In this article you will learn:

• Providing students with questions to foster metacognition helps them expand their thinking, develop metacognitive skills, and become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses.
• The Questions to Foster Metacognition can be thought of as “what teachers should be asking”—or, more accurately, ideas teachers can use to support students’ metacognition in grade appropriate ways. These questions should be modeled by the teacher and then gradually handed over to the students themselves.
• It is imperative that we teach our students to think like mathematicians by asking questions that foster metacognition and teach them to speak like mathematicians when making ownership statements that demonstrate that they are actively integrating both cognitive and metacognitive skills, both mathematical content and mathematical practice.

In this article you will learn:

• Mathematical metacognition in the classroom is essential for the development of problem-solving skills.
• Fostering metacognition requires a balance of explicit instruction, teacher modeling, student-centered exploration, and responsive coaching. This approach helps students initially learn the types of questions and thought processes they can apply, enabling them to progressively use these skills autonomously.
• Mathematics instruction must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency, and problem-solving skills and teaching the Standards for Mathematical Practice can support this development.