The Independent Learner

THE

INDEPENDENT

Students must feel both engaged in learning the curriculum and empowered to pursue their own goals and interests. The only way teachers can achieve this is by making students partners and eventually leaders in their learning process. In The Independent Learner: Metacognitive Exercises to Help K–12 Students Focus, Self-Regulate, and Persevere, author Nina Parrish provides K–12 educators with practical strategies for teaching students how to learn and to practice metacognition. These research-backed teaching strategies equip students with intrinsic motivation, emotional literacy, and problem-solving skills, all of which will be invaluable in their classrooms and future professional lives. By reading The Independent Learner, educators, no matter their grade level or content area, will discover how to create a classroom environment that promotes engagement and self-regulation.

Readers will: » Learn the benefits and components of self-regulated learning

» Discover numerous research-based strategies and activities they can use across grade levels and subject areas » Create an engaging classroom culture that promotes student agency

—Whitney Freije, Seventh-Grade Teacher, Windsor Central School District, New York

“The comprehensive content is appealing to educators who serve multiple grade levels and content areas, or to make available to school campuses as a professional learning resource.”

—Nancy Petolick, Instructional Coach and Interventionist, Savannah Elementary, Aubrey, Texas

“This book is easy to read and follow, and the external links and the reproducible materials are excellent.”

—Nathalie Fournier, K–5 French Immersion Teacher, Prairie South School Division, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada

» Receive reproducible tools and templates for maximizing student learning

NINA PARRISH

» Encourage students to take ownership of their learning by providing authentic, challenging learning experiences

“The introduction clearly states the purpose of the book is to provide useful strategies along with the research that backs them up. Throughout the book, the author does just that. The descriptions are clear and examples ensure that teachers can literally take strategies from this book and implement them the next day.”

THE INDEPENDENT LEARNER

LEARNER

THE

LEARNER METACOGNITIVE EXERCISES TO HELP K–12 STUDENTS FOCUS, SELF-REGULATE, AND PERSEVERE

ISBN 978-1-952812-43-9 90000

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement to download the free reproducibles in this book.

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Nina Parrish

THE

INDEPENDENT METACOGNITIVE EXERCISES TO HELP K–12 STUDENTS FOCUS, SELF-REGULATE, AND PERSEVERE

Nina Parrish

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

LEARNER

Copyright © 2022 by Solution Tree Press Materials appearing here are copyrighted. With one exception, all rights are reserved. Readers may reproduce only those pages marked “Reproducible.” Otherwise, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the publisher.

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Printed in the United States of America

Names: Parrish, Nina, author.

Title: The independent learner : metacognitive exercises to help K-12 students focus, self-regulate, and persevere / Nina Parrish.

Description: Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022008062 (print) | LCCN 2022008063 (ebook) | ISBN 9781952812439 (paperback) | ISBN 9781952812446 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Independent study. | Metacognition. | Learning, Psychology of. | Regulatory focus (Psychology) Classification: LCC LB1049 .P357 2022 (print) | LCC LB1049 (ebook) | DDC 371.39/43--dc23/eng/20220322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008062 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008063

Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President and Publisher: Douglas M. Rife Associate Publisher: Sarah Payne-Mills Managing Production Editor: Kendra Slayton Editorial Director: Todd Brakke Art Director: Rian Anderson Copy Chief: Jessi Finn Production Editor: Gabriella Jones-Monserrate Content Development Specialist: Amy Rubenstein Copy Editor: Evie Madsen Proofreader: Elisabeth Abrams Text and Cover Designer: Fabiana Cochran Editorial Assistants: Sarah Ludwig and Elijah Oates

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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This book is dedicated to my children.

Thank you for reminding me to be present, ask questions, have fun, and stay curious.

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

I

want to thank my students for continuously challenging me to become a better educator and for always pushing me to search for new ways to teach familiar concepts. Thank you to the parents of all my students for believing in me and trusting me with your children.

It is always a gift to watch them grow.

I also want to thank the teachers I work with and all the educators I have worked with previously for taking the time to mentor me and share strategies. So much of this book is a result of what I learned from collaborating with you.

I am extremely grateful for the support of my husband, Jay, and my two daughters, Aly and Emma. Your encouragement allowed me to persist in working on this book during a very difficult pandemic year. I would also like to thank my mom, Ellen Van Velsor, for always encouraging me to write and helping to edit most of my published articles.

I would like to express sincere gratitude to Sarah Jubar for believing in my ideas, giving me this opportunity, walking me through each step of the process, and answering my many questions. I am grateful for Amy Rubenstein, who helped me organize my thoughts in the early stages of this book so they actually made sense. I would also like to thank Gabriella Jones-Monserrate for cheering me on as I worked on the final edits to my draft and helping me check every detail. Thank you to everyone at Solution Tree including Douglas Rife, Kendra Slayton, Sarah Payne-Mills, Kelly Rockhill, Shik Love, and Rian Anderson for helping me turn this book from a dream and an idea into a reality.

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Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers: Teresa Haskiell Math Teacher James Wood High School Winchester, Virginia

Robin Fogarty Education Consultant Robin Fogarty and Associates Chicago, Illinois

Maria Krum Teacher Valencia Middle School Los Lunas, New Mexico

Nathalie Fournier K–5 French Immersion Teacher Prairie South School Division Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada

Joshua Kunnath English Teacher and Department Chair Highland High School Bakersfield, California

Caitlin Fox Instructor Red Deer College Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

Adrienne Paone ILC and English 2 Pedro Menendez High School St. Augustine, Florida

Angie Freese Consultant Woodbury, Minnesota

Brian Pete Education Consultant Robin Fogarty and Associates Venice, Florida

Whitney Freije Seventh-Grade Teacher Windsor Central School District Windsor, New York

Nancy Petolick Instructional Coach/Interventionist Savannah Elementary, Denton ISD Aubrey, Texas

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement to download the free reproducibles in this book.

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

Kristoffer Barikmo Instructional Coach Shawnee Mission East High School Prairie Village, Kansas

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Self-Regulation and Metacognition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Road Map to Expertise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Chapter 1 Metacognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Metacognition and Self-Regulation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Core Methods to Encourage Metacognitive Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Strategies to Assess Metacognitive Skills. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Chapter 2 Mindsets and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Growth Mindset and Self-Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 The Value of Scaffolding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Strategies for Developing Positive Mindsets That Create Motivation . . . 42 Strategies for Using Goals to Increase Motivation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Strategies for Cultivating Resilience and Grit to Maintain Motivation . . . 58 Strategies for Evaluating Learning Through Feedback, Reflection, and Revision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

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Chapter 3 Emotional Regulation and Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Effortful Control and Emotional Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Emotional Vulnerability in the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 The Value of Emotions in the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Strategies for Mindfulness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Strategies for Emotional Regulation, Behavior Reflection, and Change. . 80 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Chapter 4 Planning, Prioritizing, Organizing, and Managing Time . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Chapter 5 Remembering, Understanding, and Applying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Foundational Taxonomy Levels and Self-Regulated Learning . . . . . . . . 120 Classroom Conditions for Remembering and Understanding. . . . . . . . . 122 Strategies for Using Mnemonics to Remember and Understand. . . . . . 128 Strategies for Testing, Asking and Answering Questions, and Summarizing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

Chapter 6 Critical Analysis, Evaluation, and Creative Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Critical Analysis, Evaluation, Creative Thought , and Self-Regulated Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Strategies for Reading, Collaborating, and Notetaking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Strategies for Visualization, Design, and Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

Executive Function and Self-Regulated Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Strategies for Ensuring Priorities Match Goals and Values . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Strategies for Planning the Completion of Daily Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Strategies for Monitoring the Completion of Daily Tasks. . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

N

ina Parrish is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Parrish Learning Zone in northern Virginia, a learning center that provides supplementary educational services to students of all ages. She has worked as a special education teacher, tutor, and education center director and has taught remedial reading, language arts, mathematics, history, and study skills since 2003. Nina specializes in working with students with learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

Nina writes The Learning Zone Blog and has contributed numerous articles to national and international publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Mary Washington. She received the Project PISCES scholarship to attend North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she completed her teaching certification in special education. Nina earned a master’s degree in education for school counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University.

