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In education, over a long period of time, there has been much head scratching about how to equip young people with so-called “21st-century skills”.

These, as the World Economic Forum put it in its 2015 report , include “competencies like collaboration, creativity and problem solving, and character qualities like persistence, curiosity and initiative”.

So important are they deemed that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has even attempted to broaden the range of outcomes measured through its Programme for International Student Assessment (better known as Pisa) to include creativity, analysis of information and the ability to relate to others.

Explaining why the OECD was moving beyond narrower measures of maths and reading skills, general secretary Angel Gurría explained that things that are easy to teach are also easy to digitise and automate.

“In the age of artificial intelligence, we need to think harder about how to develop first-class humans,” he said.

Helping pupils ‘think better’

International schools group Nord Anglia Education, like schools in many countries and economies around the world, has been wrestling with how to help pupils “go beyond the curriculum and be able to showcase their curiosity, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, compassion, and commitment” - the six “learner ambitions” it wants to develop in its pupils.

Its solution is a two-year project with researchers at Boston College designed to help pupils “think better” by building their metacognitive skills (metacognition, put simply, is the practice of thinking about the way we think).

Now, instead of leaving the development of skills and attributes such as creativity and critical thinking to chance, the group is aiming to teach them explicitly; in turn, it wants to give pupils the opportunity to practise them, and then measure their growth.

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Dr Kate Erricker, group head of education research and global partnerships at Nord Anglia Education, says the group realised that if it wanted pupils “to act in a more curious, collaborative, committed way, first they have to think that way”.

Pupils, she says, also needed to become more self-aware, with an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in these areas, and of how to improve.

“Self-awareness about yourself as a learner is the critical starting point to know where you are and where to go to get better,” she says.

While there is plenty of research that has validated the impact of metacognition in schools, it has often proven hard to pin down what effective metacognition teaching looks like in the classroom.

The Nord Anglia research, however, includes insight into how metacognition can be applied in classroom situations.

The research involves 10,000 pupils and 1,000 teachers across 27 schools (it runs 80 international day and boarding schools in total) in 16 countries.

At the centre of the Nord Anglia approach is the use of ”thinking routines”. These are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies designed to make thinking visible for pupils and, ultimately, to make them think more deeply.

One example is “see, think, wonder”, a thinking routine that uses three questions - “What do you see?”; “What do you think about that?”; and “What does it make you wonder?” - to help pupils understand objects such as artworks, images or artefacts.

To design the thinking routines, the group drew on the work of .

The goal, explains Erricker, is that “pupils end up with a toolkit of different thinking routines they can choose to use in their lessons”; as part of the project, 18 bespoke will be put together for Nord Anglia’s schools.

Integrating ‘thinking routines’ into existing lessons

Erricker stresses that these thinking routines are not taught to pupils in isolation, devoid of context.

“It’s not about saying we are going to have the metacognition lesson Tuesday at 9am - that’s not the approach. The approach is integrating this into existing lessons, not taking extra time in the curriculum,” she adds.

Another important aspect of the project - enabling pupils to “reflect on their progress and growth” - involves Nord Anglia’s Learner Portfolio, an online platform where teachers and pupils can document where skills such as curiosity and compassion have been demonstrated, then build on this progress.

In December, the group published the first data to emerge from the project, in its paper. The research - involving 389 teachers and almost 2,500 pupils - will provide the baseline, so that Nord Anglia can understand if pupils are improving in critical areas that many employers now say they care about.

Teachers and pupils were asked questions about how well they understood metacognition and how helpful they found it to be.

Some 87 per cent of teachers said metacognition helps pupils to succeed beyond school; 83 per cent said it helps to improve thinking; 84 per cent think it helps pupils be successful in school. Only 9 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that metacognition is a passing fad.

Meanwhile, 84 per cent of pupils said that metacognition helps them understand how they think and learn best, while about half agreed or strongly agreed that they understand what metacognition is.

When asked about changes over the past few months, pupils, on average, reported improvements in their creativity, collaboration, commitment, curiosity, compassion and critical thinking.

Qualified support for emphasis on metacognition

However, the research found that not all pupils were enthusiastic about the project: just 35 per cent reported that learning about metacognition is “fun”.

“Not all kids loved it,” the Nord Anglia publication says, with one pupil reporting: “I would rather they just give us an interesting topic”.

Teachers, meanwhile, “worried about not having enough time to implement the strategies”.

The project involves pupils aged 8-14, but having the time in class to develop these skills becomes more challenging for teachers as children get older, Erricker acknowledges.

Early years teachers are “all about the development of the whole child”, she says, but over time, pressure to get pupils through qualifications can take over.

The irony is not lost on her that, just as pupils near the time when “they’re going to need to really master these skills and apply them in real-world situations”, it gets harder to make time for them in school.

Nevertheless, Nord Anglia is convinced that it has taken the right approach by focusing on metacognition.

“We haven’t learned yet the impact in terms of the outcomes for our pupils - that’s going to come later,” says Erricker. “But what we are seeing is that when teachers are integrating it into classroom practice, it’s having benefits in terms of how the pupils learn about their own thinking, how they interact and discuss with each other, and how they realise the importance of these skills and attributes.”

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