Introduction
High learning gain is possible using metacognitive strategies - especially for disadvantaged learners - but “How to apply them effectively in the classroom?” is still a not-well-answered question. What is clear that teaching them in parallel with teaching subject content rather than as thinking skills is more effective.
Of course meta cognition is right up there with generalisation and problem solving - hard for lower attaining learners to do - especially for learners with smaller working memories.
R1: Teachers should acquire the professional understanding and skills to develop their pupils’ metacognitive knowledge
Learners become more motivated with success - and getting over 80 percent of questions correct in every maths lessons - as timely practice learners do, is very motivating. Learning how to answer questions that needed more than one feedback-dialogue helps learners to believe they can overcome learning challenges and feedback-dialogue helps learners build skills and vocabulary to think about their learning.
R2: Explicitly teach pupils metacognitive strategies, including how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning
Using “think aloud” to explain how to answer questions and solve problems is important. Equally important is ensuring that learners have mastered the prerequisite skills required. Timely practice helps teachers see what learners in their class already know, using a ladder of layers in the progress on topic, meaning “think aloud” skills are more likely to stick.
R3: Teachers should support pupils to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning.
Every lesson learners must, when answering their timely practice questions, search in their long term memory for the skills they have to help them answer each question. They cannot rely on “just copying what the teacher did today” this helps them build good triggers for their chunks in long term memory as they build, refine and strengthen their chunks.
Over the two year course some learners developed the ability to problem solve and generalise, but not all did. Learners in a timely practice class are “not counted out” by their attainment from building their problem solving skills, but neither should they be expected to develop these to be able to achieve in mathematics.
R4: Set an appropriate level of challenge to develop pupils’ self-regulation and metacognition
Challenge very much needs to be at the right level, timely practice encourages a spiral of gentle, but relentlessly rising expectations. Timely practice increases both motivation and attainment.
R5: Promote and develop metacognitive talk in the classroom
Encouraging learners to help and seek help first from their peers, for feedback after errors in their timely practice, is part of our guidance for learners.
However as explained in R7 care needs to be taken, low attaining learners often are only able to generalise and therefore explain their processes after mastery - possibly because there is no spare working memory capacity until then. So gently does it.
R6: Explicitly teach pupils how to organise and effectively manage their learning independently
With timely practice it is easy for teachers to provide carefully targeted deliberate practice in these 3 ways:
teaching and guided practice - using our teach-learn resources
personal practice - using our practise-learn resources
retrieval practice - using timely practice assignments
The teach-learn and practise-learn activities of the lesson, where new learning is taught is not the end of the story. It's the next lesson and all the subsequent lessons where learners begin and revisit independent practice on that bite of learning, within their timely practice assignment, where the difference is made.
We strongly believe that teaching has not become learning (by which we mean learning that has stuck i.e. embedded learning) unless the learner can independently answer questions on that learning.
We don’t think practice can be counted as independent, if it only occurs within the lesson where the new learning occurs. Practice questions which merely require the learner to apply the skill/procedure(s) taught within the lesson shouldn’t count as independent practice. If all/almost all of each lesson is only used to teach learners new skills and practise only those skills, we are not giving learners enough independent practice. Lessons where the only skills practised are the skills taught are like teaching a child to ride a bike with stabilisers.
We believe that independent practice requires the learner to independently recognise what skills or procedures are required to answer a question and the measure of success is that the learner can independently and accurately apply the skills/procedures to answer similar questions. To enable learners to do independent+deliberate+retrieval practice, that is answer the questions in their timely practice assignment, learners will some times need help and feedback. The way we organise retrieval practice means there is enough time in the lesson for the teacher to give feedback and feedback is usually effective.
R7: Schools should support teachers to develop knowledge of these approaches and expect them to be applied appropriately
This is a school wide responsibility, but teachers using timely practice will more quickly develop skills than with traditional maths teaching. Teachers using timely practice quickly develop effective feedback skills (because teachers get 10 to 15 minutes of deliberate practice giving feedback every timely practice lesson). Feedback-dialogue requires teachers to help learners change their thinking - which requires learners to think about their thinking - that’s meta cognition.
Advice with respect to chunk based theory, says
teach from the simple to the complex … and … [initially] don’t encourage students to carry out their own analysis of well-known problem situations, as they do not possess the key concepts yet.
From Chunking Mechanisms and Learning Gobet, F. & Lane, P. (2012),
In our opinion learners with smaller working memories will not have capacity to think about their learning at the same time as apply their learning until they have built larger chunks in long term memory. Most topics in timely practice only expect learners to answer questions on what they have already learned - not genuine problem solving. As learners make progress they will begin to encounter more genuine problem solving.