can't remember who it was, it was someone from Singapore, and they were talking about metacognition and they were saying they thought about metacognition as developing an identity as a learner, that, "This is how I go about things and this is how I learn and this is how I can reflect on something and this is how I can become better at something."

And so, just as Craig's described about if you are a novice, if I identify and I understand how I learn or I'm curious about how I learn, or I'm curious about how I can learn better... just excuse my dog in the background she's having a moment... these are the sorts of things that I think when it was explained to me in that way, that we can develop an identity and it gives that sort of uniqueness but it also suggests that we need those opportunities to develop an identity.

And so in education if we don't give children a chance to do that, and where I've seen that most is where people through the misguided support, that's probably the best way I can say it because they don't feel that a child can do something so therefore I'll do it for you and that's helping you, denies that opportunity to develop that identity as a learner. And you can only learn about learning something if you fail at it and have terrible experiences at it as well as succeeding and those sort of things. And I think that really resonated with me. I mean it's nothing different to what's already been said but I like the idea of that and we can continue to develop that identity as a learner as we succeed and fail and learn, I guess.

Andy Psarianos

That's right. And I think there are so many different ways that you can think about this but, bringing it back to an analogy of the piano, right, because you all know how much I like analogies, if you fiddle around on a piano not knowing what you're doing, what you quickly realise is that not all the notes sound really equally as good together as others, right? And being aware of that is a level of metacognition which then allows you to understand why, let's say, a particular scale, the pentatonic scale or the major scale, is relevant, right, because you're aware. It's not like if someone just shows you how to play plink, plink, plink, plink on the piano, there's very little metacognition.

But if you fiddle around on the piano for a while you'll realise that these notes don't really sound all that good together. And then someone says, "Well try this group of notes." And then you start piecing together some kind of structure but you have to be present in order... You have to be mentally present. And it's a discipline of mine. It's like, "Hmm. I wonder why those notes didn't sound well together." And then somebody gives you a bit of structure and says, "Here's a scale, try using just these notes." All of a sudden it works a little bit better. That's the metacognitive process in action, right? It's like being aware of what's going on, self-evaluating, evaluating what you're doing, evaluating what the result is.

And it's a discipline that we try to build in children so, for example, at Maths — No Problem! it's very deliberate in the textbooks, a metacognitive process, but it's also very, should be very, deliberative in a teacher's practise. By asking children the same questions over and over and over again you're effectively creating a discipline of mind where what one hopes is that they start asking themselves those questions. Because, as a teacher, if you're using this similar language all the time, you're saying, "How do you know? Are you sure? What do you think of that?" These types of things, they're just prompts, they're metacognitive prompts. If you ask the children the same, if you say the same thing over and over to them every day, there's no surprise when they start asking themselves those questions before they put their hand up or before they talk to their neighbour or whatever. And that's really metacognition in action. That's what it's all about, right, that self-regulation.

Craig Parkinson

I think it's developed as well, intentionally by the teacher or unintentionally by the teacher, through the type of feedback that you give to your pupils.

Andy Psarianos

Yes, absolutely.

Craig Parkinson

So there's the instructional model of feedback from John Hattie and Helen Timperley that talks about when you're working with a novice, how we define that, that's another issue, but with somebody who is brand new to it, you just need to tell them whether it's right or wrong. There's no deep thinking there. They just need correcting and showing a good example.

But feedback should always do two things, shouldn't it? It should, number one, close the gap in learning. That's the purpose of feedback. And, number two, it should develop greater levels of self-regulation in the recipient. So you move on from telling them what to do to starting to prompt them a little bit which is why what you said there, Andy, about the pupil gets the question in their own head that they're going to be asked by the teacher so they start having an internal-

Andy Psarianos

... dialogue.

Craig Parkinson

... monologue with themselves. But then, beyond that, you move to self-regulation feedback where you ask about, "Okay, how did you plan for this? What did you do in terms of monitoring? What about evaluation?" But we dress this in the right form for the pupil that we're with.

