How To Build Metacognition Into Everyday Teaching With Nathan Burns

Leisa Grace sits down with Nathan Burns, “Mr Metacognition”, to clarify what metacognition really is and why it improves attainment when it is taught deliberately and embedded across school life. We explore how leaders can move beyond vague “thinking about thinking” to build independent, resilient learners through curriculum, routines and staff development. 
• Metacognition as planning, monitoring and evaluating learning 
• Challenging information and checking ideas against prior knowledge 
• Why research support is worldwide and linked to attainment 
• Why teacher training and accountability can miss explicit metacognition 
• Avoiding bolt on approaches and making it part of modelling, questioning and feedback 
• What a metacognitive school looks like for all staff roles 
• Designing staff training that starts with what is already working 
• Evaluating impact at department or whole school level 
• Using Perkins’ levels, surveys and stakeholder feedback carefully 
• What gains schools see first in student resilience and better questions 
“Drop Mr. Metacognition into any good search engine or pop Nathan Burns into social media, especially LinkedIn, um, and you will find me there.” 

Purchase Nathan's Books here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Nathan-Burns/author/B0BQZ5N6FN?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Transcript

Welcome And Meet Nathan Burns

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You are listening to the Teach Middle East Podcast. Connecting, developing, and empowering educators.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hey everyone, Lisa Grace here with another episode of the Teach Middle East Podcast. Today I am speaking with Nathan Burns. Nathan Burns is Mr. Metacognition. What a cool name. Mr. Meth Metacognition. It's a bit of a tongue twister. It is, yeah, yeah. No, it's uh it definitely is. Welcome to the podcast, Nathan. Please take a moment to tell us a little bit about who you are and the work you do.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Amazing, thank you. And yeah, thank you so much for having me. Really, really excited to uh to join you and all of the listeners today. So I'm now working full-time on metacognition. It's quite interesting. We joke about the name Mr. Metacognition. I often think that people know me better now as Mr. Metacognition than actually Nathan Burns. But yeah, so when I was working full-time in schools, I was a secondary teacher of maths, did a number of different uh roles with more able students, worked pastorally and in behavior, but I always found my place as someone leading teaching and learning, professional development. And a few years ago began working on it full-time and didn't really know where everything would take me. And it has ended up taking me down the route that I absolutely love, which is metacognition. So it's something that I've been working on for the best part of a decade now. Written four books on it, written numerous articles. It is something that I'm just incredibly, incredibly passionate about and really, really excited to hopefully share some insights, some strategies, some ideas with everybody today.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Brilliant. I want to really set a flat stage for everybody. So we're all starting at the same point.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Yeah, yeah,

What Metacognition Really Means

SPEAKER_02 1:52

yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

So, what is metacognition and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_02 1:57

So, this is the question that most people start off with. It's the one that I also dread the most because metacognition is such a complex idea. It's both really simple, but it's also so complicated. Now, I think that the phrases that we maybe have in education around metacognition, we often hear about learning to learn, and we definitely hear the definition of thinking about thinking. Like somebody says metacognition, oh, that's that's just thinking about your thinking. And it is, but that's quite a shallow understanding of maybe everything that's encapsulated by metacognition. And we do have to understand it is a complicated idea. And I mean, we're going to be talking for about half an hour today. And normally when I do training, I spend about an hour and a half talking about the theory. So let me break it down in sort of like 90 seconds. The definition that I always go to is by a brilliant theorist called John Flavelle. And his writing, I think, on metacognition is some of the clearest. And what he said is it wasn't this idea of thinking about thinking, it's more than that. It's if I realize I'm having more difficulty learning one thing than learning another. So if I recognise I'm having more difficulty learning A than B, so it's this consistent evaluation of, oh, I'm struggling. Why am I struggling? What is it that's stopping me from being successful? Or even we can flip that and we can go, well, why did that go really well? Was it part of my planning? Did I monitor really well as I went along? And what's going to allow me to be successful moving forwards? So that's half of what he said. And I think that's what most people think of when we talk about thinking mad thinking, about metacognition. But then in that definition, there's also a second part of it. And it says, if I double check C before accepting it as fact. So that's the idea that we can be told information and we challenge it. We don't necessarily shout at a teacher, go, no, you're wrong, I don't believe you, but we go, ah, that isn't what I would expect. That doesn't follow the pattern. That doesn't follow my prediction. It's a bit like if you do um a science experiment and you develop your question that you want to answer and you develop your hypothesis, and then you run your experiment, you go, Oh, I didn't quite get why I expected. Why was that? Oh, do I need to change my understanding? Is something else that I knew not correct? Or how does this fit in with my wider knowledge? So that is also part of metacognition, this idea of challenging knowledge and seeing where it fits in with our schemas and with our mental models. So, all in all, it's this idea of well, what do we know and what do we not know? Thinking about our planning, our preparation for tasks, monitoring our way through it, and then of course, that idea of evaluation, what went well and what didn't go well. So that is in short as short as I can make it, is sort of what metacognition is.

