Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.834)
Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast where we explore how to keep schools relevant by looking through the lens of mindfulness and asking the question, what's really worth paying attention to here? I'm your host, Seth Fleischhauer. In each episode, I interview educational change makers striving to understand what they do, why it works, and how it can lead to practical transformative solutions for teaching. This week, I have two guests, Kayla Moorhead and Emily Murphy. Welcome, Kayla and Emily. Thank you for being here.

Emily Murphy (00:28.492)
Thanks for having us.

Kayla Morehead (00:29.854)
Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Seth Fleischauer (00:32.632)
So the three of us met at ISTE when Emily was presenting on the work that she does at Nord Anglia on metacognition. Both Kayla and I had questions for Emily afterwards because of our personal passions for metacognition. We found out that Kayla is a researcher working in Denver Public Schools. On the topic of metacognition was your PhD, I believe. So it's just a perfect little marriage of people who are interested in thinking about thinking.

and, I'm excited to have this conversation here today. first, Kayla, could you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Kayla Morehead (01:08.5)
Yeah, sure. Thanks. So my name is Kayla Morehead. I am a researcher at Denver Public Schools in Colorado. I got my PhD in experimental psychology with a focus on metacognition and self -regulated learning. I also did some research on note taking and some developmental math education. Now I work in Denver Public Schools as a general researcher. So basically, anytime another team has a research question, they come to our team, say, hey, could you investigate this? And we help them do that. So I do.

kinds of projects from evaluating our tutoring programs to see if they're effective to like I did a project to understand students' perceptions about lunch and when to focus groups with students which is always a very fun time so it's fun time over here doing a lot of different projects.

Seth Fleischauer (01:54.018)
Wow, my perception about lunch is that I'm hungry right now and usually. Wow, sounds like a really fun job. Emily, can you please introduce yourself?

Emily Murphy (01:57.16)
All right.

Kayla Morehead (01:57.524)
Yeah. Yeah. I know.

Emily Murphy (02:06.562)
Yeah, I am Emily Murphy. I am the Senior Professional Development Lead for the Metacognition Project and Education Research at North Anglia. So North Anglia Education is a group of international schools. based in the UK, but we have 87 schools around the world in a bunch of different countries, all different cultures and contexts. And I'm part of the central education team that provides support where we can and gets to lead on really fun initiatives like the Metacognition Project.

I was a classroom teacher for 13 years before moving into EdTech for a few years and then joining Nord Anglia. So very much self identify as a teacher still. can't, I don't think that ever really leaves you. But yeah, working sort of in the background now doing more teacher training and development.

Seth Fleischauer (02:50.966)
Awesome. And a ton of respect for Nord Anglia and what you guys have been able to accomplish internationally. I'm in like a internationally adjacent school that we work with in Taiwan. So I'm kind of peripheral to that world. And I know that Nord Anglia is a real gold standard that a lot of people look to. And then, you know, with metacognition, my personal interest in this came about when we at Banning Global Learning, were looking at

Emily Murphy (03:00.29)
morning.

Seth Fleischauer (03:16.466)
the work that we were doing and understanding that the things that we wanted to accomplish were extremely hard to assess. The things that we wanted the students to be able to do were things that did not fit neatly into a standardized test. And this is where the idea of metacognition came around because this is one way to be able to support the idea that what you're doing is working to show that students are actually learning the things that you want them to learn because they're talking about

their thinking about those things. so metacognition has been a real interest of mine since then, and I'm excited to dive into it more. I wanted to start with Kayla. How do you like when if you're in an elevator and people are like, what is metacognition? Like, how do you describe it? And how does it differ from general ideas like self awareness, executive functioning, even mindfulness, theme of this podcast?

Like, where is the Venn diagram of how all those things relate?

