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00:00:02

[Will Rixon]

Good to see you on stage finally. How are you?

[Francesa Bovone]

Thank you. I'm fine. I'm great.

I'm so excited. Good.

[Will Rixon]

Me too. I can't wait to see your talk.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay.

[Will Rixon]

So you made the transition from publishing to ELT in 2010. What— tell me about that publishing. What were you doing before 2010?

[Francesa Bovone]

I was an editor. I was editing dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, and school books.

So courses, yeah, in English and Spanish.

[Will Rixon]

So wonderful.

[Francesa Bovone]

Yes, it was wonderful.

[Will Rixon]

And why the change? That's quite a different job, right?

[Francesa Bovone]

It was wonderful. But when I took the CELTA, which I did, I don't really know why. Okay. I just decided to because I had always liked teaching. I just, I'd like to say I saw the light literally.

So I left my job.

[Will Rixon]

Literally, there was some kind of light around.

[Francesa Bovone]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And no, I really, I said, Jesus, why haven't I done this before? I wasn't very young in a way because I was over 40 already.

00:01:02

Okay. But I knew, I mean, that was my thing. So I just decided to change and I'm so happy I did. I was happy before as well. Okay.

But now I'm super happy, you know, so.

[Will Rixon]

Good for you, Francesca. I mean, it's a difficult thing, you know, at 40, it's difficult to change career. So, um, isn't it? I don't know.

[Will Rixon]

Okay, well, metacognition in action. Over to you for 15 minutes, Francesca.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay.

[Will Rixon]

See you in a bit.

[Francesa Bovone]

Thank you. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, now before— okay, as I said, I'm very happy to be here. So welcome, everyone.

And I'm really happy that I can share this with you because it's something that I'm really passionate about. Now, before I even show you my agenda for today, I would like to ask you a huge favor, and that is, can you please answer this question? So what is your strategy for remembering this webinar? For example—.

00:02:14

[Will Rixon]

Francesca?

[Francesa Bovone]

Yes?

[Will Rixon]

So sorry to interrupt. We can't see your slides yet. I don't think you're sharing them.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay, let me try again.

Let me try again.

[Will Rixon]

Okay.

[Francesa Bovone]

Ah, sorry about that.

[Will Rixon]

Yes, perfect. We can see that now.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay. No, sorry.

Okay. Is it okay now?

[Will Rixon]

It's absolutely perfect.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay, Jesus. Thank you very much.

Sorry about that.

[Will Rixon]

You're welcome.

[Francesa Bovone]

Okay, now, okay, Andy Chapman, excellent. So sorry, I repeat. Now before I show you my agenda, I would like to ask you a favor, and that's to answer this question on my first slide.

00:03:02

So what is your strategy for remembering this webinar today? Are you going to take notes or maybe make a list of keywords or just listen and then discuss it with a colleague or with your classmate? So can you please answer this question using the chat box? Take notes, listen, rewatch the webinar, take notes, listen and discuss. Fantastic.

Taking notes, stick the notes. Fantastic. On the wall.

Wow. Wow.

Excellent. These are very good ideas. Rewatch it, use the recording. Yes. Okay.

Thank you very much. This is great. Okay, now the agenda. We're going to define metacognition, then we're going to see how we can embed metacognition in our everyday lessons. And then I'll give you a couple of practical examples for, as to how we can help learners develop their metacognitive awareness.

00:04:04

Now, probably you have heard of metacognition being defined as thinking about one's own thinking or learning about one's own learning. Which is correct, of course, but it's a slightly simplistic definition of it because a large part of metacognition is about actively monitoring one's own learning and making changes to it based on that monitoring. How do we do this? We ask ourselves questions. We will see lots of examples of questions that we can use to ask ourselves.

I'm saying ourselves because I speak of all of us as learners. Okay, so this concerns the teachers and our students, of course. Also, before I move on, I would like to highlight the fact that metacognition is being studied so much, especially because it's been proven to really foster learners' autonomy and independence. So this is the object, the objective, okay, of all of this. Now, the first person to give us a clear definition of metacognition was John Flavel.

00:05:10

That was in 1976 in an article that he published. And he identified the two main areas of metacognition, which are knowledge and regulation. Knowledge is divided into knowledge of person, of task, and of strategies. Knowledge of person is the awareness that learners have of their own abilities, of their own attitudes. So how we see ourselves as learners.

Task is the knowledge of the activity. So have I ever done an activity like this before? Do I know what I need to do? Okay. And strategies, knowledge of strategies.

So what strategies are available for me that I can use? Which strategies are going to be more effective? So this is knowledge. Okay, person, task, and strategies. The other dimension that Flavell identified is regulation.

00:06:04

And this is, as we said before, this is the big part, the most important part of metacognition. That's made of planning, which we do before we carry out a task, monitoring while we're carrying it out, and evaluating, so after. Planning is about the ability to choose and use appropriate strategies and resources to complete a task. So the questions that we can ask ourselves are, for example, what is my goal with this task? What do I already know that I can use to help me here?

And where should I start from, for example? Okay. We also need to develop the capacity to check our performance during, during tasks. So we can ask ourselves, am I really understanding this? Like, do I know what I'm doing?

Am I progressing in this task? And do I need maybe a different strategy? Okay. What, how can I What do I need to change? How can I improve?

00:07:07

Okay. And then when we finish, we must learn to assess our strategies and our results. So did I meet my goal, the goal that I set in the planning phase? And were the strategies useful? Or like, is my work a good quality?

And have I been successful on the whole? Or what do I need to change? Okay. So, and this was regulation. Please keep these 3 points in mind because we're going to use them later.

