Metacognitive Strategies for Sharpening Critical Thinking
Blog by Laura Jayatillake, Critical Thinking Coordinator & Head of Department, Psychology
In an era of AI-generated content, fake news, misinformation and a reliance on social media for information, critical thinking is clearly needed more than ever. But is critical thinking something that we can embed across all subjects? Is there any space for it in our already crowded curriculum? Aylesbury High School is actively tackling the vital task of enhancing students’ critical thinking abilities. Laura Jayatillake shares their initial strides and outlines their roadmap for future growth.
Critical Thinking and Metacognition
As Critical Thinking Coordinator at Aylesbury High School, a girls’ grammar school in Buckinghamshire, I’m keen to find answers to these questions and more. To this end, a small group of colleagues who make up our Pedagogy Team enlisted the support of Thinking Matters. We had already begun our pedagogy journey by supporting metacognition across the school, so understanding the relationship between critical thinking and metacognition felt crucial from the outset.
Whilst both cognitive processes encourage explicit and sustained reflection, the emphasis is different in each case. In short, critical thinking involves analysis and evaluation of ideas and beliefs that may or may not be one’s own, whereas metacognition involves thinking reflectively about the way that one learns, being able to select the best learning strategies available. As a team we are working with the following definitions:.
Metacognition:
'a pupil’s ability to monitor, direct and review their learning. Effective metacognitive strategies get learners to think about their own learning more explicitly'.
Critical Thinking:
'the intellectually disciplined process of actively & skilfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action'.
Scriven & Paul, presented at the 8th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking & Education Reform
Metacognitive tools
In a remote CPD session with Thinking Matters we explored the goals that we wanted to achieve in our specific context, possible barriers to success and how to overcome them. Throughout the training our trainer employed the ‘tools of the trade’, prompting us to engage with higher order questioning, Thinking Routines and Thinking Frames. This gave us some insight into how these tools might work in practice in our lessons. Yet, before disseminating these resources to all teaching staff, I wanted to try them out for myself in my A Level Psychology lessons and opted to do this when teaching Forensic Psychology to Year 13.
''This metacognitive strategy opened up some interesting questions for discussion and allowed for common misconceptions to be clarified.''
...such tools can enhance thinking skills and that, crucially, they can be slotted into existing schemes of work without a huge overhaul of lessons.
I found Project Zero’s Thinking Routine ‘Think, Puzzle, Explore’ helpful for nudging students to make connections to prior learning before looking at different explanations for offending. Connecting to prior learning is routine in my lessons, but inviting students to go on to consider what ‘puzzles’ them gave students explicit permission to consider what they don’t know and what confuses them. This metacognitive strategy opened up some interesting questions for discussion and allowed for common misconceptions to be clarified.
The Thinking Routine ‘Circle of Viewpoints’ proved to be a powerful way for students to consider different perspectives (e.g. offender, victim, wider society) when evaluating various ways of dealing with offenders (e.g. custodial sentencing, anger management, restorative justice). Perspective-taking isn’t a requirement for evaluation in A Level Psychology but introducing this particular aspect of critical thinking had evident benefits. By stepping into the shoes of different people affected by crime, the evaluation points came alive in class discussion, allowing for an emotional connection which appeared to make the points more meaningful and memorable to students.
Later that same lesson I introduced the Compare-Contrast Thinking Frame as a tool to help students explore similarities and differences between two different approaches to dealing with offending. Students typically find comparative essays challenging, but many reported that the diagram helped to structure their ideas more clearly (see below for example student work). Thus, students were able to experience first-hand the power of dual-coding, pairing verbal information with visual images to support the encoding of that information, something that they had learnt all about when studying the Memory unit in Year 12 Psychology.
This pilot study built my confidence that such tools can enhance thinking skills and that, crucially, they can be slotted into existing schemes of work without a huge overhaul of lessons.
Next Steps...
This work is now being rolled out with in-house training by our Pedagogy Team. In the 2024-25 academic year, as a common performance management target, all teaching staff in our school will trial a selection of Thinking Routines and Thinking Frames. In addition, staff will be provided with higher-order questioning strategies to support critical thinking and metacognition in lessons. This will be accompanied by a programme of work to promote the values and dispositions that nurture thinking, such as curiosity, truth-seeking, and open-mindedness.
By the end of the 2024-5 academic year, we hope to have a clear understanding of what works across different subjects and key stages in our school. This will enable us to finalise a ‘Thinking Toolkit’ to support students with the thinking skills and values needed to navigate an increasingly complex world.
NB: For Thinking School Network Members only: A new webinar about how to ‘Master Critical Thinking’ is available in your ‘Webinars Recording’ tile on your dashboard. View Webinar
‘The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”
