7 Metacognition Strategies to teach for Reading Comprehension
Before learning and understanding metacognition and metacognitive strategies, I used to teach reading comprehension skills in isolation. I would spend one day on making predictions, a day on making inferences, etc. Teaching metacognitive strategies intertwined these skills and allowed for me to give students real-world examples of how we use each skill in our own lives before applying it to when we are reading. To learn more about what metacognition is, why it's important and how to teach it, keep reading!
What is metacognition?
Metacognition simply put is thinking about your thinking. We use metacognition while we are reading when we STOP and THINK about what we’ve read. There are seven strategies to teach to aid in reading comprehension. Good readers use these strategies while reading, sometimes without awareness.
Why is teaching metacognition important?
Teaching metacognition is important because good readers stop and think while reading. They make connections, can empathize and understand where a character is coming from, create pictures in their head, draw conclusions, make predictions and more. It is important to explicitly teach these skills to foster student independence and develop strong readers. First, we must model, model, model— and when we think we’ve modeled it enough– we should probably model once more!
*If you have non-readers in your classroom, they can still be introduced to metacognition because it is something we do naturally in our daily lives. You may just need to adjust what group work and independent work would look like.
What are the metacognition strategies?
- Metacognition- stopping to think about what we’ve read and our understanding of what we’ve read
- Schema- make connection, retrieve and active prior knowledge
- Making Inferences- drawing conclusions, making predictions and form interpretations
- Questioning- generate questions before, during and after reading
- Determining Importance- sift out relevant and useful information
- Visualizing- creating mental images using our five senses
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Synthesizing- changing their thinking in response to what they’ve read
How do I teach metacognition?
The metacognitive strategies should be taught in the order above; metacognition, schema, making inferences, questioning, determining importance, visualizing and finally synthesizing. It is important that when you teach metacognition, you start by teaching one skill at a time and teach it explicitly with a real life example. After students are immersed in a real-world example, then you can model how it is used while reading. Finally, students can practice the skill with a partner and/or independently. Students should always have an anchor chart or reference sheet to refer back to while reading with a partner or independently. I send students home with a metacognition reference sheet in their notebooks or folders for independent reading at home. I believe this helps support the school-to-home connection and keeps parents informed on what we are learning at school.
I’ve created a bundle that can help you with teaching metacognition. The bundle includes:
- posters to be hung on a bulletin board or in your classroom as a reference for students
- student reference sheets for HW folders or interactive notebooks
- graphic organizers for EACH metacognitive strategy
- a flip book for ALL metacognitive strategies
- punch cards to be used for when students are reading independently and using their strategies
- certificates to celebrate students becoming masters of each strategy
When we teach metacognition explicitly, students become strong, independent readers. By creating a real-life experience of each skill, students are able to make connections to the world and reading. To purchase this bundle, click here.
To learn more about metacognition, you can read the book Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor that is linked here.
If you're interested in our other products that have been created to help teach and support reading comprehension for all learners, but especially struggling learners, we've got you covered!
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- Reading Strategies Comprehension Bulletin Board
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