This is an ethnographic study of promotion of metacognition, focusing on the teaching practices in secondary mathematics classrooms of three teachers in the UK. With all three teachers, observations of their teaching and interviews regarding their teaching were conducted. The main aim was analysing and substantiating the parallels and differences among the teaching practices, providing an account of the patterns in the teachers' promotion of metacognition and the underpinning factors. An important finding of the study was the differences in the teachers' emphasis on metacognition throughout the stages of the lessons and the activities they used, and during their interactions with the students of different achievement levels and progress with the activities. Ultimately, I developed the Framework for Analysing Mathematics Teaching for the Advancement of Metacognition (FAMTAM), comprising of four factors underpinning teachers' practices: their understanding of metacognition, their perceptions of students' features and needs, the distribution of mathematical authority and the external pressures teachers perceived. The role of a teaching approach and promotion of metacognition and possible uses of the developed framework for teacher reflection are discussed as implications of the study. (Contains 1 figure.)