welcome to the H L N S C podcast from the teaching mentors. I'm your host, Naomi Andersson, and I'll be speaking to Krista Price from our Walford campus about metacognition. Welcome and hello. Thank you for joining us. Krista, I'd like to ask you a few questions about metacognition. But first tell us a little bit about your background and what you do here at Ludlow and North Shropshire College.
Krista Price:Hi, Naomi. Thank you. So I am an equine lecturer based at the Walford campus, so one of our land based campuses. I have been teaching for nearly 20 years in various FE settings and I'm also a teaching and learning mentor and my background is sort of quite heavily within the practical side of things. So our courses are reasonably practical. So I do a lot of coaching, and I'm also, I am a, a stage four qualified, riding instructor or coach.
Naomi Andersson:Thanks Krista. So, yeah, what does metacognition mean to you?
Krista Price:So I suppose to me it's all about kind of developing positive learning behaviors, and that sort of growth mindset. So being self-reflective is really important and sort of looking at feedback and using feedback from tutors, coaches and peers in a really positive way. I think it's, it's a skill that, you know, particularly working with teenagers, they often don't come to us with and they need to learn as part of their, their learning journey within the college.
Naomi Andersson:Thanks for that. Yeah, I agree with you. They, they don't really know about it, do they? When they arrive. You mentioned before this call that you'd had some really successful metacognition resources and techniques. Could you tell us a bit about those?
Krista Price:Yeah, so particularly with our 10 80 students, so they're are second year level three students. The level of metacognition that is required for their assessments, At that level is quite high. So we do start developing it within the first year in order for them to sort of bring it through into the second year. But in particular, because riding is one of the things that they enjoy. The most. And it's a very practical task. There's also quite a lot of thinking required, particularly for the second years. So as part of their flat work riding, they have to be able to assess a horse's way of going and put strategies in place in order to I improve that horse. And they need to do that in a short space of time. So they will have, you know, sort of an hour and a half. To ride three horses and show improvement. So they need to become quite quick at sort of thinking, problem solving, planning. So as part of their ride unit quite early on in the year, what I do is I set them a, a project. So they will have a project horse and we work through a series of tasks. They have a booklet to go along with it that they have to fill in. And we work through a series of tasks with an end goal. So just before Christmas, they will all ride a dressage test, which I will judge and give them feedback on. So they have a set goal at the end. They know dressage tests lend themselves quite nicely to this because it is measurable. They're all meas, you know, they, all of the, the movements are marked out of 10. It's a set test and they all have the same goal, but because horses are so individual and the horse and rider partnership will vary quite a lot, it kind of really lends itself naturally for them developing those skills through something that they're really enjoying doing. So the way that we set it up or the way that I tend to set it up as I start with them in the classroom. I will give them their booklet that helps to guide them. So that's sort of a way of scaffolding and giving them that guidance to, to start with. We talk through The things that they already know about the horses, about themselves. And then we talk through and we work out and they have to plan a strategy as to what they're going to do. They'll then have a session where they actually carry out an assessment of the horse and then they write down their findings. So it's a little bit like an investigation in, in a science sense, and we try and, and. I try and work with the students on an individual basis, so every student will have a different journey through that particular task. So some of the students will be extremely confident and have done lots of competing and, and have no worries at all about the, the actual, you know, going in and doing a dressage test in front of me. And others will find that terrifying. So, The strategies that they need to put in place are very individual to the student, and they're also very individual to each of the horses. So each horse will have a different set of requirements. And I'm quite careful about how I, how I work the pairings with the horses and the student. So particularly with those who are a little bit less confident about their ability. Will have a slightly easier journey in terms of what the horse requires whereas those who are reasonably confident will, you know, potentially have more challenges. So it's a really easy task to be able to kind of differentiate with the students you know, because the need, doesn't it? Cause those competent drivers are gonna struggle. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And they're really applicable actually, if you think about how it scaffolded.
Naomi Andersson:Thank you for that. That's really useful. So my last question for you Krista, that is, what would your top tip be for staff looking to introduce more metacognition into their lessons?
Krista Price:So the most effective form of metacognition is actually embedding it within the curriculum. So in, in the same sense that I described that actually you are, you are coming up with tasks within your normal lessons. You're not individually teaching metacognition in terms of. This is metacognition and this is what we're going to do. You actually set up your tasks in order for students to learn how to problem solve. You can allow them to fail, but do it in a positive way. Teach them how to fail and how to use that in order to, you know, then go, right? Okay, so this didn't work. Not a problem. What do we do next? And, and in introducing things like that within the classroom setting and within your normal day-to-day teaching is usually the most successful way of, of, of training the students to be self-reflective. And I think modeling the behaviors that you want from them as well. So I will quite often give them little sort of snippets about things that maybe I struggle with. So showing them that actually it's not a negative thing, it's. To be self-reflective and to say, actually I find this particularly difficult and this is what I did, or this is what I do in order to help the situation. So I think, you know, there's a lot of power from the teacher showing, you know, showing the way that they, and modeling the way that they are, you know, doing the things that you expect them to do.
Naomi Andersson:Brilliant. Thank you so much. That was really good. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you found that useful. Over the coming weeks, we'll be podcasting and interviewing colleagues around the college, about a range of teaching techniques and theories and concepts in teaching and learning, and we look forward to sharing our findings with you. please hit subscribe if you've liked what you're listening to and leave us a review. We'd be thrilled to hear from you.
Sounds good.