Why It Raises Attainment Worldwide

SPEAKER_02 4:52

And this in terms of that second part of the question, why does it matter? I almost want to flip it like, how can it not? How can it not matter? So even just from a sort of uh from a from a research point of view, the EF Education Down Foundation, based over in the UK, done some brilliant research bringing together lots of lots of papers on it, and it sits top of their list for improving student attainment. So of everything they've ever looked at, it sits top of the list in terms of student attainment. But actually, what really matters to me is, and I've been really lucky to have a look at a lot of the research in depth. If you have a look at the research, there's a huge amount coming out from the Middle East, there's a huge amount coming out from Africa, from North America, from Europe. This isn't something that is um that is Eurocentric. It's not, it's not just being looked at in a few different countries. We can look at research from across the world, from across different age ranges, from across different contexts and different cultures. And there's one commonality that where students improve their metacognition, their attainment improves, they do better in future life, they are going to be able to engage with their learning far better. And I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? If a student is better able to evaluate, to understand what's gone well, to identify gaps in their knowledge, then of course those students are going to do that bit better. But yeah, I think it's really important that actually we understand that this research basis is completely worldwide, and there's research from the last 50, 60 years now that looks at metacognition in a range of different contexts and shows its power.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

You know, I was just thinking as you were talking about the fact that how can we not

Why Training Often Misses It

SPEAKER_01 6:36

find metacognition to be important? It should matter, but I'm trying to remember when I was training to be a teacher, I do not remember having received any training on metacognition. Has this changed? Because granted, I am not the youngest, so I do not expect that. I went to college to uni, sorry, in the late 90s, early 2000s. So has anything changed? Is metacognition a part of the teacher training program now?

SPEAKER_02 7:12

I think yeah, yes and no. This feels like a very sit-on-the-fence answer. I think it very much depends on who is leading the training, who is leading the course, as to how much emphasis is put on it. So I think that you will walk into some teacher training circumstances and you're you're five spending session after session looking at it. I I still think even in those circumstances, more time needs to be spent on it. I mean, it's just so big and so powerful, and I'm sure we'll get onto it, but it integrates itself into so many aspects of high-quality teaching. But then if you walk into other areas, there's very, very little time spent that actually you'll have trainees coming out into the classroom who may have seen the word at some point during their training, but not much more than that. And I think that's a huge problem. And I don't really know why. So I did a bit of research into this, and I think some of it is what is demanded by governments, by departments of education, and by school inspectorates, where we know that schools typically end up doing the things that are demanded of them by inspectorates, by governments, by curriculum. And so if metacognition isn't absolutely clear in those documents, schools don't necessarily do it. And I think that's probably still the same with teacher training, that it is mentioned, but unless you have, as a course leader, a huge understanding or passion for it, you may not necessarily put as much um sort of time against it. So I think it's really, really important for yeah, we recognize that power, but also not assume that metacognition will develop without ever actually delivering any training on it. I think that's sort of you know a hope. Oh, you know, uh because it's important, oh, staff will know about it, they'll have learned something about it. Actually, we've got to take the time to explicitly deliver training on these things if we want our teachers to know about it and and know what it looks like in the classroom too.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

It's interesting because you're saying schools will pay attention to the things that they're being evaluated on based on the curriculum, all of that good stuff. But metacognition is meant to increase attainment. Yeah. And schools are all about progress and attainment. Completely. So, how is it that it isn't embedded across schools as in explicitly so with adequate training and knowledge being dispersed to all the teachers? How is that possible?

