Tie Strategies to Content
Willingham: strategies do not float free of subjects. Teach each one inside the content it serves, so students learn to self-regulate this topic, not metacognition in the abstract.
The strategy, as published
Exactly as it appears on the card
Part of Strategy Knowledge & Use in 06 Metacognition & Self-Regulation, where it sits alongside its neighbouring strategies, the infographic and the thinking for the whole area.
Why you might use it
The problem it may help with
A strategy taught in the abstract tends to stay there. Willingham's argument is that strategies do not float free of subjects: self-regulating an essay is not the same act as self-regulating a proof, and pupils taught "metacognition" in general often cannot find it again inside geography.
So each strategy is taught inside the content it serves. Pupils learn to self-regulate this topic, in this subject, and the strategy arrives already attached to somewhere it works.
What it might look like
One version of it, in a classroom
Rather than sending the class to a generic study skills session, the geography teacher teaches self-quizzing inside the rivers topic, using rivers vocabulary, and adds it to a subject strategy bank: which methods suit map skills, which suit case studies, which suit extended writing. The strategy and the content are learned as one thing.
Try it
A way to begin
Take one strategy currently taught generically in your school and re-teach it inside the topic where it pays off most in your subject.
What to notice
Reading what happens
- Whether pupils use the strategy in the subject where they learned it but nowhere else. Transfer is genuinely hard; expect to teach the strategy again in new territory rather than assume it travels.
- Whether the strategy bank gets consulted, or exists only as a display.
Things to think about
Before and while you use it
- This makes strategy instruction every department's job rather than a discrete course; a subject-specific bank is only credible when the subject's teachers built it.
The wider thinking
Where the evidence sits
Willingham has long argued that thinking skills are bound to the content they operate on; the same warning against content-free metacognition runs through the strand's evidence base. The card’s attribution stands as published: Willingham.
The fuller picture, sources included, is in further reading and evidence for Metacognition & Self-Regulation.
Keep exploring
Where next?
Back to this strategy in 06 Metacognition & Self-Regulation, across to what you're trying to improve, or into all 144 at once.
Want to take this further?
Support is available
Pedagogy First gives you a starting point. If you want support exploring how approaches like this can work across your school, trust or professional learning programme, that work is available.