To learn more about Nina’s work, visit www.parrishlearningzone.com or follow @parrish learning on Twitter.

To book Nina Parrish for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.

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©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

INTRODUCTION

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W HY IT ’S IM P O RTA N T TO D E V E LO P SEL F-REGUL AT E D L E A R N E R S

Sam walks into my classroom and heaves his heavy backpack onto a desk. It falls into the attached chair with a thud. His face is expressionless, but his body language says, “I can’t believe that I have to do this again.”

I see many Sams every year. His parents and teachers have asked me to talk with him because he is not turning in work, has many incomplete or missing assignments, and often seems disengaged in class. They know Sam has potential because, despite his lack of practice and returned work, he remembers a lot of the material and seems to excel on creative project-based assignments. After school, he likes to come up with stories, write scripts, and organize friends to participate in elaborate videos he posts to his YouTube page.

Sam unzips his backpack and a mass of binders, crushed papers, and books filled with folded loose-leaf paper tumbles to the floor. As we sort through the mess, he explains that he often intends to finish a task, but it gets lost or he never comes back to it. He has the most trouble in classes that aren’t interesting to him or where the teacher “doesn’t like him.” When Sam feels angry, frustrated, or bored, he has trouble getting beyond his emotional response to complete the work in front of him or work up the motivation to continue with it later.

T

eachers with gifted but disengaged students will relate to this scenario. Sam is motivated, creative, and bright in his free time, so why is he so forgetful in class? My years as an educator have led me to the answer: Sam struggles with developing a plan to take control of his learning because he hasn’t yet learned that he can organize his motivation. He is overwhelmed by so many moving parts in his life between school and homework that he lashes out instead of sitting down to plan. Even if students are aware of effective learning strategies, they are 1

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THE INDEPENDENT LEARNER

often unsure when to use them because they haven’t been given tools for self-motivation, emotional regulation, and executive functioning. Although having a learning disability or ADHD or experiencing trauma or poverty intensifies academic struggles, most students—including the Sams in your class—still need some level of support accessing the complex thinking skills required to succeed in school.

Students must feel both engaged in learning the curriculum and empowered to pursue their own goals and interests. The only way to achieve this is by making students a partner and eventually the leader in their learning process. For real learning to take place, education must be student led, creative, and have a process instead of a product focus. When teachers use testing for feedback to increase overall understanding instead of only teaching correct answers for the end-of-unit test, they are favoring a process focus over a product focus. Prioritizing a student’s understanding of a concept (as opposed to how familiar it is to them on a test) is the ultimate way to individualize and differentiate.

In The Independent Learner, you will learn about the importance of cognition and metacognition to the learning process and gain activities to support students in becoming autonomous learners. The following sections explain this book’s approach to self-regulation and metacognition, detail how this book is organized and who it’s for, and illustrate how to help students become learning experts.

Self-Regulation and Metacognition The term self-regulation originated with psychologist Albert Bandura’s (1991) social cognitive theory of human behavior. Bandura believes self-regulation is the process that allows people to “exercise some control over their thoughts, feelings, motivation, and actions” (1991, p. 249).

Successful self-regulation relies on metacognition, or the ability to self-monitor and think about your own thinking (Kuhn & Dean, 2004). Through self-monitoring and feedback, goals can be set for changing routine and habitual thinking. Then people can evaluate and reflect on how changing their thoughts affects how they feel, their level of motivation, and the actions they choose to take (Bandura, 1991). Cognitive structures, self-beliefs, and mood states can affect a person’s capacity to self-monitor (Bandura, 1991). Cognitive structures, like personal standards and knowledge about level of performance, are constructed through the influence and feedback of significant people, reflections on past performance, personal values, and social modeling and comparison. Self-beliefs, also called self-efficacy, are the beliefs people hold about their own ability to control their behavior, actions, and daily life through their choices.

When people have high self-efficacy, they ascribe failures to lack of effort; when they have low

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Who knows students better than themselves? Instead of focusing on teaching students primarily what to learn, teachers must also teach students how to learn. Teachers must be experts in both content and research-based learning strategies. Having background knowledge in all subjects is important if students want to use strategies and engage in critical thinking, but if teachers only teach facts, students will forget those facts long before they join the workforce.

Also, a curriculum centered completely on facts that students can just search for online will seem irrelevant to 21st century learners. By contrast, becoming motivated, capable, and strategic learners will serve students for their entire life. It will allow them to acquire whatever skills and knowledge they need for their future.

Introduction

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self-efficacy, people attribute failures to lack of ability (Bandura, 1991). Mood states are transient, affective states that measure a state of mind at any given time (think fatigue, anxiety, or depression) and are slightly less specific than emotions or feelings. Mood states affect how people monitor and evaluate their performance, the level of satisfaction they have with their accomplishments, if they remember their successes or failures more strongly, and whether they are overly harsh or critical with themselves when they experience failure (Bandura, 1991).

Educational psychologists Philip H. Winne and Allyson Fiona Hadwin further developed the idea that students who are self-regulated learners monitor their learning using metacognitive strategies and academic standards to set goals (Panadero, 2017). In this book, I will explain how building a metacognitive process allows students to become more skilled at examining and overseeing their own learning. To be able to use a strategy on their own in the future, students must know what skill they are working on and metacognitively evaluate and reflect after learning a strategy to decide how they will modify that strategy and make it work for them in new learning contexts. For this reason, each strategy in this book contains prompts to guide students in planning, monitoring, and evaluating their learning and strategy use.

Professor of pedagogy and educationalist Monique Boekaerts also contributed to the development of self-regulated learning theory by outlining the interaction between motivation, emotions, and goal achievement. She found that goals guide behavior, but if a task triggers negative emotions and thoughts, it can cause students to change their focus from learning and mastering that task to protecting their well-being and shielding their ego (Panadero, 2017).

The most recent model of self-regulated learning by cognitive and experimental psychologist Anastasia Efklides clarifies the relationship between metacognition, motivation, and emotions.

Efklides suggests that students engage in tasks that are guided by their goals in a top-down manner as well as actions that are less conscious, bottom-up reactions to feedback or data from others, and the environment (as cited in Panadero, 2017). Because of the interaction between mindsets, motivation, task management, and achievement, this book also focuses on ways to guide students in managing their motivation, regulating emotions, and prioritizing and organizing tasks in order to become more successful at directing their efforts toward their goals.

