Show pupils what metacognitive processes look like!! Secondly, one of the
most powerful ways that we can show students how valued metacognitive skills
are, is to model them ourselves. Very often we discuss and model how to do
something, without modelling the thinking behind it. We allow our pupils to see
the final, polished version of our thinking without showing them the decisions we
made – the revisions, the dead-ends we went down, the ideas we changed or
threw away. Consider thinking out loud for your pupils, discussing the stages
YOU go through as you solve a problem (prove a maths theorem, polish an
opening sentence for an essay, figure out which tense of a French verb to use).
Other students can also be very powerful models in explaining the rationale for
their thinking in a way that others can relate to.