Feuerstein developed a programme of great complexity called Instrumental Enrichment, which requires special training for a teacher to use. However it is worth looking closely at his general strategy. This was not to teach the metacognitive skills directly by explaining ‘how to do it’. This is a common approach in teaching thinking skills and study skills, used for example by Edward de Bono. Instead, he used a guided discovery approach where students had to construct for themselves the higher level thinking required. A similar process is used in Graham Gibbs' study skills programme described elsewhere. Roughly speaking his procedure was:
Set Real Tasks:
He asked students to do something real, that required information, planning, doing, and explaining your solution etc.
Require Reflection on Metacognitive Strategies. When the task was done, he asked his students to reflect on how they did it. What had made them successful? What hindered them or caused difficulty?
Establish Learning Points in the Students' Own Language. He asked students for very general advice on how to succeed with such tasks. This includes asking the students to name the strategies they used. The teacher then used the students’ names for these strategies.
Bridging:
Students are then asked to ‘bridge’ from this learning to other applications. That is, they were asked ‘where else might you be able to apply this principle?’ The learners are encouraged to see the application of the thinking processes that they have just described and named, in other contexts.
This is called ‘mediation’. Learners often lack the ability to ‘see the wood for the trees’, they are swamped by the detail of the immediate experience, and need help to extract general principles from concrete experience. Then they need to be encouraged to see where else these same principles apply. The four part cycle above follows Kolb’s learning cycle:
do, review, learn, apply.