Students do not naturally possess self-regulated learning strategies; instead, teachers must add them to each learning task to help students develop the processes necessary for independent learning. The process of setting goals, learning strategies, reflecting, and adapting based on feedback is what allows students to turn their cognitive abilities into actual skills they can apply in school and life (Dent & Koenka, 2016). Students who can analyze and evaluate the information they are learning in school are engaging in critical thinking with the goal of

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

Educational psychologist Barry J. Zimmerman drew on Bandura’s (1991) work to create his theory of self-regulated learning, which focuses on the process learners use to develop “cognitive models and become experts in different tasks” (as cited in Panadero, 2017, p. 2). This book focuses on frameworks students can learn, beginning in kindergarten through teacher modeling and continuing through high school. With increased independence, they become expert learners. Coeditors Zimmerman and Dale H. Schunk (2011) define self-regulated learning as “the degree to which students are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active in their own learning process” (p. 4). For students to succeed in working independently, they must have strategies to monitor their thinking, motivation, and behavior.

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creating new ideas and products. Students who can analyze and evaluate their own thinking process are engaging in metacognition with the goal of creating new strategies and habits.

Educators must guide students to think critically about information and metacognitively about ideas and strategy use if we wish for them to become independent, self-regulated learners.

According to Zimmerman and Schunk (2011), self-regulated learners can do the following.

• Set achievable school-related and personal goals.

• Use strategies to confidently persist in their efforts toward a difficult task and to manage time, the environment, and their thinking.

• Adapt based on their own monitoring or the feedback they receive.

• Seek help when needed.

• Have a sense of self-efficacy and a belief that their efforts will affect their actions.

• Utilize creative problem solving (Rubenstein, Callan, & Ridgley, 2018).

• Transfer what they have learned from one situation to another (Ferlazzo, 2017).

The earlier students learn to take control of their own learning, the better. Many parents, teachers, and students focus on learning strategies only when they face a major academic difficulty like the one Sam is facing in the opening scenario. From the beginning of their learning career, students receive multiple assignments with conflicting deadlines and varying difficulty levels without solid self-regulation techniques to help them take control of these situations. Eventually, most students encounter more challenging coursework and find what they have been doing to get by in previous years no longer works. Many teachers can think of a time in their academic career where they felt unprepared or stuck without the planning, study strategies, time-management abilities, thinking skills, emotional regulation, or motivation they need to succeed. It can be difficult to introduce study and thinking skills later in a student’s academic career for several reasons. Studying is already frustrating to students.

Secondary-level students develop habits for using what worked for them in the past. Even if these habits are not working for them now, students will still have a hard time breaking them.

Think about Sam. Although it is certainly possible for him to acquire different learning strategies now, it will require more effort and dedication than if he had learned organizational strategies when he was younger. Sam’s actions, attitude, and level of persistence will affect the outcome. The instructor’s feedback and strategies will also impact how quickly Sam can adapt. Studies prove that breaking a habit and forming a new one can take, on average, around sixty-six days (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, 2010). It can be difficult to change ineffective learning habits or habitual ways of thinking.

With struggling students like Sam, the focus often shifts entirely to completing assignments.

This is understandable because it is hard for students to learn when they are not engaged.

However, completing a pile of work will not connect students to school or cause them to learn. The teacher’s job goes beyond helping students complete their assignments. If teachers focus only on students finishing work, the students will just get stuck again and become less motivated when the teacher assigns more work. Instead, teachers must teach students strategies that allow them to acquire, organize, and process information on their own.

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

• Monitor their own progress toward reaching their goals.

Introduction

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I wrote this book because I needed a resource to use with my students that made the application of research-based self-regulation strategies in the classroom possible. Educational reformer John Dewey points out a gap between theory and practice and the need to link what teachers are doing in the classroom with what research deems most effective (Korthagen, 2017). For research to work in classrooms, it must be valuable and useful to teachers (Korthagen, 2017).

I hope you find this book personally useful to reflect on your own strategy use and learning process. This experience will allow you to inspire your students to become more engaged, empowered, and effective learners.

About This Book

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

The aim of this book is to give teachers tools they can use to help their students become more proficient learners. Traditionally, self-regulated learning is made up of three main areas: (1) metacognition, (2) motivation, and (3) cognitive strategies (Akamatsu, Nakaya, & Koizumi, 2019). Considerable research in this field focuses on behavioral and cognitive-behavioral processes, especially as they relate to impulsivity, effortful control, anxiety, procrastination, and attention (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Research also suggests that emotions, motivation, cognition, metacognition, and behavior all affect self-regulated learning (Lawson, Vosniadou, Van Deur, Wyra, & Jeffries, 2019). The resources in this book support the use of executive-function and emotional-regulation skills. The mindsets and motivations, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts of learners all contribute to their ability to use metacognition to self-regulate (Beishuizen & Steffens, 2011). These components—metacognition, mindsets and motivation, emotional regulation (which I refer to as hot executive functioning), time management and planning (I term cool executive functioning), and thinking skills are the focus of this book (see figure I.1).

Learning strategies for: Mindsets and motivation

A metacognitivethought process Planning

“Hot” and “cool” executive functioning

A metacognitivethought process Evaluating

Thinking skills for remembering, creative thinking, and critical analysis

Self-Regulated Learning Monitoring

A metacognitivethought process

FIGURE I.1: Components of self-regulated learning.

The following sections detail what you can expect from each of this book’s chapters and how you can put this knowledge to use.

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Chapter Overview Many books that teach students how to learn using self-regulated learning strategies address only the needs of college students. Although some of the information in these books is helpful, it would take grades K–12 teachers too much time to read the books, choose strategies, and then create lesson plans that also work for their students. This book includes reproducible student activities alongside strategies that make it quick and easy to put what teachers learn to immediate use in the classroom. Each strategy and activity is designed for the teacher to implement across multiple subject areas and grade levels. My hope is that integrating these self-regulated learning strategies right into your year’s lesson plan will not take too much work.

Chapter 1 takes a close look at metacognition. This will be the foundation for most of the work in this book. A metacognitive-thought process allows students to effectively apply all other strategies in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 3 approaches executive-function strategies for emotional regulation and explores the interaction between emotional regulation, motivation, and the ability to retain learned information. Emotional-response regulation allows for increased overall executive function.

Chapter 4 looks at executive-function strategies for time management, organization, focus, selecting priorities, and planning. These skills play an important role in students’ ability to engage in metacognition and exercise control over their own learning process. I introduce strategies in chapters 3 and 4 that allow teachers to present students with ways to sustain or switch attention. These skills give students the ability to choose among competing interests so they can focus their attention on a specific activity to work toward meeting goals.

Chapter 5 presents cognitive strategies teachers can use to help students remember, understand, and apply the information they learn in their classes, so students are not just retaining facts but also making learning personally relevant and meaningful.

Chapter 6 explores techniques to lead students toward deeper critical and creative thinking.

Students will learn strategies to analyze and evaluate their thought process and the information they receive so that they can become more self-directed, independent learners.

Who This Book Is For This book is for K–12 educators hoping to instill lifelong self-reliance in students. If K–12 educators make it a goal to teach students to self-regulate from the time they enter school, then they can help develop learners who can plan, implement strategies, monitor their own performance, assess their own outcomes, and eventually learn to create not only new ideas and products but new strategies and habits. As they progress from grade to grade and course to course, students will be ready for any academic task teachers place in front of them. For self-regulated learning strategies to feel authentic and useful, they need to be taught right along with academic content in each subject area. Although it is possible to have the school

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Chapter 2 introduces strategies teachers can use to help increase student motivation. Learning and achievement both rely on students’ ability to set goals and align their behavior so they can work toward those goals. Motivation is the spark that gets students moving in the direction of accomplishing a goal and keeps them going over time and in adverse conditions.

