Every teacher knows the moment: you ask "does that make sense?", and thirty-one heads nod back - some genuinely, some because nodding is faster than admitting they're lost. This episode unpacks why, using the Education Endowment Foundation's metacognition and self-regulated learning guidance (Second Edition, November 2025): teaching pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their own thinking is one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost strategies on the EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit - worth an average of eight months' additional progress, built on 355 studies. It costs no extra curriculum time, because it lives inside the lesson you're already teaching. We take it into a primary classroom, a secondary classroom and a specialist setting, and land on one practical swap: replace "does that make sense?" with "what's our plan?"

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