Kayla Morehead (04:16.874)
Yeah, so when I'm talking to people who have no idea what metacognition is, I usually describe it as the typical way we hear of it, that it's thinking about your own thinking. But then expanding upon that, it's reflecting and thinking through your cognitive processes. So in terms of learning, it typically goes, I think this is the easiest example, if you have a student who's studying for a test, how do they decide if they're prepared?

that exam. It might ask questions to themselves of like, am I understanding this content? Do I think I'm prepared for the assessment? Those kind of questions are metacognitive questions. It's thinking and reflecting on your own processes and on your own learning in an education context. And then in terms of differentiating it, like obviously like self -awareness, executive functioning, mindfulness are all related, right? Like you said, it's event diagram. But where metacognition fits in is that it's that really that reflection part

and that like asking yourselves questions about your cognitive processing and then making decisions about what do I do from there? And that's the self -regulated learning piece that's directly related to metacognition.

Seth Fleischauer (05:29.292)
And so is there a functional difference between reflection and metacognition? I heard you use that word a couple times. Is it like reflection plus action equals metacognition? Like how do you think of that?

Kayla Morehead (05:43.134)
Yeah, think it's really, I think it's exactly what you said. I think it's also thoughtful reflection that it's not just, it's like, I think it's different from mindfulness, which is, you know, general awareness of your thought processes, but not acting on those, right? We talked about the like, this is what I'm thinking about right now. I'm just going to let that thought go as more of the mindfulness piece versus metacognition is the like, this is what I'm thinking about right now. This is my understanding of this topic or of my own learning. And then, yeah.

How am I gonna act on it? Those next steps are really important.

Seth Fleischauer (06:17.496)
And so the acting on it, those next steps, I mean, that seems to be where the value of this work comes in, right? Because from then it's a whole study of what those next steps might be. When you look at the presence of metacognition within education, what does the research show about its impact and maybe some of the best practices too? Because I assume that there are different ways to do this, right? So if you're going to give a teacher a map of like,

You know, this is what we're if you're gonna do metacognition. This is what I hope you do and this is what that we hope the impact will be How do you describe that to to a teacher?

Kayla Morehead (06:59.018)
Yeah, so I usually start with that without any kind of training, any kind of like initial training in metacognition, most people tend to be really overconfident in their own learning, tend to have an overestimate of how well they're understanding something or if they've memorized something. It's usually because they're using what usually in the literature we call cues that they're using bad cues. Cues are just like what external information

are you using to decide if you have learned something? A lot of times people use a familiarity cue. So they're like, that concept sounds familiar. I must know it when that's really a pretty bad cue. is like familiarity doesn't get into like how well are you actually understanding something? So without any training, people tend to be overconfident because they use cues like that. And what I think makes the most impact is I think first like awareness.

of what metacognition is and getting students to start acting on and engaging with metacognitive processes. So in terms of teaching, what that looks like is I think a lot of modeling. Teachers can do a lot of like as they're presenting information, talking through their own thought processes and then also prompting students. So instead of just asking them, do you know this concept? Having them reflect on how well do you think

you understand this concept and what's your evidence of your understanding? And I think that part's important of checking in on what evidence are you using? Is it just that this sounds familiar? That's maybe not a good cue. Instead of asking them, does this sound familiar? Maybe asking them to repeat back to you what that information is. And that's a much better cue, right? Like if you can't repeat what a concept is or pull it from memory, that's a really good cue of like, maybe I don't know this as well as I thought.

that I did.

Seth Fleischauer (08:55.628)
Yeah, it's very similar to the example that you gave of the student preparing for the test, right? Like to be able to understand like, am I actually prepared? And that asks you to take a deeper look at how you're doing and not just, you know, being mindful and reflective of like, I feel good, but like, why, why do I feel good? And should I feel good about how I'm doing? You mentioned too, that like a lot of students are overconfident. They are using X.

Kayla Morehead (09:16.242)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (09:24.224)
like external cues, that reminded me a lot of just the external motivation that we tend to rely on in the traditional system. And I'm wondering, first of all, if that's related there, right, if that's like a cultural thing. And then also in the realm of culture, do all students like worldwide?

like overestimate their confidence or is this like something that's like kind of specific to like America we're number one kind of kind of thinking right like like how universal is that is that trend of thinking they know more than they do

Kayla Morehead (09:53.984)
Yeah.

