Teachers' professional competence to support metacognition

Successful learning at school depends greatly on the teachers’ professional competences and, on the quality of their teaching. In this chapter, generic models of teacher competence are discussed from the perspective of metacognition as the principal component of self-regulated learning (SRL) and are applied to the specific context of teachers’ classroom practices that promote metacognition. SRL, which is based on the idea that the control of the learning process rests with the learners, is challenging and students should be supported by teachers in becoming strategic learners with high metacognitive skills. This requires teachers to have extensive competences in metacognition. While so far, most studies that investigated aspects of teachers’ practice to foster metacognition have focused only on single aspects of teacher competences, for example, on teacher beliefs, we present an integrative model, which focusses four aspects of teachers’ professional competences in SRL, that allows for a more holistic perspective. We aim to explain the great variation in teachers’ classroom practice to foster metacognition by describing the state of the art in metacognition and SRL research for each of these four aspects of teacher competence. Moreover, we derive implications for the research field of metacognition, for teacher education, and for educational practice