Palm, M. (2019, December 12). The Students Who Taught Me the Power of Metacognition. Retrieved January 15, 2020.

We all have that one student who teaches us more in one year than we ever thought possible. Mine was a 5th grader named Jasmine back in 1998. At the time, I taught at a school where 97 percent of our students were on free and reduced lunch, including Jasmine. She had acquired a tough look to help mask the trauma she had already experienced in her young life. Jasmine entered my classroom two grade levels behind in all subjects and believed that she just “wasn’t good” at school. I saw Jasmine work pretty darn hard to avoid doing her schoolwork on a consistent basis. To unlock Jasmine’s potential, I had to take some key steps as a teacher—and they all had to do with a little thing called metacognition.