The Building Blocks of Metacognitive Instruction
Students aren’t the only ones who can benefit from incorporating metacognition into your class! This article offers some excellent starting points to begin incorporating metacognitive practices into your own lesson planning and teaching.
Thoughtful teachers reflect on the efficacy of their practice. Some assignments work. Others don't. Some classroom activities lose their shine and need to be reimagined to fit the evolving needs of students. The ongoing work in the scholarship of teaching and learning offers a growing repository of pedagogical innovation, but instructors aren't always aware of the need for change. Just as we need to promote metacognitive awareness in students' learning, we need to encourage faculty to become more explicitly metacognitive in their teaching processes. To that end, we offer four building blocks as a foundation for metacognitive instruction.