Mdm Khoo Lilin loves Literature so much, she wants her students to be able to touch, feel, hear and even taste what they experience from the world of books.

When they studied Charlotte Bronte’s book Jane Eyre, she threw a Victorian-style tea party complete with swatches of vintage fabric and cups of tea, set to a 19th Century music playlist, to bring out the flavour of the era.

Today’s lesson is on Shakespeare? During break time, a craft session is in order – students build a Lego set to better help them visualise and understand a scene in the text.

These surprises “keep them curious” and looking forward to class, says the Lead Teacher in English Literature at St Andrew’s Junior College.

Her strategies must be working, because students show up voluntarily even for optional activities such as the ad hoc poetry cafes she holds outside of class.

Where learning is no hit-and-run 

What students don’t see is all the thinking that goes on behind her lesson preparations.

Mdm Khoo has taken this a step further, honing the thought behind the thinking (known as metacognition) into an area of speciality.

“Thinking about thinking, that’s my main work,” she states without hesitation.

It sounds abstract until one witnesses her lessons. Students don’t just annotate texts while studying them. They also map their thought processes and trace their reasoning in tandem.

This develops self-awareness (“how do I think and why do I think this way?”), which allows them to observe their own thought patterns and reframe them if needed, with and eventually without a teacher’s guidance.

The decision to hone metacognition as a pedagogical focus area was a direct response to her students’ fear of Unseen Poetry, an A-Level component requiring them to analyse a surprise poem.

She had the same struggle when she was a Junior College student. Her Literature class had spent five weeks picking apart the poem Auto Wreck by Karl Shapiro, a dramatic account of what follows a road accident. They went through its language, tone, style and rhythm. When given another poem, however, they weren’t sure how to transfer those skills of analysis.

“That poem was the perfect analogy for how my students were approaching Unseen Poetry. It was hit-and-run,” she quips.

When searching for a way to help students sharpen and regulate their thought processes independently, her answer came during the pandemic years of Home-Based Learning. Metacognition became a focus area of professional development for teachers, as part of efforts to help students learn more independently.

Mdm Khoo was hooked. By 2022, she started to formally weave metacognitive methods into her lessons

‘I can see what you’re thinking’ 

When students are given a new poem to critique, they do scripting in the first 10 minutes, identifying thoughts such as where they make an assumption, where they hesitate, how their interpretations evolve, or what strategies they used when stuck.

They then share their scripts with the class. By understanding, sharing, and improving on how they analyse, they can more effectively analyse any poem or book they are given.

The students may find the process humbling, or even embarrassing.

This is why Mdm Khoo refrains from introducing metacognitive work to her JC1 students until Term 2 each school year — when they have had enough time to warm up, form groups, and make friends. “That’s when students begin to feel safe enough to share their raw analyses and expose the ‘messy part of their thinking’,” she explains for the need to be thoughtful with this process.

Mdm Khoo also gets vulnerable alongside them, modelling her own thinking out loud. “It requires teachers to step away from the image of an expert,” she explains. “By going through the same process, we reveal our hesitations, blind spots, false starts, and revisions.”

“I let them evaluate my metacognitive awareness too,” she adds.

Together, they draw vocabulary from the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, a psychometric tool that is complemented with progress tracking across the students’ e-portfolios, guided reflections, and goal-setting routines too.

Over time, the students find themselves take greater ownership of their learning, moving from avoidance to curiosity and confidence, and Literature texts become less and less challenging.

Geeking out on metacognition 

Today, Mdm Khoo’s classroom is also a site of professional learning. Colleagues from across subjects have come to observe her lessons to see how metacognition can be taught and transferred from Economics through to Chinese.

She also convened a Networked Learning Community across four Junior Colleges to research self-regulated learning and metacognition at scale. Nationally, her work has been presented at platforms such as the Teachers’ Conference and ExCEL Fest in 2023 and 2025, and at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference in 2024 and 2026.

When not geeking out on metacognition in class, Mdm Khoo is exploring the subject for her PhD, to further research in her field of passion and how it intersects with Literature and ethics. Outside of work, she is a published writer and founding committee member of Poetry Festival Singapore.

More than peer recognition, Mdm Khoo is heartened by the ability to make a direct impact on her students’ sense of learning. “I’d like to believe I’ve made them more aware of not just what, but how they are thinking, so they can engage more deeply with texts and with themselves.”

“Teachers should model vulnerability and being open to making mistakes on challenging tasks, or students won’t dare to try.” 
Mdm Khoo