A volatile world needs a flexible generation of innovative thinkers - how good are we at fostering such skills? On the whole, we’re not doing as well as we could.

In our school, we noticed that our students tended not to develop enough independence or mature decision-making - or they developed it too late to be of use to them in school. We ran a survey among our Year 8 cohort to get more data and it offered little comfort: students overwhelmingly felt that independent work was boring and isolating.

What worried us even more was their action plan for dealing with what we came to call “roadblocks in learning”: when stuck with a homework task, a significant number of students confessed to simply searching for the solution online, or asking a friend or a parent for the answer. If all else failed, there might be a WhatsApp group at the ready. Last on the list? Trying to figure out a challenging task independently, perhaps by using other similar activities as a springboard.

The ability to navigate complex situations with self-awareness, resilience and creativity seemed pretty important in enabling our students to succeed both at school and as adults. So, where were we going wrong?

Given the pressure on time and results, such transferable skills are certainly not at the core of England’s school curriculum. And it can seem counterintuitive to heap even more skills learning on to the already considerable pile of requirements that make so many of our teenage students anxious and stressed.

Yet the Education Endowment Foundation report on metacognition suggests that such skills actually help to ease students’ workload and empower them to navigate challenges, instead of crumbling under them. And we have just as much of a duty to teach the transferable metacognitive skills as we do content for exams.

So, could we make it work in our setting?

A small group of us, consisting of an English teacher, an art teacher and a science teacher, set out a year ago to work with the UCL Institute of Education on a teacher-led research project on metacognition for key stage 3 pupils.

We found that Schunk and Zimmerman’s (1994, 1998) process-based approach lends itself particularly naturally to a school context, and we made this our starting point. Schunk and Zimmerman suggest that, in a coherent cycle of planning, monitoring and evaluating their work, students develop ownership of their learning when setting targets, assessing their performance, analysing causes for success or failure, and adapting future methods as needed.

So, supported by our school, we created a metacognitive tool that we could share across all subjects, designed to help students to overcome roadblocks in learning independently. Essentially, this consisted of independent projects and learning logs that helped students through the cycle of “plan, monitor and evaluate”.

We trialled the approach and got very mixed results. In English, students created independent projects for Romeo and Juliet with lots of joy and enthusiasm - but with decidedly varied results. In science, the approach had almost the opposite effect - students complained that the subject had suddenly become boring and too heavy on writing. In art, meanwhile, it was those students who were motivated anyway who benefited most, while the independent work of others fell flat, regardless of them being taught the metacognitive basics.

Resilience being a key metacognitive skill, we went back to the drawing board to evaluate. On reflection, there had been some significant positives. Where motivation was high, outcomes were not only of high quality but also seemed to have a liberating effect on students: out-of-the-box thinking, creative problem-solving and the students’ intellectual personalities and curiosities began to shine through in a way that often gets lost in the restraints of traditional assignments.

However, raising student motivation across the board and encouraging the kind of self-directed learning that leads to enthusiasm and joy is a tough ask. So, we decided to move away from the idea of a “one-size-fits-all” tool, and to differentiate our strategies in a way more suited to the kind of creative problem-solving characteristic of each of our subjects.

When searching for solutions, we became more and more interested in collaborative approaches to self-directed learning. As Zimmerman argued (2002), “contrary to a commonly held belief, self-regulated learning is not asocial”.

This offered a starting point for how to change direction, not only because it confirmed our intuition that students are most easily motivated by other students, but also because our initial survey had shown that teenagers are put off independent learning because they feel it to be isolating.

Our second round of developing metacognitive teaching strategies, therefore, looked very different. We redesigned our plan-monitor-evaluate frameworks to revolve around dialogic talk, with students directing their work together, feeding back to each other and planning ahead together. We also made a shift from large-scale projects to mini-plenaries.

How did this work in practice? In science, it came in all shapes and sizes, from emojis to evaluate how students felt about an aspect of their learning, to monitoring progress via a triumvirate of statements: “one thing I already knew”, “two questions I still need answered” and “three things I have learned”.

In art, the approach was implemented with a new half-term project, for which the students decided how the desired outcome should be obtained: they made the call on resources, teacher input and the time frame. The integration of the evaluative dialogic talk throughout the working process of the project was very effective.

In both subjects, the students enjoyed the process and engagement increased. In art, in particular, the approach raised attainment across all levels and enabled learners to feel more empowered, which boosted the creativity of their outcomes.

In English, we stayed with the independent projects, but tweaked them. We have now transformed our KS3 homework into half-termly projects, using a learning diary to plan, monitor, adapt and evaluate students’ independent progress. Our classroom topics offer springboards for this independent exploration. When studying Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, for example, Year 8 students now independently read another classic and explore contextual links in a poster, while a Year 7 unit on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland encourages students to create podcasts on “why we need the imagination”.

Looking towards the future, we have now started developing a broader toolkit for metacognitive learning. We hope that moving from the idea of a single “tool” to a “toolkit” will encourage a whole-school culture of self-directed, reflective and proactive learning, offering opportunities for the different personalities and teaching and learning preferences of staff and students. We want flexible, creative and resilient young people in our school, and we hope we are now on a journey to ensure that happens.

Katharina Donn is an English teacher working in North London

This article originally appeared in the 26 June 2020 issue under the headline “How schools can win the battle for independence”