Introduction

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counselor collaborate with the classroom teacher to deliver some of the lessons or to teach some of the skills in a separate homeroom or advisory class, it works best if the self-regulatory learning strategies are practiced every day in all academic classes. The skills in this book are correlated to different grade levels and include modifications based on age and ability level.

Districts can decide the skills that will be covered at each grade level. At the school level, teachers in a particular grade can choose a common strategy to work on. Students learn and practice that strategy in each class for a designated period of time and then they keep that strategy in a portfolio to revisit or choose to use later if needed. Strategies are revisited at subsequent grade levels with increased rigor and independence. You may be concerned that there is not enough time in the day to implement these strategies, which is a reasonable worry.

However, teaching students self-regulatory learning skills may actually save time in the long run as students become more independent, efficient, motivated, and able to manage their behavior and assignments on their own.

Teachers can provide students with tools to help them learn how to sort through and organize the vast array of new information they are exposed to each day. This book will help teachers change the way students experience learning—even subjects that they don’t enjoy—by modifying their approach and helping students to alter theirs. To succeed when presented with challenging academic tasks, students need to become active seekers and processors of information and ideas instead of passive recipients. They need to practice critical-thinking skills (Cook & Klipfel, 2015) and metacognitive strategies many times by using them during active learning tasks. This presents teachers with what feels like an impossible and overwhelming mission: getting students, including some who struggle with basic fact recall, to understand and engage in higher-level-thinking skills. This book will show teachers how to set up students for success by presenting challenging coursework while helping students develop the skills of self-regulated learners. I will also address how school administrators can support teachers and students in this mission. In the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and developing technological advances to learning, when new and difficult tasks permanently fell to teachers without many new resources to supplement the workload growth, burnout increased exponentially (Weißenfels, Klopp, & Perels, 2022). It will only continue to grow if left unaddressed. Stress continues to be the number-one reason teachers leave the teaching profession before retirement age (Diliberti, Schwartz, & Grant, 2021). Further, the decline in childhood mental health has become a U.S. emergency (Vestal, 2021). For these reasons, it is more important than ever that teachers feel supported by their school and district-level administrators to empower students with the skills and supports that make learning possible, meaningful, and relevant.

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If teachers begin in kindergarten by modeling self-regulated learning and continue to work on these skills each year, they won’t have to constantly go into academic triage mode as large problems arise. Although students younger than seven years old will not have the necessary abilities for independent self-regulated learning yet (Rutherford, Buschkuehl, Jaeggi, & Farkas, 2018), teachers can expose them to developmentally appropriate strategies through modeling and teacher-guided activities. For this reason, you will find many of the activities in this book for kindergarten through second-grade students are teacher led.

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The Road Map to Expertise Teachers receive frequent professional development on creating engaging lessons but don’t receive much training on how to provide students with the strategies they need to benefit from these lessons or continue to learn once the teacher is not right beside them. At this time, doubling down on drilling students with facts and information without providing a way to organize and manage this information would be a mistake. Instead, aim to create a community where students partner with teachers in their learning. By doing this, students gain leadership and purpose, and teachers get to gradually take a step back. Educators know what students need to learn, but they also must give students a map that allows them to navigate the challenging road ahead. This book provides that map of strategies you can use to help guide your students in becoming self-regulated learners.

Ericsson’s research differs from Gladwell’s (2011) popular book in its emphasis on deliberate practice or practice oriented toward a specific goal (Ericcson, 2014; Nandagopal & Ericcson, 2012). Ericsson argues that it takes hours of deliberate practice “designed to improve specific aspects of performance through self-evaluation and gradual refinement of performance with feedback” to develop proficient skills (Nandagopal & Ericsson, 2012, p. 2). In other words, simply spending 10,000 hours will not make you an expert. Many students spend 10,000 hours in school and do not graduate as expert learners. There is no magic number of hours that makes practice result in gains. Instead, a student has to work smarter by analyzing and evaluating their current performance in order to practice in a way that continuously refines and improves their process and resulting skill level.

Through practice, students can build strategies that allow them to plan, monitor, and evaluate their performance. Those who continue to be high achievers as adult learners display more self-regulatory behaviors and appropriately timed strategy use than nonexperts (Nandagopal & Ericsson, 2012). It should be every educator’s goal to teach students through modeling, strategies, reflection, and revision how to become experts and proficient learners. If you introduce the idea of self-regulated learning at the beginning of a student’s schooling and stay with them until they’re developmentally ready around the third grade, you’ll have exactly ten years (or, approximately 10,000 hours) to create expert learners.

Let’s begin.

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In author and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell’s (2011) book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he describes, among other things, the positive effects of many hours of practice. His 10,000-hour rule, which refers to the time it takes to become an expert at a task or concept, is loosely based on the previous research of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. This research, summarized in a recent study by Kiruthiga Nandagopal and K. Anders Ericsson (2012), poses a question that should concern all teachers: How do you capture superior performance and reproduce it?

CHAPTER 2 MINDSETS AND MOTIVATION

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In elementary school, Charlie’s teachers always praised him for his intelligence and how quickly and easily he finished every assignment. From his teachers’ comments, he knew that being smart meant understanding immediately and finishing quickly compared to his peers. Since his assignments weren’t that different from last year, Charlie understood them right away. He was able to do very little and make good grades.

As he transitioned to middle school, Charlie’s parents and teachers noticed he was having difficulty adjusting. He was always the first one to finish, but his work was often careless and filled with mistakes. When the teacher went over the correct answers, Charlie would put his head down or take out his book and read.

When Charlie did not do well right away, he stopped trying altogether, instead choosing to talk or distract others. When someone in class did well, he would roll his eyes and make rude comments. His parents noted that he had begun to study less and less. Recently, his teacher noticed him cheating off another student’s paper during a test and having a group member do all his work during a collaborative assignment.

L

ike Charlie in this preceding scenario, many students lose their drive to succeed as curricula become more difficult. However, as you may have guessed, motivation is necessary for student academic functioning and achievement in school even when controlling for level of cognitive skill (Ryan & Deci, 2020). In this chapter, you’ll learn about the connection between these types of intrinsic motivation and self-regulated learning and how a growth mindset and self-efficacy impact motivation, and acquire useful strategies for developing mindsets and setting goals that increase motivation.

REALIZING THE CONNECTION Self-regulated learning strategies not only help learners begin to reflect on their own thinking process but also increase their motivation and willingness to engage in learning. Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci (2020), professors in the 35

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Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology at the University of Rochester, argue that people need three things to feel motivated: (1) autonomy, (2) competence, and (3) relatedness. Ryan and Deci (2020) describe autonomy as “a sense of initiative and ownership in one’s actions” (p. 1).

As students begin to take responsibility for their own learning and become active participants in the learning process, this leads them toward having greater autonomy or learner agency and allows them to see a purpose in school activities (Mekala & Radhakrishnan, 2019). According to Ryan and Deci (2020), competence is a “feeling of mastery” and a sense that with effort, a student can “succeed and grow” (p. 1). Often with a new skill, motivation does not come from the task but instead from the learner’s successful use of self-regulatory strategies. When students can use a strategy effectively and see themselves making progress, they feel good about their abilities because they have a sense of mastery (Zimmerman, 2002). Relatedness, according to Ryan and Deci (2020), is facilitated when the school setting “conveys respect and caring” and the student feels “a sense of belonging and connection” (p. 1). Educators must ask themselves, “Are we creating an environment that cultivates motivation by meeting these basic needs or one that crushes motivation by ignoring them?”

