A large part of what my collaborator and I are trying to do at Cognito Mentoring is the encourage our advisees to think about
why they have the goals that they have: to think about whether what they're doing is the best way of accomplishing what they
really want to accomplish.
Quoting
an Art of Problem Solving math jam with Albert Ni (a former MathCounts national champion and an early employee at Dropbox):
Today above all else I want to talk about one of the most important questions you can ask. It's a question you've asked a million times but probably still don't ask often enough. I know I didn't when I was in school. That question is very simple - "why?" lot of times we talk about the "what". For example, making the Countdown Round at National MathCounts is a "what". Making MOP or the IMO is a "what". Getting into MIT, doing a Ph.D., working a hedge fund, joining or starting a startup ... you get the idea. However, a lot is lost if you simply focus on the "what". It's the "why" behind what you choose to do (or, equally as important, not to do), that makes all the difference. Why learn to code? Or learn to draw? Or open a lemonade stand? Why do math at all?(The entire transcript is excellent and may be worth reading in entirety.)
Pinpointing why one wants to do something is useful for figuring out how to best achieve one's goals.
We've worked primarily with high school students and college students, and sufficiently young children won't be developmentally capable of thinking in these terms. But I wonder whether it might be possible to engage some elementary school students with this sort of thinking, particularly highly gifted ones.
Do you find that your children exhibit metacognition? Is it something that they seem ready to develop further?
