This study found that major Australian and New Zealand universities and colleges where early childhood teachers are prepared, typically have indicated statements of mission or institutional goals that include seeking to promote students' personal intellectual growth. It sought to determine whether students perceive deliberate attention from the institution to their personal growth in areas of metacognitive awareness or strategic action, or constructive discourses that would allow them to explore whether such strategic action might be included in their evolving knowledge of personal pedagogy. Final year early childhood students in one large college of education in New Zealand generally believed that they had received deliberate instruction about knowing how to know things and about learning strategies, though few were able to exemplify how or where this occurred. Further, they were equivocal about whether they had received deliberate instruction about how to incorporate their own learning strategies into personal pedagogy. The authors report also on case studies of four students in the second of three years of preparation who participated in an intervention on top-level structuring, a metacognitively-based system of discourse organisation. Particularly, we link critical responses related to the newness of their understandings of top-level structuringand of their own strategic action to findings with the final year students.