johntomsett

I have been a teacher for 29 years, a Headteacher for 14 years and, at the age of 53, this much I know about metacognition and self-regulation.

As Jim Royle would say, “Magic dust, my ****!” If you read all the edu-chat around lately, it feels like metacognition & self-regulation are the universal panaceæ to cure all teaching & learning ills. Flavour of the month for the teacher-magpie…sprinkle a pinch of metacognition over your lesson plan and all will be well…just behind Feedback, they are number 2 on the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching & Learning Toolkit…lob in a dose of self-regulation and, hey presto, students’ outcomes this summer will be tickety-boo! But, as anyone who has taught knows, it is not quite as simple as that…

What on earth is a self-regulated learner? I am planning my next book and it is about fishing rather than education. It has been nourishing to think about something else other than education in my down-time. But, that said, one of my fishing anecdotes exemplifies precisely what is meant by a self-regulated learner. I was fly fishing for trout. Anchored in the middle of the reservoir, there were fish rising all around the boat. I could barely thread the line through the rod-rings for excitement. I began with a black gnat fly. I swiftly moved on to a mayfly, then a daddy-longlegs. Nothing. The fish ignored my several offerings as they continued to tail walk in front of me, waving with their fins. If one had jumped into the boat of its own accord, I wouldn’t have been surprised. An hour later, having worked really hard, I was fishless. It was pointless carrying on in the same vein. I took stock of what was happening. My technique was fine. I was casting well, so that the fly presented naturally on the water. I was using gunk to keep the fly afloat. I had cast in every direction around the boat. I had experimented with a range of different flies. What else could I could I do? It was at that moment, reflecting upon what I was doing and what I knew about fish, that I peered over the side of the boat. So small they were almost imperceptible, I could see dozens of miniscule flies, tiny, green aphids. I had nothing so small in my fly box, but I did have a green fly to which I took my scissors and cut away from the hook all but the merest flick of green feather. My shorn imitation greenfly had sat on the surface of the water for no more than a second before a hefty rainbow trout snuffled it away. I caught three trout in three casts, six fish in ten. Then the sun broke through the early morning mist and the trout vanished into deeper water.

As a fisherman, I am an experienced self-regulated learner. Self-regulated learning involves: cognition (the skills and knowledge needed to complete the learning task) – I have fished for nearly fifty years and have a huge hoard of skills and knowledge to draw upon; metacognition (the ability to control cognitive skills) – on that greenfly day I constantly monitored what was going on and after an hour of trying different techniques, reviewed what I was doing and applied my skills and knowledge to find a solution to my lack of success in tempting a fish; and motivation to apply these skills and abilities – returning home without a fish to a derisory reception from my sons wasn’t an option…

Metacognition & self-regulation aren’t at number 2 in the charts for nothing. The EEF guidance report on metacognition and self-regulation is due out at the end of this month and provides a definitive guide to understanding and implementing metacognitive practices in the classroom. It has been written by Alex Quigley, Daniel Muijs and Eleanor Stringer, some of the best edu-brains in the business. If you want to be trained on how to implement the EEF’s findings on metacognition and self-regulation, you can sign up here. Not only will you improve your teaching and your students’ learning, you might just get better at whatever it is you do when I am off fishing…

I have been a teacher for 29 years, a Headteacher for 14 years and, at the age of 53, this much I know about how we can make 39,528 individual interventions to help vulnerable students make better progress.

Why is the number 4,392 relevant to our vulnerable students? (By vulnerable students we mean those students who are low attainers on entry, have a Special Educational Need or Disability, or are disadvantaged, including those who are in care.) The answer is that in a bog standard comprehensive school like ours, which has five one hour lessons a day, five days a week for 37.6 weeks a year (that is 39 weeks a year minus training days and bank holidays, except for in Year 11 when it is 32.6 weeks because the lessons stop five weeks before the end of the summer term), and where the students attend for an average of 96% of the time, 4,392 is the number of lessons a single vulnerable student attends, on average, from the day s/he begins Year 7 until s/he attends the final lesson in Year 11.

Why our vulnerable students especially? Well, our vulnerable students, especially our low attainers on entry, make the least progress of all our different specific cohorts of students. Changing that situation, so that our vulnerable students, especially our low attainers on entry, make similar progress to all the other students, is proving a struggle. For the last six months we have been thinking as hard as we have ever done, in the near fifteen years I have been a head teacher, about a single school improvement challenge. At one point we asked a range of our vulnerable students what it was that their teachers did which helped them learn most effectively. They said ‘we learn most when teachers:

1. explain exactly what we have to do for homework;
2. help us write down our homework in our planners;
3. help us understand the meaning of difficult words;
4. seat us where we can see the board easily;
5. use coloured paper for handouts to help us read the words more easily;
6. ask us questions to help us understand;
7. help us when they are walking round the room;
8. are kind to us when we get answers wrong;
9. have a little fun sometimes.’

How can we meet our vulnerable students’ progress challenge? Well, there is no easy answer. We have 112 teachers at Huntington. The majority of our teaching is to mixed attainment classes (click here to access Professor Becky Francis’ Best practice in grouping students project and find out why we largely favour mixed attainment teaching). Now, if all 112 of our teachers were so deliberate in their teaching that, in every one of the 4,392 lessons a vulnerable Huntington student experiences in his or her main school career, the teachers consciously practised those nine simple actions that help our vulnerable students learn, what might the impact be upon our vulnerable students’ progress?

Implementation eats intervention for breakfast. To create a system where all 112 teachers practise these nine simple actions in every lesson, every day is a huge challenge. Just think, for instance, of the practical steps we would have to take to ensure that coloured paper is easily available – and I mean no-hassle-whatsoever-for-me-to-do-that available – for a teacher to make individual copies for the two students in his or her class who feel that handouts on orange paper stop the words moving around the page quite so much (even though the evidence regarding the efficacy of coloured paper on alleviating the symptoms of dyslexia is wafer thin). Just think about it for a moment and you’ll begin to understand that implementing such a simple-sounding intervention is actually pretty complex. But, with some doggedness, we have to try because the nine simple actions practised in 4,392 lessons (that’s 39,528 separate interventions) by every one of our 112 teachers just might help our vulnerable students make the same progress as their less vulnerable peers.