Being Aware of and Managing Your Thinking

I recently came across a great definition for metacognition in Emily Lai’s, Metacognition: A Literature Review. The definition is  “Awareness and management of one’s own thought.”

When I try to explain what I do with metacognition and reading to my non-educator friends, they often say something like, “I can’t believe you have to teach that to students. It must just be because they’re on computers so much.”

And that makes me wonder if they naturally think about their thinking and manage their thinking or–and this is a terrible possibility–whether they don’t think about and manage their thinking and don’t see the need for it.

I realize now that I was a plot junkie growing up and that if I had been taught reading strategies and self-questioning in school I would have been a much stronger, much more thoughtful reader.

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