So regulation, planning before, monitoring during, and evaluating after. Now, since we need to try and incorporate, embed metacognition into our everyday lessons, there are a couple of things that we can try and do. Okay, we need to practice this, but It really works. First of all, we need to make short-term goals explicit to the students and elicit from them as much as we can the strategies that they can use to achieve these goals. So we do this all together at first.

00:08:15

Again, at first, we need to model. So modeling is about the teacher thinking aloud. We need to model our internal dialogue as expert language users, okay? So that, you know, so they can use us as an example. We can talk about our choices.

We can talk about the mistakes we make, of course, and how we can mend those mistakes. Okay, our strategies. And in this phase, what we can do is give the student a framework. So we can give them the questions that we ask ourselves in the 3 different phases. And then with time, they will become more and more autonomous.

They will adapt this question to their own way of learning, and they will become really independent. Independent and go their own way. Okay, which is our aim, as I said before. So we can reduce our assistance and they will become more and more autonomous. Now, usually metacognition is especially applied to reading, writing, and listening tasks.

00:09:22

And this is mainly due to the fact that these skills allow the time to think. Okay. Speaking, doing it with speaking is a bit more challenging in a way. So I decided to try. This was an experiment that I did with one of my poor classes.

And it was okay. The hot seat is a drama improvisation activity. Maybe some of you have tried it already. If you haven't, please do because it's fantastic. What happens is that one of the students, in this case it was a girl, Okay, I was working on Hamlet, so I was doing it to analyze the characters more in depth.

So the girl was sitting on the hot seat and she was playing Hamlet, and the rest of the class was sitting in a semicircle facing her, and they were going to ask her questions. The questions, of course, could concern the plot, so what Shakespeare actually tells us, but they could also concern Hamlet's inner feelings. His relationship with the other characters, his past, or his fears or his hopes for the future. So you can imagine how compelling this can be for the person sitting in the hot seat because they really have to think on their feet and answer questions that very often are unexpected. Okay, now what we can do here is give a— I gave, it was the first time we were doing this, so I gave a framework to Hamlet and to the audience.

00:10:58

We're going to start looking at the questions that I gave Hamlet. In the planning— so we're in the 3 stages of the regulation dimension here— the planning stage to Hamlet: what is your goal as Hamlet today? Are you going to focus on his madness, his grief, or maybe his hesitation? And what prior knowledge about his soliloquies can you draw on in order to answer unexpected questions. Monitoring.

So during the task, if a question catches you off guard, what communication strategies can you use? So are you going to pause and think just like Hamlet would do, or are you going to rephrase the question or use fillers, you know, to buy time? So how can you manage that? And then At the end, at the evaluation, which questions were the most difficult to answer and why do you think they were so difficult to answer? And then, very important, if you had to do this again next week, what would you do differently?

00:12:02

What would you change? Okay, how can you change your strategies? Now let's look at the questions that I gave the audience.

The planning phase. Before the task, what could they ask themselves? So what do you hope to discover about Hamlet through your questions? What is your goal? What do you want to know about the character?

And how can you use what happens in Act 3 to prepare really meaningful and unexpected questions about, for example, his hesitation when he doesn't kill Claudius? For example. Then monitoring, so during the activity, do Hamlet's answers reflect your interpretation of the text? Or maybe do they challenge it? Is he saying something that you hadn't thought about before?

And if they do challenge your interpretation, what will you do next? What can your next question be? Okay. And also, this is fundamental in all drama improvisation activities, that you have to listen to what everybody else is saying and build on what the other people are saying. You cannot just go your own way. 

00:13:16

So are you building on the questions that your peers are asking? Okay. And are you building on what Hamlet has answered before? Or are you just waiting for your turn to speak? If you are, don't.

Okay. Stop doing that. Monitor yourself. Okay. Keep yourself in check and change your strategy.

Now, the evaluation phase for the audience. Do you have now a better understanding of Hamlet's behavior? Do you feel that you understand his character, his personality a bit more? And very important, how can you use the same style of questioning when you analyze other characters in this play? Or how can you use it if you have to write a critical essay, for example?

Okay, so, um, now I will ask you to please think about what I have said up to now, and can you please share in the chat, write in the chat, what the main idea is that you're taking with you from this webinar? So what's the main idea you're taking with you from this webinar? Can you please write it in the chat?

00:14:36

Wow, presence of mind, Benjamin.

What will you remember? Involvement, reflection, autonomy, and learning. Fantastic, Anna. Show Marina. What would you do differently next time?

Very good, Marina. Yes, that's so important. You know, that's about directing our learning. Okay, so that's when you take possession of what you are doing and you actually direct it. Agency of the student.

Wow. Yes, active engagement, of course. Metacognition is strictly connected to active learning. Absolutely. Taking responsibility.

Very good. Yes, for their own learning, for our own learning. That's also true for our teachers. Yes, the planning.

Michelle, Michele, yes, absolutely very important. Critical thinking, yes. Active learning. Wow, wow, this is— I mean, you're fantastic. Very good, very good indeed.

00:15:38

Learning independence, of course, that's our objective.

Okay, this is great. Thank you very much, very much. You're making me very happy.

Okay.

Yes, apply this to life skills. Very good. Okay. Just, yes, Will, I just want to show my sources and remind the audience that, you know, if they're interested in the topic, they can download the presentation later on.

And thank you very much, all of you. And I really hope that you enjoy the rest of the day.

[Will Rixon]

Thank you, Francesca. Absolutely wonderful. Okay, I think so much food for thought there, isn't there?

There's so much, I think, probably new things for the teachers here that they hadn't really thought about before, and some really, really helpful practical ways for them to implement metacognition. So thank you for putting the talk together. Thank you for submitting as well.

00:16:34

[Francesa Bovone]

Bye bye bye. Thank you.

[Will Rixon]

Bye bye, Francesca.