Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

the learning mix we described in Chapter 22 . Do they work best in the evenings, on their own, in quiet,etc. … ? In other words, as the ancient Greeks put it at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Know thyself’. Encouraging learners to reflect, in advance, on their learning can be useful, with questions like, ‘What will be the best way for me to approach this challenge?’, ‘What are the likely obstacles to me doing well?’, ‘What needs to happen for me stay motivated to do this task?’ and ‘How will I benefit from doing well in this task – what’s in it for me?’
    When it comes to metacognitive strategies, also known as ‘metacognitive regulation’, it becomes a question of helping the student reflect on the thinking processes that they may use to address the challenge. These could include questions like, ‘What do I already know about this area?’, ‘Have I faced challenges like this before?’ and ‘If so, what did I do to address them?’ Once the work is underway, metacognition continues with questions like, ‘Am I on target with this task?’, ‘Do I understand what I am doing?’ ‘What can I do to help myself better understand this?’ and ‘How will I remember these key pieces of information?’ (For more on metacognition and memory see the next chapter.)
    As a teacher, you can encourage children to develop these metacognitive practices by questioning them and encouraging them to question themselves in this way. Constantly asking, ‘How did you get that?’, is a powerful way to encourage such reflection in the classroom and far more useful than leaping in with a ‘Not good enough’ or even a well-intentioned ‘Well done’.
    Metacognition has a key part to play in the process of goal setting, as we constantly ask ourselves whether we are on course towards our chosen goal or not. So, an important step as a teacher is to make sure you align your goals for them with their goals for themselves. For example, a tutor once told me about one of the students in her class at a sixth form college who was a talented student orally and a great speller but who was not achieving the grades he was capable of in his written work. This was because he kept using ‘odd words’ in his essays and she couldn’t fathom why. So I asked him. He knew exactly why and was able to give me a perfectly straightforward reason. He started off by telling me that his spelling was atrocious and, when I pointed out to him that his tutor had told me that his spelling was good, he replied by telling me that it was not true but, because he had a good vocabulary, if ever he came across a word he couldn’t spell, he just put in a word he could spell. When I asked him why, he told me that, when he had been at secondary school, every time he had an essay handed back to him it was covered with red pen! In other words his goal for a piece of work was not ‘highest grade’ as the tutor had assumed, but ‘least red’. The quality of the work was further down his list than his desire to avoid getting things wrong.
    Maybe the goal of that least achieving, most disruptive boy in your class is to be the least achieving, most disruptive boy in your class, something he achieves each and every lesson. You, on the other hand, whose goal it is to have all your students working at level six, fail.
    A personal example, if I may, relates to my son. When he entered secondary school I knew he was more than capable of achieving A grades in his work, so I began the process of pushing him to achieve these, abetted by his class teachers. But then I stopped myself. I realized that A grades are good for parents and good for teachers but actually weren’t good for him. He had a different goal, namely to not be a ‘boff’. In other words, his number one goal for his school day was to have a circle of friends, something that doing well at school would mitigate against in his view. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do well, it just wasn’t number one on his list. The deal I struck with him, then, as he approached his GCSEs was one we called the ‘B-Boy’ strategy. In other words, the goal he was to achieve was ‘B grades and a life’. Not ‘all life and no qualifications’ or ‘A grades and no life’. Just Bs and a life. His minimum expected grades, I remember, were Bs right down the line (apart from RE which, in his irrefutable words and given the quality of the teacher I tend to agree with, ‘doesn’t count’). We had