SPEAKER_02 9:44

I think

Avoiding Bolt On Metacognition

SPEAKER_02 9:45

a lot of it is that metacognition isn't a standalone thing. This isn't something that, you know, we might have a staff training session on modeling, right? Or maybe we get everybody together and we talk about questioning or feedback. You absolutely can get staff together. And I mean, I do it all the time. We get staff together and we deliver a session on metacognition. But as we move along, it's got to be embedded in different aspects. Because I think one of the things that has happened in education, and we've got to prevent it happening again, is where metacognition becomes a bit of a bolt-on or an extension, like, oh, staff get told about it so it becomes the final five minutes of the lesson. Or there have been schools where I've walked into where they've gone, oh, we've got a metacognitive Monday, or we've got a thinking Thursday. And it's like, it's not just a it's not a one-off thing. This is something we need to be doing all of the time. And I think that's where we need to make the jump that actually metacognition underpins all of teaching and learning. That actually really high quality questioning will also include questioning around students' metacognition, you know, oh, why did you choose that strategy? Was that the most effective approach? What would you do differently next time? Rather than just what is the answer? Let's move on. It's the same in modeling. We can model a strategy, but how often do we take the time to go, oh, the reason I'm using this planning approach, the reason why I've picked out this keyword, the reason why I know to do that is because of XYZ? Or in feedback, how often do we give students the opportunity to really reflect deeply on, well, what are my strengths? How do I know they're my strengths? What are my areas of development? What am I going to do to work on them? What's how often do we actually get into the nitty-gritty of it? So I think that's where we almost have the surface level metacognition of the session here, or the journal article we read there, or the hour webinar here, actually, in time where we're wanting to develop metacognitive schools, metacognitive colleges, it's about ensuring that it's embedded across everything that we do. And that obviously is a it's a longer-term project, and it takes uh a far more time and expertise to sort of put that into place.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

So

What A Metacognitive School Looks Like

SPEAKER_01 11:56

when you're talking about developing a metacognitive school, yeah, what exactly does that mean and what does it look like in practice?

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing, it starts from the base level of making sure that every member of staff knows what metacognition is. It's like the very first question you asked to make sure all of us were on the same, on the same page. What is metacognition? So I think a metacognitive school ensures for all members of staff, not all teachers, all members of staff understand what metacognition is and they understand what it looks like in their context. So this isn't just about teachers, but it's about teaching assistance, it's about pastoral teams, behavior experts. It's about understanding what it looks like for our leadership teams, the teams who are leading our curriculum development, the teams who are leading our cultural development, the teams who are leading our pastoral development. What does it look like in all of those contexts? Not just here's the theory, run with it. It's yes, start with the theory and then understanding what it looks like for you. And then I think the next thing is about in time. And what I often say is the amount of time you need to develop metacognition is normally equal to or greater than the number of year groups of students you have in the school. So if you've got five year groups, then you're going to have a five-year implementation plan. If you've got seven year groups, seven years, etc., etc. And honestly, I would never really want to go any lower than five. And that doesn't mean that the only thing you always do is metacognition. Absolutely not. But it means that it needs to be at the forefront of your thinking throughout all of that time. And that means that in year one, you maybe introduce metacognition and you link it to an area. And I always say, well, what have you done in a previous year? Or what are you already wanting to work on this year? Maybe it's maybe it's reading, maybe it's extended writing, maybe it is a new feedback policy or a new behavior policy. Link metacognition in with that. Do the theory, do the understanding, but then link it in with that. And then in your next year, well, what's the next area for improvement? Maybe it's um personal development, maybe it's questioning again, maybe it's feedback. Well, link it in with that. Make sure that metacognition feeds in with that, and then so on and so forth. So, what a metacognitive school looks like, I guess to give a really clear answer on that, a metacognitive school is somewhere where all members of staff understand what metacognition is, they understand the power of it, they understand what it looks like for them in their context, and it is an environment, it is a school, it is a college where metacognition underpins everything that happens, it underpins modeling and questioning and feedback, and it doesn't mean that we ignore other areas. Like it would be ridiculous for me to say, oh, metacognition is the only thing that you need to focus on, absolutely not. But it means that metacognition is a foundational force, a foundational idea in all of these other areas of teaching and learning.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Is there a part of the cogn the cognitive science branch that we have seen growing popularity in recent years?