Have you ever spent time with a toddler? They have so many questions and demonstrate daily an abundant supply of internal motivation to figure out the world around them. Where does this go when they enter school?

Why don’t you see this same level of enthusiasm, wonder, and engagement by the time students arrive in high school classrooms? Intrinsic motivation, according to Ryan and Deci (2020), is displayed in activities where curiosity is present, like play. These activities “provide their own satisfaction and joys” (Ryan & Deci, 2020, p. 2). Intrinsic motivation links to higher performance in school, increased engagement, and higher academic achievement (Ryan & Deci, 2020). However, abundant research demonstrates that as students go through school, they lose intrinsic motivation to learn school subjects (Rowell & Hong, 2013; Ryan & Deci, 2020). To fix this, teachers should work on creating school environments that support students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Research shows that educators support students’ development of autonomy and motivation by doing the following (Ryan & Deci, 2020).

• Give students choices and opportunities for agency and ownership in the tasks that are assigned.

• Explain why and provide a rationale or goal for each assignment.

• Encourage effort and recognizing growth, progress, and success.

• Provide hints but not answers (scaffolds) when students are stuck.

• Respond positively to student ideas, questions, and perspectives.

All these qualities work best in a classroom low in control but high in structure. Structure is created in the classroom through clear expectations, support, responsiveness, consistency, and goal setting. In contrast, control involves working toward external rewards or to avoid possible anxiety and shame caused by mistakes or failure.

Educators cannot always create intrinsically motivating activities for students that inspire fun, interest, or joy.

However, they can use extrinsic motivation to help students create identified and eventually integrated motivations, where students see the value in what they are doing. Ryan and Deci (2020) define extrinsic motivation as “behaviors done for reasons other than their inherent satisfactions” (p. 3). There are four types of extrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2020).

1. External motivation: Motivators that derive from external rewards and punishments

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Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning

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2. Introjected motivation: A desire to avoid the “anxiety, shame, or guilt” that come from failure causes, even in those with good self-esteem (Ryan & Deci, 2020, p. 2) 3. Identified motivation: When students see the value in an activity 4. Integrated motivation: When a student sees an activity is worth their time and energy because it lines up with their “core interests and values” (Ryan & Deci, 2020, p. 3)

Many nonacademic skills determine whether a student will be successful in school. According to researcher Martin West and colleagues (2016), these characteristics are what contribute to the academic achievement gap and may be easier to address through intervention than traditional academic skills. Skills like mindset, self-control, conscientiousness, and grit are not easily measured with tests of cognitive ability, standard intelligence tests, or achievement tests.

However, these four skills positively correlate with gains on mathematics and reading achievement tests and improvements in attendance and behavior. Thus, supporting these skills helps students experience more academic success (West et al., 2016). The strategies in this chapter walk you through activities to help students develop a positive mindset, set goals, foster resilience, and promote grit to increase and maintain their motivation toward academic tasks.

Everyone needs a reason—a why—to motivate. If you learn to think about your own mindset and self-limiting beliefs, you can then help students examine their belief systems. (Examining your own thoughts on changing your mindset is also a metacognitive process, as the next section explains.) When you provide students with strategies they can use to improve, you are telling them with your instructional approach that you fully believe in their ability to grow.

Teachers must lead their students by modeling that they grow and fulfill their potential not by playing it safe or by trying to look smart, but by taking on new challenges, analyzing mistakes, and implementing strategies that push them forward.

The Growth Mindset and Self-Efficacy Students’ self-efficacy affects their ability to persist and stay motivated when they encounter academic obstacles. Self-efficacy is “an individual’s personal beliefs in his or her ability to perform and accomplish tasks” (Rowell & Hong, 2013, p. 160). Students with high self-efficacy feel confident taking on challenging academic tasks while students with low self-efficacy do not. Students with high self-efficacy view academic challenges or setbacks as manageable and keep trying. In contrast, students with low self-efficacy respond to setbacks by becoming discouraged and giving up (Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Gerbino, & Pastorelli, 2003).

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The goal is to transition students from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic, which helps students to be happier and more successful in school and eventually in the workplace. Teachers can do this by developing students’ so-called noncognitive skills, such as student beliefs, values, and goals, which link to motivation and resulting academic achievement (Rowell & Hong, 2013).

Developing these skills can help students move from constantly seeking or needing external validation, motivation, and control, or harmfully using extrinsic introjected motivation (that is, they only feel good about themselves when they are producing certain outcomes and accomplishing things), to a focus on internal motivation, value-based identified motivation, or integrated motivation.

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People’s thoughts about themselves and their abilities affect the outcomes they produce.

Carol S. Dweck (2016), a professor at Stanford University, finds that people hold one of two mindsets about intelligence. Students with a fixed mindset believe their ability is unchangeable, and they assume people are stuck with the skills, talents, and quantity of intelligence they are born with. Others with a growth mindset believe they can develop their intelligence and aptitude through their own efforts. For students who have a fixed mindset (like Charlie in the preceding scenario), effort is a bad thing because if they are trying hard, that must mean they are not very smart and do not have the necessary ability or natural talent. Students with a fixed mindset quickly become disinterested and give up if they cannot succeed right away.

For students with a growth mindset, hard work and effort are what make them “smart.” Thus, students with a growth mindset thrive in situations where there is a challenge that requires them to grow and learn.

Although failure may also be a difficult experience for students with a growth mindset, they view failure and success very differently. According to Dweck (2016), students with a growth mindset tend to believe that “even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements” (p. 41). They think that “effort is what . . . ignites ability and turns it into accomplishment” (Dweck, 2016, p. 41). Students with a growth mindset use this way of thinking to persevere with effort and enthusiasm despite difficulties and setbacks and to gain confidence instead of losing it when they face challenges.

Educators can teach students to have a growth mindset. The way you teach and run your classroom can either foster a growth mindset or push students into a fixed mindset. Even students with a fixed mindset toward learning may have a growth mindset in other areas of their life, like the arts or sports. Through instruction, students learn to view their skills and abilities in the classroom with a growth mindset too. One stumbling block is that sometimes teachers have a fixed mindset. This can get in the way of their own growth and hinder their ability to help students who are struggling.

Dweck (2014) explains that teachers with a fixed mindset are reluctant to engage in collaboration, receive feedback, or participate in professional development because they worry it will reveal their inadequacies or flaws. They are reluctant to discuss issues they are having

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Students with a fixed mindset experience failure as a shaming experience because they interpret small setbacks, negative feedback, or disappointment as an indication they lack the qualities necessary for success. Like Charlie, they also may feel the need to constantly seek external validation and prove themselves by doing things quickly and effortlessly. They perceive their performance and intelligence as continuously being judged. They think failure means “I am a failure.” For this reason, the experience of not succeeding right away diminishes their motivation to keep trying. They think, “Well, if I don’t have what it takes, then why continue to try and risk embarrassing myself in front of others?” They view continued effort as a way to make themselves vulnerable by putting their shortcomings on display. What if they try really hard and still fail? With this mindset, trying hard and making an effort can be truly scary because they require students to set aside their excuses. Since they don’t think they can do anything to change their ability and avoid failure, they try to look for a way to escape from the situation or mend their self-esteem through quitting, blaming others, cheating, or finding someone worse off to compare themselves to or place themselves above. They focus their efforts on avoiding failure rather than trying to improve their performance or understanding.

