AWARE BEAR: METACOGNITION

Examples of Metacognition Challenges

In a classroom, this becomes most apparent as an issue when students are debriefing something that happened in the class, or are asked do self-assessments or participate in conferences and they appear unable to accurately reflect on their thinking and performance.
Outside the classroom, students won’t easily be able to talk about what happened in a conflict at recess, or may deny something as a way of coping instead of reflecting on what happened in order to generate a good solution for next time.

About the Character

Aware Bear is a very thoughtful bear. He thinks a lot about how he thinks. He wears a hat to keep his brain safe, and he gets some extra special boosts of power from his awesome brain t-shirt which reminds him to think about his thinking. Metacognition is the skill that is needed in order to create strategies. Without Aware Bear, all of the other characters would have had a much harder time developing strategies to make them so good at their executive skill. When we are helping students develop strategies for any of their executive skills, we are scaffolding their metacognition. As they get older, it is the practice of metacognition that will help students become self-sufficient and independent in their own work with executive function skills.