SPEAKER_02 15:04

I think absolutely it definitely comes out of that. Understanding, understanding cognitive science, understanding cognitive overload, understanding the process of memory. It definitely links in with that. And again, those are all important fundamentals of understanding what metacognition is. And I think that that has probably helped its revival in parts. Because I mean, metacognition isn't a new idea. I'm not I'm not coming to speak to people today and say, look, there's this new thing I've managed to invent. That would be utterly ridiculous. It's been in, it's existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years as a philosophical idea. I mean, go back to Plato and Aristotle if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of where metacognition has come from. But in terms of education, it's definitely been linked in with educational practices since the early 70s. So this isn't something new. And we know in education, things go in cycles, right? It's, oh, hang on, I did this 20 years ago and it disappeared and now it's back again. And I do think, in part, that's true of metacognition, but I think it's definitely part of this revival with this idea of science of learning, what makes for effective teaching and learning, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

It's interesting because what you're talking about, thinking about your thinking and it's almost what schools are about, but I get the feeling that it's not being explicitly done. Uh if I'm a school leader and I'm listening to this and

Training Staff Without Reinventing Wheels

SPEAKER_01 16:34

I want to develop this in my school, yeah. What does it look like to have an effective training program around it? How would I go about developing that?

SPEAKER_02 16:48

You made a really interesting point then. That school, surely it's all about thinking and thinking about thinking. Surely this is done. And I think that's a really important starting place because if you walk into a school, if you're a school leader now and you go and sit down with staff and you say, Oh, there's this thing called metacognition, and we're we're all going to do it, and none of you will have ever done it before, and it's not how you're actually just going to get a group of teachers go, Well, I'm already doing this. And actually, metacognition will probably already be developed in certain aspects of teaching and learning. Some teachers will be developing metacognition in their modeling, some might be doing it in their questioning, but the problem is it's not as explicit as it could be, and it's not as embedded within all aspects of teaching and learning as it could be. So I think it's really important to acknowledge with staff that they will already be doing a lot of these things, but they maybe don't know the name for it. They don't realize why what they're doing is so powerful. So I think a really, really good starting point for any staff leader, any school leader, sorry, is to begin with that theory and that justification. And then starting to think about, well, actually, what are the things that we already do in our setting? What are some of the things that are working? What are some of the policies that we introduced that maybe we didn't realize are metacognitive, but actually are, and starting to make these things explicit and conscious. So I think what I mean by that is if we think about questioning, I feel like there's been a big revival in questioning maybe over the last five to six years and really thinking deeply about the importance of questioning and scripting out questions and not just asking questions that students don't really need to think about. And actually, we always question, of course, we've always questioned, but we can improve our questioning by scripting them out, by thinking really deeply about the questions we want to ask, by considering the best questions for our curriculum, for our lesson to meet the learning objectives. And I think that's exactly the same with metacognition. Some, a lot of it will already be happening, but we can still take it up a level, we can still improve it, and that's by actually being explicit and consciously considering what it actually is and what it actually looks like and thinking about how we can improve it. I remember years and years and years ago somebody saying to me about metacognition. It's my first ever training course where I went on a metacognition, and somebody says it never happens by accident, it only gets developed where it's been planned for. And it's something that I've always come back to that I think actually metacognition can happen a little bit by accident, or it does happen because we're teaching so well, because we are improving our questioning or our modeling or whatever it might be. It's some of it will happen by accident, but actually to improve it, we need to be thinking really deeply about it. Ironically, to be developing metacognitive practice, we need to be really metacognitive teachers and we need to be thinking about what we're already doing and what what's going well, what we want to improve, and what the next steps are for ourselves and our our learners.

