metacognition Archives - Rachel What If

Bringing Belief Into the Classroom: Survival, Power, and Possibility

This summer, I traveled with one of my best friends to Italy, Montenegro, and Greece. In twelve days, we took three guided tours that left me with a lesson I haven’t been able to shake: belief changes behavior.

Venice: Belief as Survival

My first tour was through the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice and was probably my favorite. Our guide, a Venetian woman with magnetic eye contact, kept using the word: “Propaganda!”

At first, I thought of marketing. But as she explained, the mosaics of St. Mark’s, with walls drenched in tiny golden tiles telling biblical stories, weren’t just art—they were persuasion. They made people believe Venice was chosen, special, blessed. And that belief kept the city alive. With no natural resources, Venice needed commerce, tourism, and influence. Their survival depended on creating wonder.

Athens: Belief as Power

In Athens, our guide Marco embodied Greek pride. He reminded us that the Acropolis wasn’t built to be practical. Its perfection came from illusions—columns built with curves so the building would look straight to the human eye. It wasn’t just architecture; it was a message. The Athenians needed their people (and their enemies) to believe they were strong, chosen, and unshakable. Belief built power.

Santorini: Belief as Possibility

On Santorini, we toured the ancient city of Akrotiri. More than 4,000 years ago, this island had plumbing, marketplaces, and earthquake-resistant buildings. They weren’t just surviving—they believed life could be better, and they built for that future. Belief sparked innovation.

What This Has to Do with Teaching

So what do golden mosaics, optical illusions, and prehistoric plumbing have to do with teaching?

Here’s the hard truth: many students today don’t believe in much. They see systems unraveling. They’re growing up in a time of deconstruction. And maybe some systems should be torn down. But the question is: what will we give them to believe in instead?

Our guides weren’t just experts—they made us believe what they shared mattered. Their conviction made me want to lean in, to listen harder, to remember.

That’s our role as teachers, too. Not just to deliver information, but to help students believe:

that knowledge matters,
that learning can shape their future,
that they have the power to create something better.

Venice, Athens, and Akrotiri remind us that belief is not fluff—it’s survival, power, and possibility. In our classrooms, belief can be the difference between disengagement and transformation.

So as we design our lessons, our routines, our words—what messages are we sending? What do our students walk away believing?

Tips for Teaching Today

Survival- Students belief learning is essential

Just as Venice needed people to believe their city was special in order to survive, students need to believe that learning is essential to their own survival in today’s world.

The mission of the Human Intelligence Movement is “to ensure all people have the human skills they need to thrive and succeed in an AI world.“

This is in no way suggesting that humans will not survive in an AI world, but it is to suggest that the way we will do that, is to remember the value of humans.

Their belief is that education should help everyone grow their creative talents, and that AI can elevate our humanness.

This is why it matters now: What are we doing to elevate the humanity in our classrooms? How are our students building belief in themselves in order to survive?

Power – Students believe learning shapes their future.

Athens built illusions into their architecture to send a powerful message: We are strong. We matter. Students, too, need to believe that knowledge gives them power—power to make choices, to change their circumstances, to influence others.

The classroom is a safe place. If students believe in themselves, and in their unique ability to create, how are we allowing them to share that with the world?

Are we explicitly naming the power of their thinking and ideas in the classroom on a regular basis? In order to name something, you must have an idea of what it is. Do you know what learning strategies are?

Take a look at this previous blog post for more information on learning strategies, and then name them every time you see a student using them.

Power is motivating. When students see themselves as active agents, not passive recipients, they start to believe their effort matters. Gradually release some of the control in your classrooms and trust that students will take the responsibility.

Possibility – Help students believe they can create something better.

At Akrotiri, people weren’t just surviving—they innovated. They believed life could improve, so they built earthquake-resistant homes and plumbing systems millennia before “modern” civilizations.

Students need to have a vision for the future. In a quick search for “how to help young people have a vision for the future,” I sadly found very little resources. I guess AI and Google are still struggling in this area.

Global Action Plan conducted a research project by interviewing lots of young people and found it disheartening that the majority of them had negative expectations for the future, and believed that things probably wouldn’t change, and if they did, it wouldn’t be for the better.

This sounds like a SCREAM for help. OR… its an opportunity to take action. What if we used a tool like a vision board, or Canva, to help them get started? This website gives teens a step by step guide for thinking through how to envision their own futures and create a visual representation of it.

Kids as young as kindergarten can also create a visual for what they hope for the future. We need to start bringing this into our conversations. We need to bring back the hope. Possibility grows when students see their ideas take shape in the real world, so don’t stop with a vision board, help them bring it to life!

Curiosity is the fuel for innovation. Ask those what if questions: What if you wrote the next great novel ? What if you could invent a game that helps younger kids learn fractions? What if you listened to the whisperings of your heart, leading you to the things you love?

Because if belief changes behavior, then the most important thing we give students might not be just knowledge, but the conviction that what they’re learning, and who they are, matters.