Kayla Morehead (10:01.674)
Yeah, so I do think that definitely motivation is related. So part of what I think can be an issue of having external motivators is that if you have a student who's studying and basically you're making this decision of like, what's good enough for me, right? Like I was definitely an overachiever and my parents made me an overachiever. So I was like, A is good enough and anything less is not okay. Not a lot of students are like that. So when a student goes into studying and goes, well, know, like

a C, that's good enough. If I get a C, if I pass, that's great. And then that overconfidence is a problem because if they're aiming for a C and they're overconfident and on all their knowledge, they're more likely to get a D, and then that becomes a problem. So that's part of the issue and also meaning that they're setting lower goals for themselves versus like if instead of aiming for a C, that same student aimed for an A, they might still be overconfident, but now they're likely to get at least a higher score.

I also think that motivation just, if you have intrinsic motivation, if you're really interested in the topic, you really want to do well, then that means that like you're not capping yourself at, I'm aiming for the score. You're capping yourself at like, just really want to know this information and I want to be able to do this. And that means you're going to persist more even beyond where you might think that you're like, yeah, I know this well. You're going to engage with the content more. So I think that's part of it. For the international piece,

I don't know this literature as well. I know a few things. know that generally, I think most people are overconfident. But like I said before, persistence is really big here. So some cultures tend to have higher persistence than we do in America. There's some research where they've had students engage with a really difficult problem that didn't actually have a solution. And Americans tended to stop working on it sooner.

So there's just a higher persistence rate in some other countries. I'm thinking of Japan and China in particular. So I think that's directly related as well, that even if you have this feeling of like, I know this, you might still keep working on something or do more checks of like, well, do I actually know this as well as I think I do? And instead of doing that familiarity check, you're gonna be like, well, maybe I'll do some practice problems. Maybe my teacher gave me a study guide. So maybe I'll go through the study guide.

Kayla Morehead (12:22.11)
and see if I can remember all of this information. And those are better cues of like checking your understanding.

Seth Fleischauer (12:28.182)
Yeah, interesting. the international question, I think, is a perfect segue into Emily's work. In terms of that question of these, of like how metacognition shows itself, how it appears in different students in different cultures across the world, you have a great perspective. Being in North Anglia, you have students from all over the world who go to school all over the world.

What kind of cultural differences do you see in terms of metacognition and the challenges to getting there?

Emily Murphy (12:59.124)
Yeah, this is part of what we are exploring in our research project. The metacognition project that I work on is a two -year research project that we partnered with Boston College on it. So we're sort of halfway through. We're kind of a year in. We've got a year to go. But this is one of the questions we're looking at. I can say we don't have the data to kind of back anything up yet. That is, like I said, that's part of what we're looking at with our surveys and with the use of the tool that I will, I'm sure, talk about a bit later. But just from my experience working with teachers,

there's definitely a difference when we were introducing this tool, which is based on student reflection and self assessment or evaluation. Our teachers in schools in China said, well, what are we going to do when students kind of underestimate their ability? And our teachers in schools in America said, well, what are we going to do when our students are constantly overestimating their ability? So I think there probably is a cultural difference here or something at play that

Seth Fleischauer (13:48.751)
You

Emily Murphy (13:56.992)
that will impact the data when we eventually get it. think we can see just from the first kind of six months of use of the tool, we can see that the average student self -assessment or self -reflection score is lower in the East in our schools in China and Southeast Asia and India than it is in the West, in the Americas. There isn't a huge difference, but it is lower.

in the east. So again, it's just based on a very minimal amount of data at this point, but we are starting to see some of those differences come out.

Seth Fleischauer (14:31.702)
Yeah. And, ironically, at least in terms of like standardized test scores, you're probably going to see much higher scores in the East than, the West. So yeah, that's an interesting little dynamic at play. so Kayla kind of illustrated for us, and a theory of metacognition where it's not just about reflecting, it's about taking action. It's not just about knowing what you're thinking. It's about having evidence to support the idea that you know.

what you're thinking. Do all of those play out with the tool, the student portfolio software that you are in the midst of developing for Nord Anglia? Is that like essentially the journey that you're taking students on from not just noticing things, but to really digging into the evidence that they know things? Or and or are there other threads that you're focusing on as like the backbone

of this software.