Evaluating Impact Without Ranking Teachers

SPEAKER_01 19:52

And then when you when you have put that training program in place, is there any evaluative process attached to that? How do we know it's working?

SPEAKER_02 20:04

So I think there's there's probably two aspects to the answer here. I think the first one is that in some ways, no, there isn't an evaluation because I think it needs to be deeply embedded and ingrained, like I've said, with everything that we do. And that includes the curriculum. So one of the things that I've been working on a lot in the last two years, really, three years, with sort of writing and with a few schools, is thinking about where metacognition fits in in the curriculum. How do we ensure that students are developing their evaluative skills or their planning skills or their ability to monitor or create checklists? Well, the only way we can do that is through the curriculum. So when we're developing the curriculum, we would evaluate it, but we wouldn't necessarily know that, well, we would know that it's working in part because students would hopefully do better and teachers would hopefully be happier with it. But the curriculum is constantly adapting, evolving, improving. And I think that's the first thing of metacognition that actually it's always got room for improvement. Even, you know, myself, I come and I work with schools, we work on metacognition. There's still so much I need to know and so much I need to learn. We're never there, we're never finished product. So I think that's the first part of it. We embed it within our teaching and learning, we embed it within our classroom practice, we embed it importantly within our curriculum, and that needs to be constantly updated and constantly evaluated to continue to improve it. But on the flip side, I definitely think there is some more um firm data that we would want to be capturing around evaluation to understand, well, how are we doing? And I think it's really important that we do this at a subject level or a year group level or at a whole school level, not a teacher by teacher basis. I don't, I always urge, let's not get to the point where teachers are being ranked on how good their metacognitive teaching is and that sort of thing. We want to be looking at it at department, year group, or whole school level. And I think there's probably three things we can do here. The first is that we can engage with a bit of work by again a really, really good thinker called David Perkins. He did a lot of work in the 90s and he basically gave us different levels of metacognition. And he said that students can be tacit where they don't really understand that they can plan, monitor, evaluate. They can be active, they can be passive where they know they could plan, monitor, evaluate, and they just decide not to. And then you get reflective and strategic learners who begin to do more and more planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Obviously, there's a few more criteria to it than that, but it's a general understanding of how metacognitive skills improve. And that's a really, really nice scale to allow teachers to hold discussions and for leadership to hold discussions around what improvements they're seeing. Are we actually going from a student body that's moving from tacit to passive? Are they going from passive to strategic or strategic to reflective? We can begin to plot those journeys. If we're wanting a little bit more data, now what some schools are moving towards is something called the junior MIA, the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, which is basically like a 50-question quiz that gets students to judge or to rank themselves, I guess, against a number of different factors. It's quite easy to run, quite easy to evaluate, and that can give us a little bit more data. And I think the only thing I'd say to school leaders there is that if you are to do something like the junior MIA or other more detailed surveys, to begin with, you might actually find a drop in metacognitive abilities. And that's purely because students don't necessarily know what they don't know to begin with. And it's when they start to develop their metacognition that they'll begin to realize how much there is to do and how much how important planning is and how important evaluation is. It's a little bit like that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Like that's it's like an old cliche, isn't it? And I think that's true of metacognition. But when we're working with our students to begin with, they won't necessarily know how metacognitively weak they are or how metacognitively passive they are. It actually takes time and development in lesson and through the curriculum for them to realize how important it is. So that's another thing that we can do. And then I think the other thing that's really, really helpful to do is speak to staff, speak to parents and carers, speak to students, speak to them about the new policies that are being tried, about the new modeling method, about the new questions, uh the new questioning approaches. Speak to all of those stakeholders and get their feedback. What's working well, what isn't, what are they finding is helpful, especially for our students, because the aim of metacognition is to develop independent and resilient learners. That's what we want, isn't it? Students who can drive their own learning forward. And so I think it's really important for actually we speak to those students and we see, well, what impact are the changes that we've introduced and the way that we're teaching? What impact are they having on you? Are you feeling more confident? Are you feeling more able to prepare for assessments? Are you feeling better able to navigate coursework? Are you better able to know what to do when you don't know what to do? Are you using scaffolds and all of that stuff? Are you getting better at all that? What's working well for you? So actually, speaking to our students and getting that student voice, I think is undervalued, but can be hugely, hugely beneficial in this metacognitive journey.

