Pupils' awareness

published:December 2009

How can you help pupils become more aware of their thinking?

Research evidence
The process of articulating their thoughts during a group discussion helps pupils to become more consciously aware of their own thinking. This awareness of thinking is called metacognition.

The discussions pupils hold whilst tackling a task may well lead naturally in this direction as they explain their thinking to each other. But sometimes pupils’ talk will leave their thinking quite implicit.  You can encourage improved metacognition whilst pupils are working together on a task by prompting them to say what they are thinking and why. 

Your evidence
You may like to investigate the talk that takes place between your pupils whilst they are working in groups on a task. You could either ask a colleague to observe a group during a lesson or you could make an audio recording for later analysis. You could consider:

• How much speaking is there?
• Who is doing the speaking?
• Do the pupils give and ask each other for reasons?
• Do they pick up on what others have to say and build on it?
• Do they try to encourage each other to join in with the discussion?

You might also like to ask your pupils to reflect on their learning after the task is completed, during a plenary session.

Next steps
Now that you have had chance to think about how much talk helps to make thinking explicit, you might like to try to you encourage more effective group discussion, by for example:

• agreeing explicit rules for discussion with pupils
• modelling asking questions that encourage others to explain their reasoning, such as ‘Why did you think that?’; and
• encouraging pupils to explicitly take note of each other’s responses.