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with colleagues or supervisors because they feel that this may cause judgment. When a student has trouble learning or is unmotivated or disruptive, teachers with a fixed mindset may seek to remove the student from their classroom or blame the student because they see the student as a threat to the idea that they are good teachers.

In contrast, teachers with a growth mindset help students change and grow (Phi Delta Kappa International, 2012). This ability comes from their desire to continue to grow and learn new things right along with their students. Teachers with a growth mindset tend to endorse the belief that “every student has something to teach me” (Dweck, 2014, p. 14). Their priority is learning, and they value this even more than they value appearing to look like “good” or “perfect” teachers. These teachers seek out feedback from a mentor or supervisor, discuss their problems with colleagues, and seek out professional learning opportunities. This approach takes courage because it requires the vulnerability to admit you don’t know it all and to allow room for learning and growth. Through their openness and collaboration with others, teachers with a growth mindset become a part of a community working toward solutions instead of becoming isolated, frustrated, and bitter. Social support keeps them teaching and helps them bounce back from difficulty with resilience. It does the same thing for students.

You may hear your fixed mindset “voice” in certain situations even when you are trying hard to adopt a growth mindset. Often your mindset begins with the way you are taught. Dweck (2014) suggests teachers may hear their fixed mindset telling them: • “You’d be able to do this easily if you were a good teacher.”

• “You’ll never be able to get these students to learn this.”

• “You see, you took a risk and failed; don’t try that again. Stick with what you know" (p. 15).

Like students, Dweck (2014) suggests teachers can benefit from changing their fixed-mindset statements about their own development as teachers into growth mindset statements like: • “Nobody is good at this right away. It takes experience.”

• “Maybe other teachers have some good ideas about how to teach this material more effectively.”

• “Maybe I need to find some new strategies or set different goals" (p. 15).

Try changing some of your fixed-mindset statements to growth mindset statements. Then help students do the same. For more ways teachers can support the development of a growth mindset in the classroom, see table 2.1 (page 40).

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According to Dweck (2016), studies by Falko Rheinberg, a German researcher, show teachers with a fixed mindset tend to categorize students by ability and believe students with different levels of achievement are “deeply and permanently different” (p. 66). They think certain students are “smart” or gifted, and other students are “less smart” and less capable of learning. Since they believe there is nothing they can do to make the students who are “less smart” more capable of learning, they absolve themselves of the responsibility to help those students. Research shows when a teacher has a fixed mindset, their students tend to perform according to their expectations and as a result fail to make achievement gains over the course of a year. As Carol Dweck explains, students who start as “high achievers stay high, and the ones who came in as low achievers stay low” (Phi Delta Kappa International, 2012, p. 19).

In this way, teachers confirm their own theory: some students are just “smarter” than others.

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TABLE 2.1: Ways Teachers Can Support the Development of a Growth Mindset in the Classroom Rationale

Example

Emphasize growth in ability through effort instead of special talent.

Teachers promote a certain mindset with the language they use and how they set up an activity.

Communicate that test results are not a measure of students’ potential but a way to determine where students are right now with their skills to help them grow.

Focus on teaching instead of judging.

Often, students with a fixed mindset hear a message of judgment even from well-intentioned teachers (Dweck, 2016).

Because of this, teachers must be extra cautious to teach students the behaviors and skills instead of judging them based on what they are currently able to do.

When students’ behavior or work is not what the teacher expects, instead of assuming the work or behavior is a reflection of the students’ character and intelligence (judging), the teacher concludes the students just don’t know the correct behavior or information yet and shows them what they expect (teaching).

Offer process feedback instead of praise.

Often, with good intentions, teachers praise students for their intelligence, good grades, or talents. Although some teachers think of this as a type of feedback, it is really detrimental in the long run, as it causes students to constantly seek out external praise and validation. Feedback should not focus on unchangeable personal attributes, but instead feedback should help motivate and encourage students to apply effort and persistence to each learning task they approach.

For a student who is doing well: “I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that mathematics problem until you finally got it. You thought of a lot of different ways to do it and found one that worked!”

Set high standards within an atmosphere of trust.

Hold high expectations and provide challenging and engaging work for all students, not just the students who are currently achieving or performing at gradelevel standards. Expect greatness, effort, and growth from each student, and hold yourself responsible for helping each student improve.

Tell students honestly where they are.

Then, expect them to put in the work. Most important, support students in their efforts to grow.

Treat setbacks as opportunities for growth.

If students do not feel safe to make mistakes, they are going to pretend to be perfect, pretend to understand, or stop trying. Instead, endeavor to empower students to respond to mistakes or bumps in the road with curiosity. By teaching students to respond to challenges with curiosity instead of shame, teachers are giving them the necessary tools for creativity, critical thinking, and self-regulated learning.

“Tell me how you did this problem, and we can figure out together why it didn’t work out as planned.” Rather than using language like, "I can't add fractions," encourage students to instead say, “I can’t add fractions yet.”

For a student who is not there yet, “I liked the effort you put in, but let’s work together some more and figure out what it is you don’t understand" (Dweck, 2016, pp. 180–181).

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The Value of Scaffolding The tasks a teacher presents to students must be appropriate for their level of development to maintain motivation and eventually move toward self-regulated learning. Work should be not too easy and not too hard, but just right. How capable students are of controlling their thoughts and actions links to their language ability. Students pick up and internalize the use of self-talk (or metacognition) to guide themselves through difficult tasks by first hearing adults around them model that language (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Students come to the classroom with huge differences in experience, background knowledge, ability, motivation, and availability to learn. Yet each day, teachers must figure out how to reach every student.

For example, a teacher may discover a high school student does not know how to do long division. The teacher may be tempted to give that student a calculator and show them how to use it for division problems. A calculator would allow the student to quickly get the correct answer, but it would take away the opportunity for that student to move from their current level of understanding to truly grasp what it means to divide. The student would not gain the tools needed to reason through a more complex problem involving division and would be out of luck in situations where a calculator is not allowed, like on certain standardized tests. Alternatively, the teacher can scaffold content beginning with very simple one-digit by two-digit long division problems and then working toward harder tasks. The teacher could scaffold the materials by helping the student create examples on cue cards and come up with acronyms that represent the steps (and the thinking process for each step) to solving a long division problem. After some practice, the teacher could gradually hand over responsibility for using the strategy to the student. Then the student could use the cue cards each time they do division until they can divide on their own without using the written thinking steps.

Students who continue to struggle even when the teacher scaffolds the instruction may need additional supports or accommodations (IRIS Center, 2020b). Students of all ability and skill levels need temporary scaffolds to stay motivated and persist when they are stretching themselves to try something new. When teachers provide a scaffold, they help students accomplish the task and may assist students in internalizing a model of thinking or strategy to help them with future tasks. Scaffolding allows a student to maintain motivation and develop the persistence necessary to move from being a teacher-dependent learner to a self-regulated learner (Smit, van Eerde, & Bakker, 2013).

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According to Vygotsky (1978), each student has an actual development level or what the student can do independently, and a potential development level or what the student can reach with capable instruction. He coined the term zone of proximal development to describe the space between those two levels (Vygotsky, 1978). Scaffolding is when a teacher provides temporary support to help a student perform a task that they are unable to complete on their own.