The Gains Schools Notice First

SPEAKER_01 25:22

And so, in your experience, having you are Mr. Metacognition, when a school has implemented this properly, what gains have you seen?

SPEAKER_02 25:36

I think the first gain that you see is that that end impact of that independent and resilient set of students. You will have learners who, at the first sight of difficulty, they don't give up. They understand that challenge is a part of learning, and that actually to be wrong is in many ways too is good because actually if you get everything right where you've not learned anything new, it's actually the opportunity to learn is from when you make a mistake. So, what we actually get are students who are resilient, who want to face challenge, who, yes, may still get overwhelmed by huge challenges, but then they know what to do. They will ask really good questions. We've all been in a classroom where a student's gone, I don't know what to do. I'm stuck. I don't know. And they're just not helpful statements, they're not helpful questions. Whereas in those contexts where students are better at driving forward their own learning, the question won't be, I'm stuck. It will be, well, I've done step one, but I just can't remember what step two is. I've written this paragraph, but I'm not sure how to link it to the argument that I'm trying to make. I'm really struggling to remember what formula I need to use, but I do know what my end point is. I know that I'm trying to prove this or show this. So it's that resilience and that independence that I think will be seen to begin with. I also think what you begin to see is better discussion in the classroom and improved or see skills. This is a huge thing that OSC and metacognition really come in very tightly together. But improved OSY and improved metacognition, they often need the same approaches in the classroom, and developing one can very quickly develop the other. And so I think improved ORISC and a student's not just their awareness of what it is they're working on, not just their awareness of their strengths and their areas for improvement, but also their ability to communicate those ideas is also far, far improved. Again, we can probably all think of classes we've taught, or maybe classrooms we've gone into, and we speak to students and we are wowed by their awareness of what it is they need to work on and the accuracy with which they have at determining their strengths and areas for improvement. And that's what we want for all of our learners, isn't it? We want our learners to be aware of their strengths and their ability to communicate what it is they need to work on. So I think those are some of the other big things that you can see from schools that have worked really, really hard on metacognition.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

I mean, it it sounds very much worth it. I'm sure, like you said earlier, schools are doing it, but it's that deliberate practice and that deliberate approach that probably is missing.

How Nathan Supports Schools And Connect

SPEAKER_01 28:16

So we're winding down the podcast. I wanted to just check with you how do you work with schools to get them up to speed on metacognition?

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Yeah, so I think here it's it's really important that each school considers the context that they are in. And I think it's really important that it's always about understanding what the next step in the journey is. So very often when I'm working with schools, it's it's identifying where what they've already been working on and tying in that to the next steps in their metacognitive journey. So whether that's whole school training, whether that's the leadership support, whether that's the curriculum development, it's really important to identify clearly the next steps in the journey to make sure that that next bit of the metacognitive process is the right next step for all staff.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

And so, how can people connect with you? Uh is my last question. How can they connect with you if they want to learn more?

SPEAKER_02 29:12

So, simply if you pop into any search engine, Mr. Metacognition, my website will come up, but I'm across LinkedIn and across social media. Um, my email address is readily available. But anyone is more than welcome to drop me a message, and I'm always, always happy to talk about metacognition, talk about the context that you're in, talk about your next steps, talk about the support that I can offer. Yeah, always, always happy to talk about anything and all things metacognition and anything and all things teaching and learning and generally education. So, yeah, drop Mr. Metacognition into any good search engine or pop Nathan Burns into social media, especially LinkedIn, um, and you will find me there.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

It's been a pleasure talking to you. I've not actually found anyone who has been so enthusiastic and bubbly all about metacognition. So you are indeed Mr. Metacognition. Thank you, Nathan, for being on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Oh, amazing.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

Thank you so much for having me. You are welcome.