Emily Murphy (15:32.907)
I think Kayla really hit it on the head. It's really reassuring. I love when I get to talk to experts and what they say. I'm like, yeah, okay, good. We're doing that. Okay, we've got that covered. Okay, good. That's very much aligned with our thinking around metacognition and how we can help students develop an understanding of their own metacognition. And that's how we've configured the tools. So the learner portfolio is the tool we're talking about. It's a student reflection tool that we've configured with a Finnish EdTech company called Kridi.

They have a tool that they've been using in schools in Finland and in other international schools as well for a number of years. And we've sort of worked with them to modify that, to make it work for what we were trying to achieve with the Metacognition Project, which is essentially giving students an opportunity to think about their thinking, to kind of develop that self -awareness and document it, and to reflect on their thinking in a number of different ways, to get teacher feedback as well on that.

thinking as opposed to on their ability to solve a math problem or the piece of art they did. And then to visualize all of that data for students. think what Kayla was saying around modeling it and kind of making it visible for students is a really big piece for us. We think that a key part of helping students develop stronger metacognitive skills is intentionality, making it intentional, giving students

that agency and ownership so they know, okay, this is something I'm working on. This is something we talk about in class. This is something I know I can do better in and that I know is important. And we've tried to build a tool that facilitates that or kind of highlights that thinking. in the learner portfolio, students collect evidence. They have something called the moment capture area of the portfolio where they collect evidence and essentially build a portfolio of their thinking of their

work or learning in different skills. So it's very much skills based as opposed to kind of traditional academic subjects. So we have our learner ambitions that we use, which are six key skills that we feel students will need to be successful in the future. So things like collaboration, creativity, curiosity, commitment, critical thinking, I always forget one, so I'm not going to try and list them all. They are all Cs. They are all Cs.

Seth Fleischauer (17:51.768)
Are they all Cs? Is every single one them a Okay.

Emily Murphy (17:55.458)
which should help me remember them and it doesn't. But basically 21st century skills, those kind of key skills that we know students need to be successful that are transferable and applicable across all academic subjects, across any context. That's what they're documenting in the learner portfolio. And when they're doing that, they're answering questions that help them to think about their thinking, to be more metacognitive about those skills in particular. So it's asking them to kind of self -assess, you how

creative do you think you are? How well do you think you ask questions to be more curious? And then over time, they start to build up kind of a data set that shows that reflection back to them in really beautiful visualizations that we get very excited about on the project. But yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (18:48.835)
I want to dive into those ambitions. Like how granular do you get in terms of what it means to be curious, what it means to be creative? Like do you start off very general and with the first graders, you're just sort of like, was this creative? Was this curious? And then by high school, there's like a list of, you know, 18 traits of curiosity that they're trying to demonstrate. Like how granular do you get and how does that interact with the

Emily Murphy (19:00.716)
Mm.

Seth Fleischauer (19:15.106)
the metacognitive process.

Emily Murphy (19:17.186)
So I think first and foremost, I think it's important to say that as an organization, Nord Anglia, our schools have complete autonomy over what they teach and how they teach it. We never want to go into a school and say, you're going to do it this way. Because again, we have schools in 30 something countries around the world. We can't say that what works for this school in Spain is going to work for this school in Dubai. You have to, you know, kind of.

give schools the flexibility and autonomy to do that. So what we have developed as the project is kind of what we think will work, kind of one way of doing it. But we have project schools, schools that have kind of signed up for the project, who are doing things in slightly different ways. In terms of what we feel as a project is most important, I think, is that these skills are teachable and have to be taught. So it's not enough to just say, curiosity is important.

you have to teach students what it means to be curious. And so in order to kind of help with that, we've broken down each of the learner ambitions into key strengths. There are three strengths for each learner ambition. And I won't remember those off the top of my head either, but it's things like when you're curious, I think question, explore, and there's one more that I can't think of, but those are kind of skills that are more easy to teach to students, more easy to build into lessons that.