The aim of this support is to bridge the gap between a student’s current ability and what the teacher requires in the classroom to help the student grow closer to working independently.

When teachers use scaffolding, they are sending the message to students that they believe in their potential. In contrast to simplifying the content or making modifications, scaffolding provides the support that eventually allows the student to perform the skill on their own.

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Strategies for Developing Positive Mindsets That Create Motivation Teachers can help students develop a growth mindset and realize the joy of learning by teaching them about neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to grow and change. Students can learn about the different parts of the brain and their function to understand more about the brain’s capacity to learn (Robinson, 2017). When people have new experiences, their brain creates new connections which are strengthened through repeated use (Center on the Developing Child, 2020). The exciting thing about this is that people can rewire their own brain and become smarter at any time through acquiring new information and using new strategies to study and practice.

When teachers help students to develop a growth mindset through instruction and modeling, their motivation, grades, and achievement increase (Phi Delta Kappa International, 2012).

It gives students a reason to put forth effort in school. The following strategies help students practice the growth mindset mentality and develop a positive response to their own mistakes.

Exercising Your Brain to Help It Grow (Grades K–12) Exercising students’ brains will help them understand that the level of effort they put in affects their ability. This activity is a way to teach students about the parts of the brain and how the brain forms new connections when students learn new things. Do this activity at the beginning of the year.

INSTRUCTIONS Introduce this activity by saying something like, “We used to think that you were born with a certain amount of intelligence, and that’s all you got. Now, scientists know that when you work hard and tackle new challenges in school or life, you can help your brain grow and make more connections. Like a muscle, our brain gets stronger when we exercise it and do hard things.” Implement the following actions to conduct this activity.

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Isn’t it motivating to think that it is within your control to change your capacity to learn?

Finding the place where students are making mistakes is the key to effective instruction. If students are truly challenged, they shouldn’t get it right away. Experiencing initial confusion and having to exert effort to make meaning are an indication the brain is forming new connections and new learning is taking place. When teachers teach students to think of learning challenges or the opportunity to learn from mistakes as helping to grow their brain, they respond more positively and persevere despite initial discomfort or difficulty. Instead of thinking of mistakes, confusion, or challenges as a sign they are just not smart enough, students learn to view the unsettled feeling of not understanding as an indication of an opportunity for growth.

Experiencing confusion is often what causes students to stop, reflect, and use or modify their use of strategies. Developing a tolerance for confusion and an ability to sustain motivation to work through problems to create meaning is essential to accessing higher-order thinking (Miller, 2013). These are the complex thinking skills beyond basic fact recall and memorization that allow for critical and creative thinking.

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1. Introduce the book Your Fantastic Elastic Brain by educator and psychologist JoAnn Deak (2010), which explains the different parts of the brain and how the brain works. Ask students to tell you what they already know about the brain. Consider showing students a diagram of the brain or a short age-appropriate video on neuroplasticity.

2. Begin reading the book while students listen and label parts of the brain and record information about the functions. While reading, stop occasionally to discuss and ask questions to check comprehension. At appropriate points in the book, stop to have students write about and illustrate the following.

A time they tried something that was hard at first, but with practice, they were eventually able to do easily

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A time they made a mistake and were able to use this mistake to grow their brain

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A time when something they learned in the past made it easier for them to learn something new

3. Have students share their responses aloud in pairs or in a think-pair-share. Have them discuss or write down two things: (1) something they learned about the brain and (2) one way they can use what they learned about the brain to help themselves stay motivated when they are feeling discouraged or frustrated in school.

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Give students the parts of the brain on pieces of paper and glue them to a blank picture of the brain. In Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It—Lesson Plans for Teachers, Little Pickle Press (2012) provides a free printable map (bit.ly/3tZcoED). Students too young to write about their learning experiences can tell them to a partner or draw a picture and share their stories aloud with the class.

UPPER ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL (GRADES 3—8) Students listen to the book (if you are reading the book aloud) and create visual notes by drawing and labeling a picture of the brain with the parts of the brain and its functions.

Students use a blank brain map to make their drawing accurate. Then they list things they tried in school or life that were hard at first but became easier with practice (talking, walking, playing soccer, and so on). Learning this new thing helps grow their brain.

HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 9—12) Students add to the preceding activity by including a time they made a mistake and were able to use this mistake to grow their brain. They could also think about a time something they learned in the past helped them to learn something new. The students then illustrate each experience with a picture or series of pictures. This book focuses on brain development in the first ten years, but high school students may enjoy researching and writing about whether teens can continue to grow their brain, build new connections, and learn new skills. (Good news: they can!)

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Creating Growth Mindset Statements (Grades K–12) Challenging situations can make it difficult for students to maintain a growth mindset.

Everyone has triggers that cause them to take on a fixed mindset. Educators can teach students to take these discouraging fixed mindset thoughts and reframe them as growth mindset affirmations to help keep students motivated. Have students place these affirmations in a visible location. Students who are mindful of fixed versus growth mindset language can help coach themselves and their classmates toward a more growth-oriented focus. Students can use this activity adapted from the strategies in Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, to gradually change their attitude and motivation by changing the way they think (Dweck, 2016).

INSTRUCTIONS

You may want to show students a video clip or comic strip or read a story that provides an age-appropriate example of counterproductive or discouraging self-talk. Instead of giving up or giving in, students learn to challenge and question conclusions and talk to themselves in a more encouraging way. See figure 2.1, which explains how to do this.

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Students can do this as a class activity. Students brainstorm as a whole class to answer the following question: “What fixed-mindset statements do you say to yourself or hear others say before beginning a task, while you are working, or if you become discouraged?”

The teacher lists the students’ statements. Then the teacher asks students one of the following questions: “How would you rewrite these as more encouraging growth mindset statements?” or “How would you say this in a kind way to a good friend to encourage them?”

UPPER ELEMENTARY (GRADES 3—5) The teacher gives the students the situations to begin this activity as a whole class. Then, students can work in pairs; one student comes up with the discouraging statements, and the other reframes them using the preceding monitoring questions.

MIDDLE SCHOOL (GRADES 6—8) Give students the situations and as a class or in pairs, have students brainstorm the fixed-mindset statements in the instead of column in figure 2.1. Students then come up with the growth mindset statements individually using the monitoring questions for the elementary grades.

They add their own examples and check back with their partner or the whole group to share and compare.

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Explain to students sometimes people say things to themselves that are not very nice or encouraging. Luckily, they get to choose how to think and respond. With practice, everyone can change the way they talk to themselves.

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Mindsets and Motivation In This Situation:

Instead of:

Try Thinking:

I am just not a mathematics person.

No one is good at something new right away.

It takes practice to become good at mathematics.

When I am trying something new, and I can’t do it perfectly right away . . .

This is too hard. I can’t do it.

I have never done this before, so my brain is stretching and growing.

It may be challenging, but I will figure it out if I keep working hard.

When I get my test back and I got a seventy-nine and my friend received another one hundred . . .

I will never be as smart as her.

She is using some great strategies! I am going to try to learn from her.

When I get a problem wrong, make a bad grade, or make a mistake . . .

I am a failure. I should just quit before I make a fool of myself.

I can figure out what went wrong so that I can learn how to do it better next time.

Source: Adapted from Dweck, 2016.

FIGURE 2.1: Growth mindset statements.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 9—12) For high school students, don’t provide text for the in this situation column in figure 2.1.

Instead, students do the following using a piece of paper folded vertically into three columns.

