Shevek Pring

Firstly what is metacognition? The act of thinking about thinking. It is being aware of yourself within the thinking and learning process. When you are able to be conscious of the learning taking place you are able to use that learning process as a toolkit to learn other things in other contexts. This is immensely powerful as a tool because it allows us to do many things as learners;

• Transfer our skills between different contexts because we can understand that the skill is not just linked to the task but is a tool to create learning experiences with.

Imagine you are learning to build a house, you have a step by step guide that provides you with all the processes to build the house. You dutifully follow these step by step processes and you get a house at the end of the process. However, if you learn the skills to build a house consciously and can apply them as a toolkit, when you are presented with the materials to build a house with, you are also able to use those materials in many diverse ways; you are not only able to build a house, but could also build a boat, or a treehouse, or a cart etc. This ability to take the learning skillset and apply it as a toolkit in many contexts is the power of metacognition.

• It helps us to self-reflect on what we have done and how it can improve, by looking beyond the learning itself to what it could be in the future.

Reading is a great example of this, as a metacognitive skillset reading provides access to so many things, instructions, history, new ideas and new worlds born out of imagination. It allows us to access concrete tools that support us in our thinking, it makes the concept of ‘I wonder if’ or ‘maybe this could’ to become a reality by broadening our perspectives and ways of thinking. It helps us to solve problems that we find along our journey, and provides new perspectives for us to reflect on.

• It helps us to self-regulate our emotional responses, we can understand more about why we are feeling the way we are feeling and that allows us to create strategies to support ourselves when things are difficult.

When we are outdoors in the rain, or waiting for a plant to grow, we cannot make the rain stop, or the plant grow by being frustrated impatient or angry. Our experience of being outdoors forces us to look inwards and reflect on ourselves. In this way the metacognitive process is supported really effectively by being in the outdoor environment.

• Lastly it is an experiential process that helps us to understand how we apply what we learn, not just recall it. It is this application of our knowledge that ultimately makes it useful to us in our lives.

When we learn something in isolation or with no context, we will struggle to retain this, it is not useful to us as knowledge until we are able to contextualise it. For instance, if you learn Pythagoras theorem on paper with no application it will not mean as much to you as it will if you apply it to solve a problem you are facing, for example to find a length or span when building a structure. The feedback loop between metacognition and experiential learning is complimentary. By being outdoors and having the freedom to apply knowledge in a variety of contexts we deepen and embed our metacognitive skillset.

So metacognition as a tool for learning is something that transcends curriculum, it encompasses the pastoral sensory and cultural needs of learning too. In this regard it is truly holistic. It is for this reason that we can apply it so readily to outdoor learning. Outdoor learning is experiential in nature (pun intended!), it supports metacognition by opening us up to new experiences and challenging us to look within ourselves to find answers to what we encounter. If you are facing a climb in the mountains you are faced with the reality that the mountain will continue to be despite your actions, so you face yourself, your skills, abilities, doubts and fears when set against something so big and immovable. In the same way a learner who struggles with the fact that it is raining will be forced to find an answer to that struggle internally because they cannot control the weather. The outdoors teaches us to be aware of ourselves in this metacognitive way because nature is immovable so we must be the one to change.

The outdoors also teaches us many other skills in this same way,

• It teaches us patience; we cannot force a plant to grow faster than it is
• It teaches us the power of beauty awe and wonder as well as how to deal with adversity
• It teaches us to be present in the moment, to breathe in the sights smells and sounds around us and to appreciate where we are and who we are
• Patience, appreciation, and mindfulness are all skills that are metacognitive, we have to know them consciously and apply them as tools for them to be effective.
• Finally from a participation perspective we can see that through the interconnectedness of nature we are able to understand that the smallest things can matter deeply to the ecosystem. When this knowledge becomes metacognitive we realise that by extension we also matter deeply. Crucially we matter deeply because we are, not because of our achievements or actions. This builds a powerful sense of self that supports us through life.

So as educators how can we be a part of the process?

• There is an argument that we shouldn’t be. There is a phrase attributed to Rustie Baillie of Colorado Outward Bound School that says ‘can the mountains speak for themselves?’ It suggests that the experience of nature in and of itself is enough. Certainly it is worth us considering in our practise when to look outward from the group or activity to allow the experiences around us to be the focus. For me, this is more powerful if we then support the metacognition through discussion afterwards. We are aiming to draw out learning conclusions not facts or figures here. Crucially metacognition is not about recall, it is about the ability to know the learning that is happening

• The holistic nature of outdoor learning has some profound implications on our practise also. We start to realise that we are not the sole agents of delivering learning, and that learners agency in their own learning journey is far more important. Also by extension we see that experiential learning is at the heart of enquiry and interest for learners, and that facilitation of this is our primary focus. It teaches us that conditions and experiences matter, you cannot make a flower grow in the wrong conditions, you must change the conditions not the flower. This experiential and holistic practise becomes the foundation of metacognitive learning because we start to do three things that support metacognitive processing for our learners;

1. We provide autonomy and agency to our learners through letting them experience independently
2. We learn ourselves to facilitate learning opportunities not dictate them and by extension to draw learning out not put learning in
3. We begin to shape learning around building competencies and skills not just knowledge to support independent application and lifelong learning moving forwards

These things are the foundation of metacognition, and we see examples of this everywhere we look

Climbing, canoeing, kayaking, coasteering- all these outdoor activities are based on this premise. Our Duke of Edinburgh awards and other programmes are based on helping learners be autonomous and metacognitive in developing skills for life as well as learning.

Forest school and adventure play are firmly rooted in learner agency and a learner led approach. We know this intuitively as outdoor practitioners, it is likely already deeply embedded in our practise, the key is for us ourselves to become more metacognitive in order to support this further for those we work with in the great outdoors.

I want to finish with some questions for you to reflect on when developing your practise in outdoor learning. There are no right answers, it is about you understanding more metacognitively why your practise looks the way it does and being conscious and intentional about the changes you want to make. 

1. How mindful are you of the opportunities for growth your learners present to you? 
2. How much are you willing to let them experiential and not task focussed?
3. Are you able to let go of the feeling of control a classroom gives and trust that learners will thrive with less structure to their learning?
4. Can you let the learning develop through experience discovery and play without needing to steer this process?
5. How good are you at spotting the opportunities to draw out learning reflections for sensory pastoral and curriculum-based elements of the learners growth and development?

Finally, learning isn’t linear and it isn’t neat, Its messy and creative and chaotic. But most of all it is lifelong and it should be interesting and fun. If we want learning to continue throughout peoples’ lives, and we want people to continue to engage with the outdoor world around them, we must try to support them to develop a toolkit for learning that they carry with them and that they know how to use. That is metacognition in its most direct and powerful form.

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