DESCRIPTION

 

The idea of this project was born when we tried to improve students’ learning. In all our schools we noticed that a large fraction of our students regardless of background, lacked confidence in their own academic performance, had problem to focus their attention and gave up as soon as some resistance occurred and therefore had very limited academic success. We wanted to find a way to teach our students to overcome these obstacles.

Pedagogical research has shown that the highest impact factor on school learning is the quality of the teacher and what the teacher does in the classroom (these factors having much higher impact than variables such as class size, homework, etc). Furthermore here is strong evidence that great teachers are made not born; this means there  is great scope for improving learning by adopting the most effective classroom techniques.

The US Education Endowment Foundation in reviewing empirical studies found that feedback from teachers to students and metacognitive strategies (helping pupils think about their own learning explicitly) were the two most effective ways of improving teaching and learning in the classroom (The Economist 11:th of June 2016). Feedback to students and metacognitive strategies can be considered as two sides of the same coin, the first being based on teachers thinking and awareness of the learning process and then the effective communication to students and the second being  based on students own awareness of their own learning.

Even if curriculum and professional development for teachers already emphasizes the importance of feedback and metacognitive strategies the daily routine in schools does not provide explicit opportunities for students to develop metacognitive strategies. Students need time to learn how, where, and when to use these strategies effectively. Teachers often make the wrong assumption that all children will pick up these skills on their own; sadly these pupils that do not develop critical thinking and learning skills are often dismissed as having limited learning potential. This project seeks to implement feedback/metacognitive techniques in the daily practice of the participating schools as well as guiding teachers in their professional development using metacognition.  The project will form work groups for teachers and run workshops which will develop teaching material/lesson plans making use of teacher feedback/student metacognitive learning - which will then be tested in the classroom.