The Language of Learning: Metacognition and Conceptual Understanding

Every act of learning begins with thinking, and every act of thinking unfolds through language.In this interactive professional learning experience, participants will explore the role of metacognition in developing conceptual understanding of the skills, strategies, and processes that underpin disciplines.

We often teach students what to do and how to do it, but rarely take time to unpack the concepts behind the doing. This workshop invites participants to pause, reflect, and reimagine how learners can become more aware of the thinking processes that drive reading, writing, designing, researching, planning, and collaborating.

Participants will investigate the language of metacognition: the words, structures, and interactions that make thinking visible and transferable. Participants will engage in dialogue, explore case studies, and engage in experiences that highlight how every teacher, regardless of subject area, is a language teacher: someone who shapes how learners articulate, refine, and extend their understanding.

By the end of this workshop, participants will walk away with:

• a renewed understanding of how language enables metacognitive growth,
• practical ways to make the concepts behind skills and strategies explicit, and
• a shared repertoire of metacognitive language and practices to embed across learning environments.
  
  

This is an opportunity to reframe what it means to teach and learn, to move beyond instruction and towards cultivating learners who know how they learn, why they learn, and how to transfer that understanding across contexts.

This in-person event will be held at NAAVU SCHOOL, providing a vibrant setting for collaboration and inspiration.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to delve into the depths of conceptual understanding!

Below are the sessions that constitute the architecture of this learning experience:

1. Opening the Conversation: What Is Metacognition?

2. Every Teacher a Language Teacher: The Invisible Thread of the Language of Metacognition

3. The Landscape of Skills, Strategies, and Processes

4. Making Metacognition Visible: Classroom Practices That Support Thinking About Thinking

5. The Language of Metacognition: Talk, Reflection, and Feedback

6. Designing for Transfer: From Strategy to Concept to Performance

7. Leading Metacognitive Classrooms: Coaching and Collaboration for Sustained Practice

8. Embedding Metacognition: From Awareness to Organisational Culture

Participants will receive:

• A certificate of participation 
• A toolkit with strategies and protocols for them to put into practice in their own context 
• A copy of a publication to accompany their professional inquiry