scaffold their understanding of what it means to be curious. I think when we've then created content, our content that we've created that schools again can use or can choose not to use, it is up to them. But the content has been developed around those skills as opposed to just having one lesson for being curious or one lesson for being creative. So we'll have three lessons for each of the learner ambitions. And even within that sometimes they're broken down into

smaller lessons if teachers want to spend a longer chunk of time digging into these concepts. So we have a metacognitive sequence that we kind of guide students through that starts with that understanding and that self -awareness. They learn what it is to be curious or to think critically, to ask meaningful questions, whatever the strength is, and they self -assess based on that strength in the learner portfolio. So in the tool that we've developed, they start with a self -reflection about how

Emily Murphy (21:33.888)
while I'm able to explore the world around me to be a curious thinker or whatever the strength is. Once they've completed that learn, they then set a goal. So they're kind of identifying this is something I want to do better or get better at, something I wanna learn more about. And then they're introduced to a routine or a strategy to help them develop that skill or that strength. And this is where our work with Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routines really comes into play. We've aligned

our content so that there's a thinking routine for every strength. And sometimes the routine is different based on the phase or the year group or grade that we're working with. So for, you know, creative questioning, we might have see, think, wonder as the routine that is used to kind of scaffold that kind of thinking. So they learn about the routine and they practice that in really scaffolded way. And then over the course of six weeks, they

use that routine across all of their different lessons, all different subjects, all different types of learning, all different contexts. They might use that routine outside of school or use that strength or feel like they've demonstrated that strength outside of school as well. And all of that is what's documented in the portfolio. Those are the moments that they're capturing, the evidence that they're capturing in the portfolio. So all of that's documented. And then they have another self -reflection at the end of the sequence, which takes about six weeks, where they kind of get to think about,

I've been really focusing on this, how have I improved, how have things changed? And because we have that start and end reflection, we can start to show them that development over time and that change over time.

Seth Fleischauer (23:10.562)
Okay, I think I understand. have a couple more questions before I want to get back to Kayla and have her sort of like, I don't want to use the word evaluate, but like give us comments.

Emily Murphy (23:13.185)
Yes.

Emily Murphy (23:18.326)
No, please. We love feedback. Like I said, we're lifelong learners. want to improve. So yes, please.

Seth Fleischauer (23:25.28)
It's before, before we get there, cause what you've laid out for us is essentially like a, like a process of metacognition. And I'm curious about like, from Kayla's perspective, like what the, what is the process of metacognition and, like how much of what you've laid in here is sort of like an option versus a necessity, within the process. but before we get to that, w you mentioned Harvard's thinking routines. remember being very.

Kayla Morehead (23:37.11)
Thanks

Seth Fleischauer (23:52.408)
peaked by this when I saw you present at ISTE. Can you just kind of break that down for us quickly? Like, what are some of these thinking routines? How are they applied?

Emily Murphy (24:02.314)
Yeah, I love Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routines. They're something that I used as a teacher before I ever left classroom teaching, before I ever started working for Nord Anglia. And I'd also say there's something that I think most teachers use sometimes without knowing they're using them. Thinking routines are essentially strategies or routines that are developed to help scaffold thinking moves in a particular way. So if you are trying to act a certain way or demonstrate a certain strength or skill,

there are certain thinking moves you need to use in order to do that successfully. And these routines facilitate that, they scaffold that. So for example, if we want students to be more collaborative and to kind of communicate in a better way, one of the routines we use is think pair share, which is a routine that I'm sure most teachers, certainly I was a primary school teacher and elementary school teacher, certainly elementary school teachers use constantly. Essentially, if you're not familiar, you have students think about a question or a prompt.

independently for maybe 30 seconds, and then they pair up with someone and share their thinking with them, and then you share out with the group. So it's just kind of just a really scaffolded way of communicating your thinking and listening and kind of communicating collaboratively with other people. So these routines are really, they're brilliant. They're available on the projects are a website. There are over a hundred of them. They're free to use. They're amazing.

and I cannot recommend them highly enough. They kind of range in complexity as well. So think, pair, share is a really simple routine. One of my favorite routines is what makes you say that? That's the whole routine. You just ask what makes you say that, and that's the routine. But it's one that I find myself using, obviously at work and with students, but I find myself using it at home all the time. I ask my kids, I ask my husband. Sometimes if I'm trying to get to a deeper understanding, it just comes out of me now. And that actually...

