**Institutional Metacognition as an Improvement Tool for Educational Management for Educational Management**

**Institutional Metacognition as an Improvement Tool** 

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.70992

Carlos J. Ossa-Cornejo, Ignacio Figueroa-Céspedes and Felipe Rodriguez-Rojas Ignacio Figueroa-Céspedes and Felipe Rodriguez-Rojas Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Carlos J. Ossa-Cornejo,

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.70992

#### **Abstract**

A theoretical article is presented in order to describe and analyze an innovative methodology for educational management called institutional metacognition (IM), and it's defined as a reflective and participatory process of an educative community to face conflicts, applying techniques that generate a conscious, dialogical and collaboratory learning in educational organizations. This perspective is relevant to school management field, because it implies the need to build a new vision of the school as an organization that not only teaches but also learns and therefore delivers new tools to current social needs of communication and participation that are stressed nowadays in educational organizations. This process can be used as a management tool for organizational change, to promote an effective learning, and to improve coexistence in schools; it would be used to manage organizational change, and it allows monitoring and accomplishing activities and conflicts that may occur. The characteristics of IM help to improve managing the organizational process when it is visualized as a part of improvement cycle. It presents benefits to collaborative learning, diversity, conflicts mediation and participatory diagnostics. On the other hand, there are challenges that hinder their application to improve relationships, both internally, as a new and unknown tool, and externally related to features of educational institutions.

**Keywords:** metacognition, organizational learning, school management, improvement, reflection

#### **1. Introduction**

Currently, the educational institutions are facing multiple challenges with respect to the improvement of learning, decrease of violence and conflict situations, effective use of resources,

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

implementation of social policies, etc. This, thus, leads to a complex conception of what education implies, which implies not only generating effective and significant learning but also effectively integrating the influence of factors related with the social interaction and of sociopolitical factors related with the classroom and the school [1].

which it presents itself as a complex and dynamic concept but insists on being treated as a rigid and simplistic concept [1, 9]. Since the 1970s, learning has been considered a process of thinking which allows us to use reasoning in an effective manner; for this the use of cognitive strategies to learn effectively and meaningfully is not enough, but reflective strategies that evaluate the same process of using those strategies to learn, that is, metacognition, also

Institutional Metacognition as an Improvement Tool for Educational Management

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.70992

5

The metacognition is defined as a set of knowledge generated by the individual, both the knowledge they achieve and the way in which they carry out an activity [10]; it is relevant to decision-making and the evaluation of the results of this, which turns the metacognitive process into a tool so that people learn better, expressing themselves in individual, group, and organizational situations. In this sense, the IM is an evaluative methodology, of a reflective and participatory character, in an educational community, to face the difficulties present in the institution and to evaluate their effects, applying techniques that generate a conscious,

On the one hand, it can be used as a strategy to evaluate the academic development of the students, as well as the teaching methodologies of the teachers, which allows generating improvement plans to remedy difficulties that arise in these areas. On the other hand, it can be used as a diagnostic mechanism for the school coexistence, determining the existence of poorly resolved situations of conflict, as well as teaching the culture of peace, necessary for

Furthermore, the IM is a tool that can orient the organizational development, based on the promotion and evaluation of collaborative processes in the educational management This permits, on the one hand, fostering collaborative work between teachers and professionals of the institution and, on the other, generating a process of evaluation that is reflective and

Knowledge and the metacognitive strategies help in the learning process, allowing it to be achieved effectively; this implies not only a dimension of knowledge but also a dimension of regulation over the decisions made by the person [10, 11], which becomes especially relevant to the learning process. The ability to self-regulate is important for the achievement of better learning [12], providing the student a tool for reflection on their specific knowledge. All this

Working the metacognition processes with the students, helping them to become conscious of their knowledge and of their conceptual structures, improves both the involvement with the learning and the methodological and conceptual results. In this sense, the student's metacognitive abilities influence their learning, also serving as indicators of academic performance

The development of metacognition achieves, in this sense, profound and meaningful learning, since the ability to know one's own knowledge and to determine how it is achieved is related to the ability to recognize and memorize relevant information [16] and to understand

dialogic, and collaborative learning in the educational organizations [6, 8].

oriented toward action that permits improvement of the difficulties found.

will allow them to guide their own formation with better results [13].

the good life of the members of the educational community [5, 6].

**2.1. Metacognition and learning in community**

and problem-solving processes [14, 15].

should be used.

Therefore, the importance of the individual learning, at a social and organizational level, should be considered for the development of the educational institution, for the strengthening of the organizational culture and the learning goals in students [2, 3], and for the implementation of educational inclusion processes and complete formative development of people [4]. While these different levels of learning that occur in the school (individual level and organizational level) are usually worked separately, obeying different logics, it is possible to generate them in an articulated way, through collaborative and reflective processes.

One of these processes is called institutional metacognition (IM) originally discussed by [5], as a reflection and dialog process to deal with situations of conflict; however, it can be posed as an innovative methodology to elicit and evaluate processes of improvement and change, at both the individual level and institutional level [6].

This methodology has consequences on the learning and organizational culture and is relevant to the field of educational management, since it implies the need to build a new vision of the school as an organization that not only teaches but also learns and, thus, contributes a participatory methodology to the actual social needs that currently stand out in educational organizations [7, 8].

In this way, the student learning in the community, the operation of the school organization, the processes of school coexistence and the procedures for education inclusion can be understood as processes of change that require systems of participatory and reflective information management that can lead to a more effective and democratic development of the educational institution. It is therefore a relevant factor for the educational management and can be established as a systemic process of diagnosis and intervention to generate organizational change. This thus allows IM to be understood as a mechanism for continuous improvement of school management [8].

In this chapter, an analysis of the different levels of learning and how they benefit from the metacognition process will be presented; likewise how the institutional metacognition is a methodology for the learning of the organization itself, as well as a mechanism of organizational change, considering it as an adaptive tool of the educational institution. Finally, it will be shown how the IM supports the educational management, so that it can be used by school managers within the perspective of the organizational improvement cycle.
