Thinking Moves A-Z: Metacognition Made Simple

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So, he set about creating a scheme that was simple and memorable, practical and complete – one that could be used by teachers to teach thinking more systematically and effectively, but also by learners to manage their thinking and, thereby, manage their own learning and lives better. I have found them useful in understanding how information can be applied into exam answers and broken down into categories, such as ZOOMING OUT to get the wider picture or ZOOMING IN to focus on specific details.

According to the Educational Endowment Fund, “With a large body of international evidence telling us that, when properly embedded, these (metacognitive) approaches are powerful levers for boosting learning, it’s clear that we need to spend time looking at how to do this well. The same study also states that “Explicit instruction in cognitive and metacognition strategies can improve pupils’ learning” EEF Guidance Report, 2018 ( https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/) When we talk about the progression of mathematical understanding we have a shared language. We all understand what it means to engage in addition and subtraction. Phonics, science . . . all areas of learning have a common linguistic foundation. Thinking Moves A – Z provides a vocabulary for thinking. The moves themselves are not new – we all use them in our learning and our life every day. But now we have a way of talking about how we think, and that gives us a means to work on improving the effectiveness of our thinking.’

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During a teaching career of over 20 years, there have been very few initiatives that have had as great a positive impact on my practice as Thinking Moves A to Z. It has transformed the way I teach and the way I encourage my pupils to learn. Having said this, Thinking Moves didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know about teaching and learning; I have exerted very little effort in tweaking the methods I use to teach. It simply gave a name to every method of thinking that we all use in our everyday life; a label that I could direct children to use to help them with their learning, triggered by a memorable action children find easy to respond to. For anyone wanting to explore a metacognition approach to early-years practice then Roger’s Thinking Moves A-Z and my book, Beautiful Thinking, are a great place to start but you also have the tools already available to you right now. Just take a peek inside the early-years framework, Development Matters, and you will find that the whole of the Characteristics of Learning are metacognition skills. Brain development between birth and age five is immense. There is no other period in life where our brains develop so much or so rapidly as they do in those first few years. Even a PhD student does not make as many intellectual leaps and bounds during their studies as a young child does as they just learn to be a human. Comprehensible. Simple activities are provided to allow each move to be practised and to allow people to make meaning of the move. This is supported by a list of synonyms and associated vocabulary for each move that helps people to build a more nuanced understanding of the acts of thinking it denotes. For example, to think ‘Ahead’ is also to ‘ predict‘, to ‘ aim‘, to ‘ look forward‘, to ‘ expect‘, to ‘ hope‘ and to ‘ target‘. Special synonyms for EYFS children are provided; I think that they are particularly useful to use when you feel unsure or muddled, as they can help you to plan not only how to structure the layout of the information but also they can be helpful in EXPLAINING and evaluating the information itself.

Obviously, the real benefit of Thinking Moves is increasing the children's ability to explain their thinking and it is encouraging from visiting lessons, listening to their discussions and looking at our students' written responses that the moves are becoming ingrained and part of the language of learning in our school. Our next step is to evaluate this process further and to develop the role of metacognition and self-regulation into our developing social and emotional learning programme and the evolution of agency focused curriculum, which we have begun this year. Students at Sandringham Primary, Newham, London could remember all 26 Thinking Moves in their very first session with facilitator, Paul Kell The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) found metacognition to be a low cost and high impact approach to supporting progress. They also linked it to self-regulation, an area which is ever present in early years frameworks. In their findings about metacognition the EEF stated; Thinking Moves A – Z is a structured approach to thinking about thinking – a framework for metacognition. In this video, Roger Sutcliffe explains how it works. My teacher prompts us in class but I find myself using them independently in other subjects and in my revision.

What is Thinking Moves A-Z?

Our primary school which follows the IB curriculum has been implementing Thinking Moves A-Z metacognition strategies since 2019. We have seen tremendous growth in our students’ ability to explain and evaluate their own thinking as well as evaluate and appreciate the contribution of their peers. This in turn has strengthened our students’ ability to reason and make progress in inquiry within the PYP framework.