Seth Fleischauer (25:39.224)
Yeah.

Kayla Morehead (25:41.759)
you

Seth Fleischauer (25:50.577)
Hehehehehe

Emily Murphy (25:56.412)
is what we're trying to achieve with the students as well in the metacognition project. We want them to be using these routines routinely. They're not designed to be activities or one -off kind of tasks that students complete. They're meant to change the way students engage with information or students think. So when they start doing it independently, when you're on the playground and you hear kids having a conversation and one of them says, what makes you say that? You're like, I've done it. Like, yes.

Kayla Morehead (26:22.93)
you

Emily Murphy (26:24.018)
we've achieved what we're trying to achieve here. This is great. yeah, thinking routines are the best.

Seth Fleischauer (26:30.508)
Awesome. Okay. That's great context. So you've laid out for us a process here where a student you're, you're doing some direct teaching of specific skills. You're having the students reflect on the evidence, to which they have achieved that skill or not. They set some goals, for how they want to improve at that skill or at other skills. there's this list of thinking routines, which are all sort of mini metacognitive processes that are getting, encouraging them to continue to think about like.

whether or not they've reached the goal, what's the evidence of whether or not they've reached the goal, all of this is documented in their portfolio where they're presenting evidence that these things have happened. And then there's a big kind of final self -reflection at the end that kind of draws it all together in what seems like a six week sprint of these types of processes. So, Kayla, how much of that is consistent with what you understand to be

Kayla Morehead (27:23.914)
Hehehe.

Emily Murphy (27:23.958)
Lay it on me, I'm ready.

Seth Fleischauer (27:30.188)
both like the options for metacognition and the essential components of metacognition and what makes you say that.

Kayla Morehead (27:37.32)
Yeah, nice. it. So I'll say first, I mean, I think what I love about what you're doing with the metacognition project, Emily, I'm going to phrase it in like, what I think, like you could have done, but you're not doing, which would have been ineffective. I'm going to phrase it that way. like, what could you have done that would have been ineffective is asking those metacognition prompts, and then never returning to them. Again, there's

some evidence that just asking students to engage with metacognitive processes is helpful, but it's kind of mixed. So I think just that leads to like a, why are we doing this? What's the point in this? It doesn't lead to any growth metacognition wise, if they're just answering those prompts and then aren't shown any evidence of like, well, how accurate were you with those prompts, right? And that shows when we do that, it doesn't really improve their metacognition or make them.

more accurate when we just ask those prompts and then never return them again. So even like asking them those prompts and that you have the data available for them to see, like obviously I'm a researcher and I love data, right? So anytime that we can make their learning visible, that's helpful. So that right there, I think is awesome to have like, you're engaging with these prompts, you're reflecting on them and you're returning to them later and you're looking at growth over time, I think is awesome.

I think another thing you could have done, which would have been ineffective, is to do that and then not say, hey, you were overconfident or like, hey, this is how you're actually performing, and then just like leave it there. That's sometimes right. That can lead like if students are overconfident and you're like, hey, you were overconfident, and then just leave it. Now they're gonna be like, you feel upset about their learning, not know what to do, right? And that's gonna be really demotivating. So.

What I love is that you're then following up on, what are these like thinking routines that we can go through? What are the questions that we can ask to build up that evidence to make us more accurate? And I think that's really key right there is not just saying like, hey, you are inaccurate move on, but to follow up with what are the skills you can work on. I think it's like the research I know it's typically like, well, what are study skills? Like clearly like the way you studied for this test wasn't helpful. How could you study?

