In terms of the makeup of our brains, the frontal lobes (pre-frontal cortex) are the ‘executives in charge’ and can be compared to the leaders or supervisors of a business or organisation – without good leadership, the organisation becomes unstructured and inefficient. Effective executive functioning coaching takes place when pupils are helped to understand themselves better. This means that the parent tries to stop being the teenager’s pre-frontal cortex (i.e. The executive in charge of the organisation, organising and problem solving everything on behalf of the teenager), and gradually withdraws their scaffolding, so that the teenager learns how to manage their own EF skills. The Thinking linked EFs: 9. Metacognition Metacognition refers to the ability to stand back and observe yourself from the outside – i.e. how you problem-solve and decide what is called for in a given situation. When you have this skill, you can make decisions about how to proceed based on what you understand about yourself. Whilst doing this you ask yourself ‘How am I doing?’. Afterwards you evaluate how you did and then decide how to do things differently in the future. Metacognition is a skill based on a combination of understanding your own behaviour and past experiences, as well as monitoring your behaviour as you adjust to some current new situation.
What you might see in a teenager who has a poor metacognitive awareness:
• They cannot accurately evaluate skills (e.g. expecting to do well in tests, despite poor past performance / preparation) • They cannot identify appropriate study strategies • They cannot plan or organise a written piece of work • They can memorise facts but misses the larger context (does better on multiple choice tests than essay questions) • They have a hard time understanding more abstract concepts (maths as well as content-area subjects) • They have difficulty making inferences, drawing conclusions, grasping the main idea, reading between the lines
• They fail to check work/proofread
Ideas about how to help with Metacognition difficulties: • Provide specific praise for task performance, by recognising strategies that your teenager uses – e.g. for chores, performance on schoolwork, interactions with friends etc. Provide specific praise such as ‘you’re good at understanding your friends’ feelings.'
• Encourage your teenager to evaluate their own performance on a task or in a social situation. • Encourage your teenager to ask teachers for feedback as a way to improve performance. • Use your behaviour as a way of indirectly helping your teenager understand how people might react to their behaviour.
Managing Metacognition self-check form Item • Following directions (e.g. do you forget to do part of the assignment and lose points as a result? • Proofreading or checking your work to make sure you followed the rules and
Not a problem
Notes
• • • •
haven’t made careless mistakes Knowing what to study Knowing how to study Understanding the material Doing a poor job and getting into trouble for it
Pupil self-help strategies:
• •
• •
•
Tips Ask teachers for revision sheets for tests Create your own study-packs for tests by pulling together all important material, amalgamating and condensing your notes Create self-monitoring checklists (e.g. a proofreading checklist) Ask yourself 4 self-monitoring questions: What is my problem?, What is my plan?, Am I following my plan?, How did I do? Other strategies:
• • • • • • •
Self-talk What’s the big picture? How are you doing? What worked for you before? What didn’t? What do you need or want for a grade? Have you studied enough to get it? Your own idea:
Proof reading checklist: • Do all sentences begin with a capital letter? • Have all proper nouns got capital letters? • Are all sentences complete sentences? • Did I use appropriate paragraphs with one key idea per paragraph? • Do all sentences have ending punctuation? (. ! ?) • Did I use commas and quotation marks correctly? • Did I spell every word correctly?
Three-colour Highlighting
• Main points (often the first of last paragraph in a section or the first sentence in a paragraph) • Supporting details (elaborated on the main points, provides evidence or proof to support assertions or opinions) • Terms (key vocabulary or concepts)
K-W-L technique • K = background knowledge • W = what you would like to know about the topic • L = Learned (read the material and note what you have learned)
Know
Want to learn
Learned
• Please feel free to email me (marsdenz@kesw.org) if you would like me to do any 1:1 input with your son/daughter to help them get back on track with any of these skills.
Kind regards,
Zoe Marsden Head of Learning Support and SENCO - King Edward's Witley