A further step: a “metacognitive environment”

Engaging in metacognitive instruction to increase students’ knowledge of cognition means:

• to teach the importance and benefits of metacognitive thinking;
• to provide students with opportunities to understand their personal learning style preferences;
• to increase student cognitive awareness by building declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge;
• to explicitly teach, model, and label cognitive and self-regulatory strategies;
• to establish classroom structures and design lessons that help students understand and build their cognitive awareness.

Engaging students in metacognitive regulation processes for planning, monitoring, controlling, and evaluating includes:

• planning strategies to help students focus on what needs to be learned and how they will learn it (e.g., goal setting, activating prior knowledge, organizational tools, higher order questioning, etc.);
• monitoring strategies to help students focus on how they are learning (e.g., self-questioning, thinkalouds, self-assessment, journals, etc.);
• controlling strategies that help students regulate their learning (e.g., self check-ins, relaxing muscles, positive self-talk, etc.);
• evaluating strategies that help students consider how effectively they learned (e.g., written prompts, self-reflection tools, exit tickets, etc.).

Create a classroom culture and environment conducive to developing, encouraging, and supporting metacognitive thinking lets:

• to develop classroom norms that support a climate of optimism, academic risk-taking, and growth mindset;
• to set high expectations, clear goals, and opportunities for reflective thinking;
• to model and encourage the use of language that clearly describes thinking;
• to provide learner-centered rigorous tasks and convey that productive struggle is part of the learning process;
• to develop a physical environment that promotes and supports metacognition;
• to allocate time, opportunities, and interactions that promote metacognitive thought.