Kayla Morehead (29:53.056)
that might be more helpful. I think you're doing a similar thing with like the thinking routines of, you this, it wasn't that helpful, let's try this routine, see what happens. And then you're giving them that evidence to see like, hey, look, you did this routine and you're improving not only in your accuracy, but you're improving on these skills. And that's what's really big because now you're giving students tools for them to be able to use. And you've shown them, hey, this tool is effective, right? It's one thing to be like,

We're handing students tools all the time, but to give them a tool and then when they use it, they see how it's helping their learning, that's really big and that's going to motivate them to use those tools more. So even when they leave their current grade or their current school, they have those tools for them to be lifelong learners and continue to help themselves. And I love that you're doing these general skills too of like what you just said, that these are skills they're going to need, not just in a class, but lifelong.

that's big too. They can take that to any other course, any other situation where they're learning.

Seth Fleischauer (30:56.14)
How consistent is what Emily's done with the other projects of metacognition that you've seen and is there anything that you're seeing in her project that is unique and different?

Kayla Morehead (31:08.852)
Yeah, I think a big thing in there is that for a long time, all of the metacognition literature was around judgments of learning, which were just, hey, you studied these items, how well do you think you'll remember them later? They were oftentimes with like word pairs. So my advisor in grad school, who was one of the developers of these judgments of learning, he's constantly using word pairs. And we sometimes made fun of him for it, because he was always about his word pairs.

And then it expanded in some sense to like the research I was doing in grad school was about category learning. So it wasn't around like, did you memorize these? It was how well do you understand this category that if we gave you a new problem, you would be able to solve that problem within the category. And then what I think Emily's doing with her work is expanding even further than that, right? It's not just about memorization. It's not just about understanding of a concept. It's understanding of skills.

And I think that's really big. And I think it's an awesome extension of metacognition just into this realm of like, how are you as a learner and how are you developing skills? And I think that's gonna be really big and more important. There's only so many times we need to memorize word pairs, but there's all these times where we need these 21st century skills.

Seth Fleischauer (32:28.76)
So Emily hearing that feedback was that something that you guys set out to do like did you know that you were taking this a step further than a lot of other people have?

Emily Murphy (32:39.042)
I mean, again, it's reassuring to hear, Kayla, that you see it that way. We always hope to do that. I mean, I think when, you know, when you're doing work in research, education research as part of this organization, we wanted to make sure that what we were doing was pushing things forward. I think what really stood out for us is that we've known, I think all educators have known about metacognition for a long time. We've all been talking about metacognition. When I did my teacher training many, maybe 15 years ago, 16 years ago,

I remember metacognition was like the hot word at the time. That was a long time ago in terms of research, of educating, you know, that things should have moved on further, I think, than they have. If we knew how important metacognition was 15 years ago, we still aren't really seeing, okay, so what do we do about it? And that, I think, is what we were trying to achieve, what we're trying to achieve with the metacognition project. know, again, our teachers are amazing. They're already doing so much of this work. They're already thinking about metacognition.

and these skills and trying to provide opportunities for students to engage with that in the classroom. But there's always been that question of, well, how well are we achieving that goal? How well are students achieving, you how well are they, how much are they learning? How well are they achieving their goals? There isn't really a way or there hasn't been yet a way to document that. And that's what we're trying to achieve is yeah, kind of that next step of we know it's important, so what? It's another thinking routine. What, so what, now what is a great thinking routine.

Seth Fleischauer (34:07.517)
What, so what, now what? I like that. What, so what, now? So let's focus on the so what. The what is metacognition. Why is it important? So what?

Emily Murphy (34:22.422)
Kayla can probably speak more to this than I can as a doctor of metacognition, as we were calling her at ISTE. I know we've seen a lot of research internationally and in the UK as well. The Education Endowment Foundation has done a lot of research around metacognition and it shows that it is a high impact approach to improving attainment in students. Students who were engaging in the research in metacognition or trying to develop those skills showed

Seth Fleischauer (34:29.336)
Hehehe

Emily Murphy (34:50.856)
an average increase of eight months improvement and attainment over students who weren't. And what's great about metacognition is that it's free and anyone can do it. don't really need, mean, obviously we're creating a tool that we're hoping helps with it, but so much of what you can do to help students develop metacognition, you don't need any tech, you don't need other resources, you don't need to buy something new.

you can just do it with students. And I think that's what really makes it stand out as such a high impact approach that we should be exploring and kind of engaging with. But Kayla, I'm sure you can speak more to this then. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (35:25.484)
Well, and if I can frame it, like Emily was talking about high impact. Does metacognition have high impact for whatever it is that you're trying to achieve? Or is there a certain subset of skills that are more impacted by metacognition than others?

