#language modeling

According to Merriam-Webster, metacognition is "awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes." More simply put, metacognition is thinking about thinking.

A trendy term in education circles, its use encourages teachers to engage in "think-alouds," where a teacher demonstrates the type of thinking involved in various activities by vocalizing his own thoughts while performing a task as students look on. 

For instance, a teacher may read a challenging text out loud as students watch, pausing to think (out loud) through difficult words and ask himself text-related questions that will further his understanding of the reading. 

When do parents use metacognition?

All the time. I used it with my 19-month old today, for instance, while helping her get dressed.

"Let's put your arm through the hole," I said, while helping her with her shirt. "Ooh, it's stuck - push harder!" I talked through my thoughts, showing her at each phase of the dressing process what I was thinking and how I worked through any "issues" that arose along the way.

(Sidenote: sometimes these "issues" may get as serious as a number two arriving after pants have been put on; in these cases I try to reserve some of my thought process for myself.)  

Parents of older children may implicitly use metacognition as they explain to their child why they said "no" to a request he or she made; explaining the logic behind a decision not only promotes the feeling of fairness, it also helps a child learn decision-making skills that mirror those of their parents.

(You'd hate your child to think that you being a big meanie is the sole reason for denying her request to set up her basketball hoop in the living room, wouldn't you?)

Keep Up the Good Work 

By thinking about our own thinking, and then modeling it for our children, we teach the language involved in those thoughts, and we model the thought process involved in arriving at well thought-out decisions. This is the essence of how parents "teach" their children, whether or not they intend to do so. 

Parents don't need to know the word "metacognition" to have been using it from the moment they uttered their first word to their little ones, but hopefully this has shed some light on why they've been so wise to do so.