Metacognition is thinking about your thinking. It is one of the first big and impressive words that is introduced to a young learner.  It involves how you approach a learning task, how you choose to solve problems, monitoring your own comprehension and evaluating your own understanding of new content. It is important to get even the earliest learners to start thinking about their thinking and to validate that they way they think is okay. We often want our students to arrive at the same answers, the same way, when their brains are not wired for it. That results in some students feeling marginalized or feeling like they are not as smart because of the way they learn. Nobody is ever going to change the way you think or solve problems so the best thing to do is validate it and teach the students that regardless of how they think, learn and solve problems, they can be successful too. Teachers do a lot of thinking about how students learn. They can typically watch a child solve a problem and identify if the child is left brained or right brained. They can usually identify a child’s learning style as kinesthetic, visual or auditory. A teacher is usually the first one to identify auditory processing deficits and neuro-atypical behaviors in a child and teachers can certainly pick ADHD kids out of a line up. But teachers rarely let the child own their individual learning styles. This is why differentiation is so important. Our job is to make sure every child is successful. We accomplish that by having the learner’s natural curiosity and intellectual capacity work for us, not against us. In the early childhood years, we do so much evaluating children that we often inadvertently pigeon hole them into “needs math support” or “requires intervention.” I am not suggesting that we should not offer intervention to children who need it and could benefit from it. However, by the time they are old enough to get an extra math class instead of an elective in their schedule because they don’t do well in math, they begin to own the idea that they are never going to be successful because they “hate math.”  Children as young as second grade should be able to articulate how they learn best and methods they use to solve problems. If we allow students to “think out loud” we can often zero in on where the deficit lies and immediately correct it. Once they realize how they learn best, you can offer multiple ways to demonstrate mastery. I guarantee if you use differentiation to your advantage, your students will score higher and be more successful, and that will ultimately be a positive reflection on you and your practice.

Knowing the dominant eye, ear, brain, hand & foot can improve the learning of any child. In addition, once they are armed with this information, they know where the best place is for them to stand or sit, in any learning situation, to be able to maximize their learning potential. Many years ago, I was working with a 1st grader  who was really struggling with every aspect of learning in her classroom. I completed a Dominance Profile on her, which showed us her dominant eye, hand, ear and brain. I then drew a rudimentary picture of a typical classroom and asked her where she sat in relation to where the teacher did most of her teaching. Guess what we discovered? She was sitting in the worst possible place to take in information from the teacher with her  dominant eye and dominant ear.  When I  explained this to the teacher,  she asked me if we could do the Dominance Profile on the rest of her class, which of course, I did. The following year, when she was in 2nd grade, this student asked me to come into her class and explain her Dominance Profile to her teacher, so she could sit in the best place for learning, which of course, I did. After that year, she took care of it herself and is now a sophomore in college, still advocating for herself with great success!

You can get  more information on Dominance Profiles in the book, “ The Dominance Factor: How Knowing Your Dominant Eye, Ear, Brain, Hand & Foot Can Improve Your Learning” by Carla Hannaford, Ph.D.”…

Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED.

If you are an experienced teacher with a story or tip about metacognition, please share it in the comments.