3 Ways to Build Metacognitive Skills in Young Students

I had an exchange with a student last year that reshaped how I think about celebrating success in my classroom. It happened during a demo lesson. We were reading Timeless Thomas, a nonfiction book about Thomas Edison, and discussing how text features help us understand more about his breakthroughs. One student, who had been struggling, suddenly lit up while looking at a diagram: “Wait, this reminds me of our knowledge map. We use that to help us figure stuff out. I get it now!”

I told him he’d made a breakthrough—just like Edison—and the class erupted. It was the kind of moment that sticks, not for just one student, but for everyone in the room. That demo lesson ultimately became the one that landed me my first teaching position (a breakthrough of my own). I realized that young learners can notice when their thinking changes, and they can name what it feels like too. For that student, understanding felt like inventing the light bulb. New teachers like me can recognize these metacognitive shifts in their students and help develop more sticky moments.

What if they are happening all the time—and we just need to notice?

Metacognition in elementary classrooms

Young learners can’t always fully grasp what their own minds are capable of. However, deep thinking is already there—and it shows up in all kinds of unexpected ways. Even preschool-aged students are masters at noticing patterns and changes in their environment, changes as small as their tables being shifted slightly to the right. They also recognize when something feels different, like when a new student joins and the energy in the classroom changes. And they even self-correct when they correct themselves mid-sentence with a giggle: “I meant three, not tree!” These are subtle, real-time examples of executive functioning: Students are demonstrating cognitive flexibility and self-monitoring.

Moments like these happen all day long in our classrooms. What we can do more of is recognize the way a student goes back and fixes a sentence after reading it aloud, or the way they light up when they realize that they finally understand something through a connection they made. What students need from us is not more praise, but more presence. In practice, that might mean staying with the silence while a student works out their thinking, noticing their process instead of jumping to “Good job,” or reflecting their moves back to them by saying, “I noticed you,” so they can recognize their thinking patterns.

The early grades are the perfect time to begin building this habit of “noticing and naming” thinking. It’s where we build the foundation for the kind of learners we strive to cultivate. The real reason young students don’t reflect more is because they haven’t been explicitly taught how to notice those moments or how to name them.

So, as new teachers, where do we begin? We can shift what we say, how we listen, and how we design. Start small, with just three intentional changes.

3 ways to build metacognitive skills

1. Shift your language in everyday feedback. Start by naming those shifts aloud in real time. Like me, you’ll likely begin noticing them everywhere you look. And once you start noticing them more, your students will too.

We can reframe our language from “You got it right!” to “Tell me more about your thinking,” “How did you get there?” or “What did you do differently this time?”

The goal is to communicate: I’m here with you while you figure this out. These micro-moves make students feel seen for their thinking, not just their performance. Over time, they normalize risk-taking and metacognition as part of the classroom culture.

2. Build routines for reflection. Imagine a student who says, “I can’t do it.” You might say, “Have you tried another way?”

Help students find the language to notice and articulate what is happening in their brain; then build routines around that language. This can be as simple as pausing mid-lesson to use sentence stems like “I noticed…” or “I realized…” Make the language student-centered: Have it live on the walls, on the whiteboard, and in your everyday “teacher talk.”

Student voice doesn’t have to be reserved for academic goals. We can use it as a scaffold to support how students understand their own thinking. When students have the language to reflect, they begin to do it on their own. They mimic the feedback we give them when explaining their own thinking. With these simple changes, they begin to say things like “I checked it again and I realized…” or “I tried a different way and now I understand.” This tells us more about what’s working for them and what they might actually need.

3. Value quiet progress. For new teachers, it’s tempting to fill every pause and mark every answer with a “Good job.” But the real learning often happens in the pauses between: the quiet reread, the unprompted retry, the small change in strategy, or the hand raised in math for the first time. The quiet progress is easy to overlook, especially if the student doesn’t say much or “perform” loudly. It’s our job to help students notice the thinking moves they make. And we all need classroom environments that help students recognize when and how these shifts are happening.

Students grow when language, routines, and relationships work together to make thinking visible. And it doesn’t take many years of teaching experience to accomplish that. Just intention.