Teaching Metacognitive Skills

Adapted from the University of Waterloo, here are considerations when integrating metacognitive strategies into your teaching. Remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. Sometimes, less is more! You can also contact the centre for teaching and learning innovation (CTLI) to help brainstorm ideas on how to get going.

	Be intentional about teaching metacognitive skills. When designing your course, identify opportunities in which to incorporate strategies to teach metacognitive skills. For example, you might decide to build metacognitive strategies into an assignment, or around your midterms. Decide when to focus on self-regulation skills and when to focus on guiding learners to think metacognitively about course content.
	Be explicit when teaching metacognitive skills. Talk about metacognitive skills with your learners; define metacognition and explain why developing metacognitive skills is important during and after college. If you have structured your course so that specific themes, relationships or contrasting perspectives emerge, give learners your road map or use activities such as a concept map to help them identify it themselves. In other words, don’t assume that learners will automatically see relationships that might be obvious to you.
	Encourage goal setting. Prompt learners to consider why they are taking your course, what grade they want to earn and how they plan to achieve that goal. For example, have learners work in groups to brainstorm strategies for earning an “A” in the course.
	Develop ways for learners to “stop and take stock” during class. During class, ask learners to pause for 1-2 minutes and think about what they are doing at that moment (i.e., taking notes, engaging in off-task activities, working on another course). After the pause, this could be a good time for learners to ask questions.
	Prompt learners to think about how they prepare for class. At the beginning of class, show a slide with the prompt “How have I prepared for class today?” Ask them to write their answers to a set response option. Showing multiple response options enables learners to see strategies that they might not have thought of on their own. Talk about your expectations regarding class preparation and why that is important to their learning.
	Emphasize the importance of learning versus getting the correct answer. After posing a question to the class, give learners time to discuss how they arrived at the answer they chose. Specifically, ask them to consider their process, the main reason for choosing the response, why they discarded other possible steps or answers, how confident they were about their answer, etc. Follow up with an explanation of why you have asked them to spend time on this.
	Link the purpose of an assignment to course objectives and professional skills. When giving an assignment, ask students to think about why you chose that assignment and how it relates to their professional development. See Tables 1 and 2 in Tanner 2012 for prompts.