Cultivating Metacognition in teaching means:

  • to compensate for any cognitive limitations that a student can have;
  • to help students take control of their own learning;
  • to increase students' perseverance in getting better at their work;
  • to improve transferable knowledge;
  • to have in mind all ages of students;
  • to increase the emotional and social growth of students.

Metacognitive didactics teaches students to study in the way that suits them best, and it does so through a series of didactic strategies:

The student learns to select the relevant information, to identify the central and salient ideas from which all the others branch, to divide the teaching units into paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, to summarise.

The student learns to connect the various components of the subject being studied, using logical links and concept maps. The concept map is a fundamental tool of metacognitive teaching, as it graphically represents the mechanism through which cognition correlates the elements to be memorised.

The student learns to implement old information with new information, creating an organic framework in which knowledge intersects. Some examples: in biology, the study of tissues is grafted onto knowledge of cells; in history, the study of a revolution presupposes knowledge of the historical period preceding it.