At present, I am halfway through a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership and Management. The academic year started again two weeks ago and I am now in the throes of writing an assignment on Strategic School Improvement. My reading and research over the last few weeks has surrounded the concept of ‘noticings’ and the importance of conscious and unconscious awareness of what is happening in the classroom around teaching and learning. This goes for both teachers and students.

Teachers become masters of conscious and unconscious ‘noticing’ in their classroom over years of practice. I guess that the challenge is to encourage (and provide the tools for) students to also be more aware of what is going on around them, with their learning - consciously and unconsciously too. One of the keys to this is by helping young people to become critically reflective and metacognitive as a learner in the teaching and learning process. That is, thinking about how and why they learn and the most effective ways in which they do so. This also helps build learner self-efficacy, as when one reflects on how and why one learns, it empowers the individual and gives direction, value and meaning to their learning.

Chick (2013), an authority on metacognition and an academic from Vanderbilt University in the United States of America, unpacks metacognition as the processes of planning, monitoring, assessing and understanding one’s own learning. She sees critical awareness of the self as a learner and a thinker and of one’s own thinking and learning as the crux of being more metacognitive. In short, Chick establishes it is the practice of ‘noticing’ – consciously and unconsciously – with depth and purpose, aspects of the learning process. In order to do this, she asks learners to pose the following questions when reflecting on their learning, to be more critically aware:

• What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?
• What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?
• How is my thinking {on x topic} changing over time?
• What about my assessment preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?

These questions could help a student to become more conscious and metacognitive with their learning. Chick (2013) also advocates the use of a reflective learning journal, claiming that it helps students to develop their critical reflection and metacognitive awareness on an ongoing basis.

Let us all work together to ‘notice’ more about our teaching and learning, so that we, as a school community become more critically aware. Rather than always focusing on the ‘what’ in terms of our learning, let us ask ourselves ‘how’ am I learning this and why?

Kirk Thomas – Director of Teaching and Learning