Learning Control Centers: An Inside Out approach to metacognition

Opening your brain to see what is going on in there is a real thing, its called Metacognition, and it should be the number one thing we are doing in classrooms this year.

Somewhere, I saw a quote that said, “The most attractive quality in a person, is that they know who they are.”

Now, its one thing to know who you are, and not anyone else. That’s not what I’m talking about today. Knowing who you are involves some serious study and reflection. You want to get to know the real you, the you that loves quiet jazz music in the fall. The you that just decided to start watching Gilmore Girls, about 20 years later than everyone else. The you that seeks out a challenge because you know its going to make you better.

In order to get to know ourselves, we will have to have an open mind, like literally. This is not a closed door romance. Opening your brain to see what is going on in there is a real thing, its called Metacognition, and it should be the number one thing we are doing in classrooms this year.

Listening to the voices in your head

This is not a blog post about math, but to illustrate my point, I want to share an experience I had recently that made me a bit more aware of myself, a little more metacognitive. I was asked to try a strategy to subtract two numbers.

Think for a moment, how you would normally subtract two numbers, mentally. Mentally, meaning you are doing this in your head. Aha! Look at you being metacognitive. I’ll bet you just pulled out two numbers like 7 and 5, and you ended up with 2. Wow.

How, how did you end up with the 2? Now what if you had bigger numbers?

The strategy we were asked to try is called the Count Up strategy, counting up from the smaller number to the larger number.

This is how I generally do subtraction, mentally, something I already knew about myself thank you very much. At least I thought I did, but then I was asked to try a timed test, doing this strategy with two digit numbers. I was given one minute to solve as many problems as I could, mentally, using this strategy.

Want to guess how many I completed correctly? Five. Five two digit subtraction problems in 1 minute. I am an instructional coach people. I was in 2nd grade a very long time ago.

But here was the best part of this whole thing. After the minute was up, we were asked to reflect on our work. The first question was: How does this strategy help me subtract whole numbers? And the second question was: How confident am I in this strategy?

Right away, my brain said, quite loudly inside my head, “I just need more practice.” That right there friends, is metacognition. I knew I understood the strategy, and I also knew I wanted to use it because it made sense. Most importantly, I listened to that voice in my head.

Building a control center

Metacognition is rising to the top of every educators list of buzz words these days.

We all think, some of us a little too much, so what we really need to do is understand how we currently think. Its always better to know where you are, before you can know where you are going. The place we are going in metacognition land is not just observing our thoughts, but controlling them.

In Pixar’s Inside Out, we get a peek inside 11-year-old Riley’s mind, where five emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust – work from “Headquarters,” a control center that looks like a high-tech command room. These emotions operate a console that influences Riley’s reactions and decisions throughout her day. The genius of the movie is showing how these emotional characters literally watch Riley’s life unfold on screens while deciding how she should respond to different situations – they’re essentially metacognitive observers of her experience.

Here’s what hit me about Riley’s control room: those emotions aren’t just reacting – they’re watching Riley navigate her world and making conscious decisions about how to help her respond. That’s exactly what happened to me during that subtraction exercise. When I said ‘I just need more practice,’ there was a little mathematician in my control room taking notes, watching my performance, and making plans for improvement.

Most of our students are doing math with their control room lights off. They’re solving problems, but nobody’s up there watching HOW they’re solving them or noting what they need to get better. When we help students flip that switch and get their own little mathematician observer online, they stop just ‘doing math’ and start becoming mathematicians who understand their own thinking.”

So how do we help students build their own learning control rooms? The good news is you don’t need to overhaul your entire teaching practice. You just need to start asking the right questions at the right moments – the kind that wake up that little observer upstairs.

Managing an effective control room

Think of it this way: every time students solve a problem, there are actually two things happening. There’s the math they’re doing, and there’s the thinking about the math they’re doing. Most of the time, we only pay attention to the first part. But when we start shining a spotlight on the second part – that’s when the magic happens.

Control Room Check-ins: After students finish a problem, ask: “What did your brain just do there?” or “If you had to teach your method to someone else, what would you say?”

Mathematician Observer Questions:

“What part felt easy? What part made you slow down?”
“If you did this problem again, what would you do the same? What would you change?”
“When did you know you were on the right track?”

Console Conversations: Have students share not just their answers, but their thinking process: “Walk us through what was happening in your control room while you solved this.”

Control Room Predictions: Before diving into problems, ask: “Based on what you know about yourself as a math learner, how do you think this will go?“

Preparing for expanded control centers

https://news.disney.com/pixar-video-backgrounds-available

Just like Riley, your student’s control rooms will become more and more complicated as new and harder problems arrive.

What if in addition to teaching math (or reading, or science, or whatever your subject), you made it your mission to help every student build their own learning control room?

The world we live in demands that students know when they are stuck, how they got there, and find a way through it. Kids who can say ‘I’m good at this type of problem but I need more practice with that type.’ Learners who know their own thinking well enough to make plans for getting better.

