Teacher's metacognition

Alejarndra Martinez is a psychologist has been working with teachers, initially in rural Chile. She is interested in how teachers view themselves as learners. Currently working on her PhD at the University of Melbourne  Alejandra has been working in professional learning teams, to investigate links between courses and students' outcomes.

One of the focus was to move thinking about my student to our student. The key aspect to inform our teaching from this perspective is the skill level of the students. The variables that are collected around numeracy, literacy, student outcomes, classroom practices, PLT functioning, beliefs and attitudes, and metacognition. Further research on teachers'  professional learning is required in order to understand the characteristics and development of their metacognition (Dinsmore, 2008). The key focus, therefore is how teachers see themselves as learners, and how this impacts their own practice.

The main aim is to analyse the extent to which the shift from a deficit to a developmental approach to assessment and learning influences teacher metacognitive awareness of their professional practice. The study uses a teacher metacognition framework that has 5 elements, which are part of a cyclical process: Comprehension of differentiated teaching practice; self evaluation of current competence; planning professional learning; monitoring professional learning; and evaluation of the progress made.
The Metacognitive Awareness Inventory was adapted (16 questions), and other new questions were added. Two forms were developed (A and B) with 14 common questions to enable comparison. After a calibration process using Item Response Modelling 7 questions were removed, as they were discriminating less the the expected model.

The data was analysed using an item/person map with level descriptions. Teachers were then given the results that indicated that the level they were at, rather than a specific 'score'. The initial findings were based on 359 teachers. There was a large number of teachers at Level A, Level D, and Level F. A learning readiness report on metacognition, which has individual feedback which is linked to the 5 stage cyclical model.

The students who grow the most who are at the lower level, whereas the top level the students do not grow the most. We need to connect differentiated teaching, not only to student needs, but also to teacher needs. Some of the challenges are the links with student performance. There are some aspects of metacognition that needs to be captured with qualitative data; so the next step is to conduct some interviews with the teachers. This is longitudinal research, and data has been collected in year 1 and this year data will be collected to illustrate changes.

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