Metacognition Strategies

Metacognition is used by young readers to improve their reading comprehension so they may engage more successfully with a text. Students should be taught how to use strategies and skills to monitor their understanding so they may become strategic and confident readers.

When students rely on metacognition to monitor their comprehension, they are able to learn from, connect and enjoy the texts they read.

Metacognition Enhances Learning

When explaining the importance of metacognition to your students you can simply say metacognition is “thinking about your thinking while you are reading”. Metacognition is the ability to monitor one’s intellectual functioning so that one can read for meaning and read to retain information.

Monitoring Comprehension = Metacognition

When a student tries to “think about their thinking while reading”, they learn to recognize when comprehension breaks down and utilize a fix-up strategy to improve their comprehension.

Metacognition involves:

Become aware of their thinking while they read
Identify confusion and roadblocks that complicate comprehension
Identify and utilize a strategy to improve comprehension

Developing Metacognitive Strategies

For children to develop reading strategies to monitor their comprehension they need to become active learners by setting goals for themselves, planning how to reach these goals, monitor their success, meet their goals and develop remedies when their goal is not met.

This can be achieved when teachers model specific strategies for students to use when trying to comprehend what is read. Choose a text that is moderately difficult for students so that they can apply the strategy.

Be careful to choose a text that allows you to provide background knowledge prior to reading. Or choose a text that you are certain contains material that they already can draw upon their own background knowledge to help support inferences.

You can download the Metacognition Guru Anchor Chart HERE.

Teachers can model how to monitor their comprehension by reading a passage aloud and “thinking aloud” about his or her own thinking to include their “inner conversations” by modeling some or all of the following behaviors of a good reader:

Asking Questions
Making Connections
Making Predictions
Making Mental Images
Drawing Conclusions
Inferring Word Meanings

You can download the Metacognition Guru Anchor Chart HERE.

Metacognition is having Inner Conversations

Begin by teaching your students how to “think about your thinking while you are reading”. Encourage them to slow down and record what thoughts they have as they are reading. Using a simple graphic organizer like the one above or annotating the text in the margins or on post-its helps reinforce the need to monitor their comprehension as good readers do.

Often times students will focus so much on reading fluently and/or quickly that they fail to monitor their comprehension. Ask yourself as an adult reader; how many times have you found that you need to reread a page that you just read because you can recall one thing that was on the page?

Foster the love of slow reading, encourage your students to take the time to slow down and enjoy the ride. First model how to do this together by fostering a love of “digging deeper in the text”.

Once you accomplish this, you are ready to introduce the reading strategies and skills students will use to help them comprehend new texts in a meaningful way.

What are the Reading Strategies?

Reading strategies are used to help children achieve and improve their reading comprehension. They symbolize the main brain functions while you read. These include:

Making Connections
Inferring Meaning
Questioning
Determine Importance
Visualizing
Synthesizing

What are Reading Skills?

Reading skills break the strategies down into fragments that make up the whole. Strategies are the subtitles while the skills are the details. These include:

Predicting
Using Context Clues
Summarizing
Identifying Author’s Purpose
Identify a Character Trait
Sequencing
Interpreting Figurative Language
Identifying the Main Idea

You can find a class set of Guru Anchor Charts HERE.

Guru anchor Charts© were designed to help students take ownership of their learning. By assigning a reading strategy/skill guru to EACH of your students, you will have created a student-centered classroom. Your students will be engaged, excited and will become experts in their “field” and equipped to teach their classmates throughout the year.

As you teach each reading strategy and skill, present the guru anchor chart featuring one of your students. Keep it displayed all year long. You may wish to record your thinking on smaller anchor charts hung below the Guru anchor chart. This will make learning visible and permanent throughout the school year.

Simply remove your student’s picture and reuse them year after year.

You can find a class set of Guru Anchor Charts HERE.