Unlocking Student Thinking: Metacognition with Toby Mitchell

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Curriculum Associates, an education technology company, and the makers of iReady, presents the Extraordinary Educators podcast.
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Join host Haley Browning to hear tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning.
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We believe all educators are extraordinary and we are here to support you.
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Hi everyone, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators podcast.
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Today we're joined by the incredible Toby Mitchell, a fourth grade general and special education teacher all the way from Hawaii.
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In today's episode, toby talks to us about this idea of metacognition, and that really means thinking about and understanding your thinking, which definitely can sound like a mouthful, but today Toby explains this on a really understandable level and with that it makes it very applicable to your own classroom and your own day-to-day.
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So with that, we hope you really enjoyed today's episode with Toby.
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Hi, toby, welcome to the Extraordinary Educators podcast.
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Glad to be here.
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Thank you, we are so happy to have you here talking all about a wonderful, wonderful topic in education this idea of metacognition.
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So with that Toby, for our listeners, could you just give a high level explanation as to what metacognition is?
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Sure, yeah, I mean, the bottom line of metacognition is to think about your own thinking.
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So when you put that into perspective, that's kind of hard to think about.
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It's really trying to figure out how your brain thinks and how your brain works yeah, I, I really appreciate that and I feel like as a teacher in the classroom, as administration, it's really important to kind of dive into this idea of understanding your students on a different level and encouraging them to, as you said, think about their thinking.
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So, toby, in your classroom, how do you incorporate this idea of metacognition and encourage your students to think about their own thinking?
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Yeah, there's a couple of things, but I think the big one that maybe teachers often mistaken is the word I don't know, and I put that in the blog there and it's such a small change but it takes a long time for the students to adapt to it, as well as teachers, I'm guilty of myself.
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When there are students you know, you cold call or you call on and they shrug their shoulders or they say I don't know.
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Usually move on to the next person, or you get, start giving them hints, start putting up your fingers and things like that, but using not I don't know.
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Having them to actually think and process what they're not understanding is huge.
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So, for example, if a student doesn't know something and they say I don't know, instead of moving on from it, it's important for them to understand what they're not getting, to pinpoint that, and so this will take a lot of time.
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In fact, this was something only I've tried this past school year, but in the end they really started to get it by themselves.
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So by the end of the year, they started to think of these processes by themselves.
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The I don't know became a habit that they lost, and then they started to pinpoint where they got wrong, ultimately making my job easier.
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So they tell me what they're not understanding, so I can directly help them.
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Wow, toby, that's so powerful the fact that you were able to build up this ownership of their learning and your students from the get-go.
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They're going to carry that for years and years to come, so I hope you know that you are truly making an impact on your students.
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So congratulations for that, and I also loved that you were reflecting yourself and thinking about your own thinking, saying, yeah, I'm also guilty of the fact that I went with this idea of I don't know.
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So you're demonstrating yourself to your students that you are also practicing this idea of metacognition, which is very powerful.
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So great work there.
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Toby, I'm curious how did you get into this idea of metacognition?
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Was it something you were reading?
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Was there something that you came across, maybe from another teacher?
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How did you get so invested in this idea?
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It's a great question.
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Actually, it all started last summer when I got the chance to actually go to a visible learning conference hosted by Corwin Press and the speaker there, john Hattie, who's considered educational legend, kind of just had this deep dive on metacognition, and so when that came, I also went to other small sessions of metacognition and then I kind of just wrapped my head around.
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This is something that I definitely want to try this year and I want to see if it has the big of a effect size, as John Hattie said.
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And it sounds like it has, from what I was gathering like it has from what I was gathering.
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Amazing, yeah, yeah, the data that it showed.
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Specifically, using iReady, I've had an average of 300% growth in reading and in math, and so I correlate and directly relate that to some of the metacognition learning things that I've learned from that Visible Learning Conference.
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That's so great, toby, and congratulations to you and your students for all of your hard work.
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I know a lot goes into that, even just beyond this idea of metacognition.
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So great work across the board there.
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And with that, toby, we're going to wrap up for today.
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Thank you so much for your time and we will make sure to link the blog in the show notes.
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Awesome, thank you so much for your time and we will make sure to link the blog in the show notes.
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Awesome, thank you.
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