This is completely nicked from johntomsett.com who, in turn, developed the idea from the research published by the Sutton Trust.John was trying to work out what the most useful thing a teacher can do in the last few lessons leading up to a A level exam. This is something I've often wondered myself, but his answer is really interesting because it also hits a number of other, slightly intangible, problems I've not been able to address satisfactorily yet.
Here it is:
Go through an exam paper and verbalise the meta-cognition which I (as an experienced writer of exam questions and as a psychology expert of sorts) use, without thinking (so to speak) as I construct effective answers to each of the different types of question.
Even better, do this in real-time with a visualiser so the students can basically 'see' your meta-cognition as you go through a paper because you're verbalising these thought processes and annotating them on the paper. This is what one of John's colleagues did and she also gave students a copy of the paper and got them to copy her annotations. Essentially she was kind of dictating her meta-cognition to them. Then she got a student to do this - even better.
You can see a video of this in action here
I love this idea so I'm going to try it next week.
