From a perhaps surprisingly young age, we can teach children to learn effectively and successfully. Learning to learn is to do with training children to become responsible, self-aware, reflective, and increasingly independent learners. It is also to do with giving children opportunities to develop the learning styles and strategies that help them learn best. Given that we have no idea what the children we teach may want or need to learn in the future, equipping them to become competent and confident life-long learners is one of the most important things we can do.

Even with very young children, it is both possible and important to include ‘learning to learn’ as an integral part of our lessons and to get children to think explicitly about how they learn (the process) as well as what they learn (the product). We also need to mediate in our lessons in a range of ways…