Kayla Morehead (35:26.993)
Yeah.

Kayla Morehead (35:42.302)
yeah, I love that question. I think that fits with what I was about to say. I think what's so powerful about metacognition is that when you develop metacognitive skills, it's a very general tool, right? And so that means that like, if you have a great teacher, all students can do well in that environment when they're motivated. But when you move on from that, it's like, well, now what? What are you going to do now? That teacher is not helping to guide you along. So when you teach students

how to be learners and part of that is teaching them to do that metacognitive self -assessment and then to do that self -regulated learning part of like, here's where I am, what do I need to do? When you teach students those skills, they're set up anywhere. So even when they move on, if they have a less effective teacher, it doesn't matter as much because they can help guide their own learning. So it is a very general skill that we see being powerful because students who can accurately judge their

their cognitive skills or their understanding and students who can effectively self -regulate their learning. And by that, mean, they're using that information from their metacognitive assessment to make a decision about how to learn. And if we teach them effective strategies and they're able to do that themselves, that sets them up to be a lifelong learner. And that's what's big. And I think that's what we really want for students. We don't just want to give them information. We want them to be

All the skills that Emily's talking about, we want them to be curious, we want them to be creative, we want them to go into any situation and be confident that they can judge how well they're understanding and that they know what to do if their understanding's not where they want it to be.

Seth Fleischauer (37:19.618)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this was a fantastic conversation. Thank you both so much for bringing your expertise, your candor. So fun for me, somewhat of an experiment to have like two people who don't know each other and kind of playing your respective skills off of each other. I thought that was really successful. It was really cool to hear your perspective, Kayla, on what Emily's doing, how Emily thinks about your work. This was all fantastic.

I do want to invite you if there are is anywhere that you would like our listeners to find you on the internet. Where should they look? We'll start with Emily.

Emily Murphy (37:55.714)
Yeah, I have a podcast that I host as part of my work for Nord Anglia. It's called Learning Explorations. So if you search that, it's anywhere you find podcasts, you'll see that there. talk to thought leaders in education, innovators in education, teachers as well, and just try to kind of think about again, what is that next step and how do we keep pushing things forward? So you can find me there. And obviously you can see more about the work we're doing with the Metacognition Project if you just go to Nord Anglia's website, which is nordangliaeducation .com.

Seth Fleischauer (38:26.136)
Excellent. What about you, Keller?

Kayla Morehead (38:28.086)
Yeah, if anybody just wants to talk to me about metacognition or research in general, I just love general research. You can find me on LinkedIn at KMoorhead. It's -O -R -E -H -E -A -D 25. Feel free to message me about research. I'd love to talk to you. There's also a book out that I wrote two chapters for including a metacognition self -regulated learning chapter called The Learning Design Principles. It was edited by Katherine McElden when she was at Pearson. She's now at

IES right now, but she got it published under a Creative Commons license so anybody can download this book for free. It's all about what are the learning sciences that learning designers really need to know. So it's for anybody designing learning experiences. It has little blurbs on the research and then it has here's what you can do with that. So check that out. I love that book. Yes, I'm biased, but I love the chapters I didn't write too. It's a great overall resource.

Seth Fleischauer (39:21.656)
Awesome. what a great resource. We'll be sure to have that in our show notes. So please do check it out. thank you both so much again for coming here today, to our listeners. If you'd like to support the podcast, please tell a friend, follow us, leave a rating or a review. thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar and my advisor, Deirdre Marlowe. And remember that if you'd like to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful. See you next time.