The Hidden Side of Learning: How Deveren Fogle Breaks Down Cognition vs. Metacognition

Learning often starts long before a student opens a book or logs into a learning app. Sleepy eyes, a backpack tossed on the floor, a desk littered with reminders of last night’s assignments, for many, that’s the real first step. Today’s classrooms are flooded with content and tools. But what if that’s the problem? What if the real barrier is not the amount of content, but whether students know how to engage with it, how to think about thinking?

That’s the question driving Deveren Fogle, Co-founder and CEO of Uluru. With roots in law, years teaching in New York classrooms, and a later career coaching students with complex learning and executive-function challenges, Deveren watched a pattern repeat itself. Students with equal cognitive potential often sailed or stalled, not based on what they knew, but on how they approached learning. And that made him realize: we don’t teach the real inner work.

In simple terms: cognition is what a student can do. It’s the math they solve, the sentences they read, the test they take. Metacognition is the part of executive function, it is how or if they can do it. It’s the quiet internal running record: “Do I understand this? How will I begin? How long will it take me? Should I break this into parts?” It’s also the self-talk that helps them stay motivated and the planning that keeps them consistent when tasks feel meaningless or endless. That difference changes everything: research has shown that incorporating metacognitive strategies can lead to a 30% increase in student achievement rates, particularly in complex subjects like mathematics and science.

Because Deveren saw it every day, in a third-grade class full of ENL (English-New-Language) students who outperformed city averages, or in a sixth grader drowning in five different math platforms he had to rotate through each week. That student could do math. But without a stable system in their head, they were lost in chaos. Schools were offering content. What none were offering was a path to manage it.

Later, when he worked closely with psychiatrists and psychologists, he saw it with older students too, bright, capable teens derailed by overload, not lack of ability. They were not “lazy” or “unmotivated.” Their problem was invisible. Their brains didn’t have the map, the scaffolding, the internal guidance system to manage everything they were asked to juggle.

So Deveren and his co-founder began building Uluru, not as another curriculum library or test-prep app, but as a scaffolding system for the mind. Its job: to make metacognition visible. To prompt planning, reflection, time-management, and ulurufocus. To help students organize their work and their minds. To give parents and educators insight into how students approach learning, not just what output they produce.

Because habits built from the inside out are stronger than workflows forced from the outside. A student who learns to ask “What’s my plan? How much time will this take? Where do I begin?” will carry those questions for the rest of their life. They will approach new problems with calm, not panic. With curiosity, not fear.

This is not about making work easy. It’s about helping students handle the weight, mentally and emotionally. Deveren’s approach doesn’t promise shortcuts. It builds resilience.

If schools and apps continue to focus only on content, students will keep arriving at their desks with heavy backpacks and empty internal toolboxes. But if we shift focus, from what students learn to how they learn, we might fix the real problem. And maybe, just maybe, unlock the potential hidden in quiet minds.