Remember that quote I started with? ‘The most attractive quality in a person is that they know who they are.’ Imagine a classroom full of students who truly know themselves as learners. Who understand not just WHAT they’re learning, but HOW they learn best.

That’s not just better math instruction – that’s helping kids fall in love with the person they’re becoming.

So this year, flip on those control room lights. Ask the questions that wake up the little observer in each student’s mind. Help them build the habit of watching their own thinking.

Because when students know themselves as learners, everything changes. And honestly? When YOU start paying attention to their thinking about their thinking, your teaching changes too.

Your students’ control rooms are waiting. Time to power them up.”

Student-Centered: Just Another Buzzword?

Despite a common language around student-centered practices, we are still heavily focused on the teacher and teaching. Let’s not let this important way of teaching become just another buzz word in education. Friends don’t let friends become memes.

In education, there are certain words we all know, and somewhere, in the back of the room, a teacher is rolling their eyes about them. We’ve heard them so many times now that there are memes all over the internet about them. This one from Teacher Misery is my favorite by far:

Learning vs. Teaching

Let’s start with a quick experiment. Can you name ten teaching strategies off the top of your head? Now, how about ten learning strategies? Or even five? Notice the difference?

Every school I visit, it’s the same story. The talk is always about teaching – what’s working, what’s not, what we teachers need to do differently. And when those test scores don’t budge or grades start slipping? You bet we’re quick to look at the teachers. It’s like we’ve got blinders on, focusing only on how we teach instead of how kids actually learn. We can’t expect different results, if we keep doing the same things. Or having the same conversations.

Buzzword Alert!

In a previous post, I describe a shift that occurred in my thinking about what it actually means to run a student-centered classroom. Teachers want to do better, often trying new things and taking risks within their comfort zones. When we talk about becoming more student-centered, we begin with the data, in an effort to be more objective and set goals. Where things get fuzzy is in the goals setting. By setting goals around instruction, we are still fundamentally teacher-centered – just with a new label.

Consider this: When we analyze student data, set goals based on that data, and select teaching strategies to target growth, where is the student in all of this? We’re still primarily focused on what the teacher does, not on how students learn.

Don’t get me wrong – data has its place. But when we reduce students to numbers and colors on a chart, we lose sight of the individual learners behind those figures. We must remember an undeniable truth: teaching does not cause learning to happen. Learners cause learning to happen. It’s a choice the learner makes.

“Just because you taught it…”

James Anderson’s book “Learnership” offers a paradigm shift in how we approach education. Anderson says, “We don’t have a teaching problem in our schools, we have a learning problem.” This subtle but crucial distinction changes everything.

We invest considerable time and resources ensuring teachers know how to teach and providing them with the best tools and curriculum. But what skills are our learners developing? We are living in a time where AI can perform basic computations and language tasks, so we must equip our students with skills that make them uniquely human.

A Touch of Madness

Remember when your parents freaked out if you said you wanted to be an artist or a musician? “There’s no money in that!” they’d say. Well, guess what? The game has totally changed. With AI taking on the repetitive and monotonous tasks, our individuality is our greatest asset. Coming up with wild new ideas and connecting unrelated things will be the the most valuable skill sets. Having “A touch of the Madness,” Legendary movie producer Lawrence Kasanoff says.

Anderson also asks us to consider what learning actually is. Essentially, it’s about creation. It’s about forging new neural pathways, generating novel ideas, and making unexpected connections. He also redefines what it means to have a growth mindset in these ways. In this new era of education, we must nurture these distinctly human capabilities.

Find a way or make a way

True learning is about finding a way when there isn’t an obvious path. It’s about problem-solving and critical thinking. When faced with a challenge, learners must either find a way or create a new path.

In a more practical sense, learning in action involves making choices. Remember Robert Frost’s famous lines, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by”? Learning requires making choices. It’s an active process where the learner decides to engage, to change, to grow.

Focus on Learning Strategies

As educators, parents, and lifelong learners ourselves, we must shift our focus from teaching strategies to learning strategies. Here are some actionable steps we can take:

Encourage metacognition: Teach students how to think and talk about their own learning processes.
Foster creativity: Be open to creative ideas from others and try to connect them to content.
Develop agency: This isn’t simply voice and choice, to coin another overused and abused buzz phrase, its about supporting students through challenges and allowing them to make their own choices to overcome them.
Practice failure: Reframe mistakes as learning opportunities rather than setbacks.
Debrief Experiences: Pay attention to the learning as it is happening and facilitate discourse that names the learning strategies students were using.

The future of education isn’t about perfecting our teaching; it’s about empowering our learners. We have to shift the investment of time and effort into how students are learning, rather than what they are learning.

The amazing thing is that we are creating the future every day. Let’s start creating a future where students understand that getting better is more valuable than doing your best. Getting better is about process over product, growth over outcomes, taking risks, etc. You know, living your best buzzwords.