Using metacognition as a tool to improve learning

Note: The author of this article, Lisa Cook, works for Challenging Learning, an organisation offering chargeable support, training and consultancy services to schools on a range of topics including metacognition. ‘The ability to critically analyse how you think’ or ‘thinking about one’s thinking’: these two definitions best capture how I understand metacognition. Metacognition was a key strand to the development of thinking skills in classrooms, promoted by the Secondary Strategy and groups such as the Northumberland Thinking for Learning Innovation Unit. Of interest to educational researchers for more than 40 years, this remains a hot topic for education, and I am curious as to why it seems to be so elusive in our classrooms. As a secondary history and politics teacher, I valued using thinking tools and encouraged my pupils to see them as transferable, bu