Andy Psarianos

That's right. And then as a teacher the goal is that you have to get really good at that, right, over time, with experience. But I think it's a natural way of teaching, I suppose, these days.

Adam Gifford

Oh, I'm going to jump in there. I don't know that it is. I honestly don't know that it is.

Andy Psarianos

Oh, okay, maybe not. One would hope that it's a natural way.

Adam Gifford

Yeah, I think, be aspirational, yes, okay, but is that the reality? I'm not sure. Sorry, you keep going, Andy, but I had to jump in there. I'm just not sure.

Andy Psarianos

I stand corrected. But one would hope that it's a natural way of teaching and something that we should be encouraging new teachers and, through professional development, teachers that have been at it for a while, to consider in the classroom. Just lining up and saying, "Yes, that's correct. You're right, you're wrong." Whatever. There may be a time when that's the right thing to do but largely most of the time you probably want to give them an opportunity to regulate a little bit more, right?

Adam Gifford

Yeah. But I think, though, Andy, I think you have to be quite brave. I think you have to be quite brave at times and sometimes time allows that. So I'm going to use that... Craig talked about children putting on their coats and I used to get told off, I was terrible. And now I'm well aware of developing metacognition but when I wasn't in the classroom, I was in school leadership, I'd always go down, on a bad day, go down and see the reception class because they cheered me up, right? Wee kids, they always cheer you up. They'll say something that just is either complete genius, makes you laugh, or you've got no idea where it's come from. But it's that whole thing about, "I can't quite get my zip done properly," and I'm thinking, "Oh, they're only outside for 10 minutes, come here, mate, let me just zip it up for you." And I'd get daggers looked at me from the teachers.

But I think that that idea around time, I think that sometimes it feels like you're being brave by getting them to what's deemed a success, so finding an answer or something like that. Where, actually, if you look at the actual learning that's taking place there's a potential to deprive a lot of it. But if we place massive importance on that success criteria which is, for example, a right answer versus the correct success criteria, which is a child being able to get the right answer and then get it in multiple ways, I think there's still an aspect of that that exists, that as long as the child gets seven, and you see in marking policies where it says teacher assisted, or it's been written in the book. And when you see that in practise, it's almost like, "Well, teacher did it and so what's the point in marking in a book and saying that this was teacher assisted and done?"

If it just means that, yeah, there's the right answer on the page, that's super duper, but if the child can't do it tomorrow and hasn't learned anything from the processes... So I suppose what I'm saying is I think that you're right, it should be natural, instinctive, giving people a chance to fail to learn, letting them experience something first. But I think sometimes there's a misguided sense of success criteria and time pressures which make people think, "I'll just get them to the finish line even if it means I have to pick them up and run with them." I think that still exists.

Andy Psarianos

Is that in conflict with metacognition, do you think? Is that really...

Adam Gifford

Well, I'll go back to an analogy, so, that pick it up and run, right? Let's say you wanted to become a 100 metres sprint champ. If every time Usain Bolt picked you up and ran with you and got you over the line so you did 100 metres in under 10 seconds and you did that every single time-

Andy Psarianos

If he picked me up I can guarantee you he's not going anywhere fast.

Adam Gifford

No, but using that analogy, that's not going to make you a faster runner. You could argue that sort of as a by-product. You see how he sets up at the line and there's stuff that you can learn but if it's the actual act of running 100 metres, you've got to do it.

Craig Parkinson

And that's the original definition of coach, or one of the original definitions of coach, it was somebody who picked somebody up and carried them in the same way a coach was a carriage for people. That's the original academic definition of what a coach was.

Adam Gifford

I quite like that.

Andy Psarianos

Interesting.

Robin Potter

Okay. I'm still envisioning Andy on Adam's back sprinting to the finish line. But, Craig, thank you so much for joining us for this discussion on metacognition.

Craig Parkinson

You're welcome.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, thanks everyone. Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.