• In the first column (in this situation), students record situations where their fixed mindset voice shows up. These do not all have to be school situations, but some should be. Students ask themselves, “What situations make me feel discouraged or frustrated at school?”

• In the instead of column, students write down discouraging thoughts they may have when they are about to begin a new task or while they are working. Students ask themselves, “What do I think to myself?”

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When I am doing challenging mathematics problems, and I make a mistake . . .

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• In the try thinking column, students then reframe their fixed-mindset statement into a growth mindset statement. Students ask themselves, “How would I say this in a kind way to encourage a good friend who is struggling?”

Students consider the following questions, “Are there certain times that I switch into a fixed mindset or say things that are not very nice to myself?” “When can I use this strategy to help myself stay motivated?” and “How does changing the way I talk to myself change the results I am able to produce?”

Fixed-Mindset Characterizations (Grades K–12)

INSTRUCTIONS Students create and draw a character to represent their fixed-mindset voice. Then they write a description of their character. Make sure students know what a character is and that students in third grade and up understand the parts of a paragraph. Consider presenting students with several examples of cartoon or popular age-appropriate characters (villains, monsters, or heroes) to identify and discuss their traits. This will help students think about what their fixed-mindset voice sounds like when it shows up, and the effects of listening to that voice.

EARLY ELEMENTARY, UPPER ELEMENTARY, AND MIDDLE SCHOOL (GRADES K—8) Students in grades K–2 can make a classroom display where they draw their fixed-mindset voice as a monster with speech bubbles that include fixed-mindset statements the students think or hear others think from the previous activity. These can be things like, “I am not good at this” or “My idea didn’t work, so I give up.” Then they can draw their growth mindset voice like a superhero talking back to their monster with statements like, “This is new to me, but I can improve with effort” or “I can try another idea.” Students in grades 3–8 can work individually or in pairs to draw versions of their characters and will have more statements next to each character. Students who have trouble writing can use voice-to-text software and design their character on Google Slides (https://google.com/slides/about) or Google Docs (https://google.com/docs/about).

It may help to ask students the following questions.

• “When does the fixed-mindset voice show up?”

• “What does the voice say?”

• “What effect do these negative thoughts have on you and your actions?”

• “What would happen if you talked back to your character using the growth mindset statements?”

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This activity adapted from Dweck (2016) helps students recognize, call out, and check their fixed-mindset voice. Instead of listening or reacting to their negative internal voice, students learn to talk back to it using their growth mindset statements. Fixed-mindset characterizations help students recognize their fixed-mindset voice and its effect on their thoughts, actions, and the ways they interact with others.

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HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 9—12) Show students the example in figure 2.2. Have students name and draw their own fixed-mindset characterization, then write a description of their character while considering the preceding questions for kindergarten through eighth grade. Next, they write a second paragraph describing how they could “talk back to” each fixed-mindset statement with a growth mindset statement.

(You can include a picture or characterization that indicates growth like a body builder or a superhero with a cape alongside these statements for this activity.)

Source: Adapted from Dweck, 2016.

FIGURE 2.2: Fixed-mindset characterization example.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Students ask themselves, “What should I do when I hear my fixed-mindset voice say something discouraging? What can I do to help encourage myself? What can I do to help encourage my friends and classmates? How does the way I talk to myself affect my ability to learn and try new things? How does the fixed-mindset voice cause me to think, act, and respond to other people?”

Crafting a Vision (Grades K–12) Now that students have examined their mindset, the next step is to have students consider what success looks like to them. This is their vision, and it will be based on their values and may help them sort out what is of value to them. A vision board is a great visual way for students to begin thinking about their goals. A vision board is like a collage. It is a collection of pictures, sometimes with a few words that create a visual representation of things a student may be interested in doing, what they want to learn, places they wish to go, careers they are interested in, or obstacles they are struggling to overcome. This creates the “big picture” or frame of reference that students can work from when setting more short-term and specific goals. Crafting a vision enables students to think about their long-term goals and connect them to short-term goals for this school year. A sample vision board created by a sixth-grade student is included in figure 2.3 (page 48).

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Negative Nellie shows up at the most inconvenient times, whenever I am thinking about trying something new or starting a challenging project. She also arrives when I am facing a difficult situation, make a mistake, or receive negative feedback or a bad grade. At first, she pretends like she is just trying to help me. This is how she sneaks her way through the door and why she is holding gifts with an evil grin on her face.

She doesn’t want me to embarrass myself or work really hard and then fail. She tries to convince me she is protecting me when really, she is holding me back. I know she is not helpful at all and is only there to plant seeds of doubt and whisper discouraging thoughts. When I listen to her, I feel depressed and angry. She wants me to stay in my comfort zone, avoid trying new things, and give up. When I think about her messages, they really don’t make much sense. When I talk back to her and teach her my growth mindset statements, she loses her evil powers.

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Make lots of friends.

Read more and get good grades.

Take care of my pets.

FIGURE 2.3: Vision board.

Show students some examples of a vision board. There are many examples and how-to videos available online for creating a vision board on multiple platforms.

INSTRUCTIONS Students think about things they hope to achieve personally or in school by the end of the school year. They can consider goal-oriented questions like the following.

• “Is there anything you struggled with last year that you would like to work on this year?”

• “What interests do you want to find out more about?”

• “What books do you want to read?”

• “What is a skill that you wish to improve?”

• “What is something you would like to learn this year or in this class?”

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Students draw or find pictures to represent their answers to these aspirations.

UPPER ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE (GRADES 3—8) Same as for kindergarten through second-grade students, but these students also describe their goals with a few words.

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Make more money and start saving more.

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HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 9—12) Use the same approach for third- through fifth-grade students, but also include visual representations of long-term goals related to their short-term goals. This could include pictures to answer the following.

• “What colleges am I interested in attending?”

• “What are my future plans?”

• “What careers am I interested in?”

Students can add their vision board to a front clear pocket on their strategies notebooks so they see their goals often. It is also possible to create a digital vision board using Google Slides or Google Drawings (https://docs.google.com/drawings).

Determining School and Classroom Values (Grades K–12) In this activity, students list classroom values and draw a picture to represent their interpretation of what acting on each value looks like. Coauthors Lauren Porosoff and Jonathan Weinstein (2018) define values as how a student chooses to act or “qualities of action that make life meaningful” (p. 6). They posit in-school values answer questions like the following.

• “How will I approach school?”

• “How will I choose to do this assignment?”

• “How will I choose to relate to my peers?” (Porosoff & Weinstein, 2018) Usually, students choose values for themselves that are adverbs like courageously or responsibly (Porosoff & Weinstein, 2018). While goals describe exactly what students are going to do, values answer the question of why they are going to do it. Values form the basis for the identity or the type of person one wishes to become. Habits expert James Clear (2018) explains it this way: “Each action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become” (p. 38).

For example, you may have the goal of keeping your papers in a binder. You may be doing this because you value organization. To accomplish this goal, you must have a process that leads you to develop the habit of putting your papers in a binder. By developing this habit and practicing each day, you are becoming a more organized person. Determining classroom and individual values helps students explore their meaning and encourages them to think about how they can use their actions to live according to their values in the classroom, school, and at home.

Since values is an abstract concept, it may help to provide students with some examples.

Find a detailed list of values from Porosoff and Weinstein’s (2018) book Empower Your Students (visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement). This list may be helpful for developing classroom values or helping students determine and elaborate on their individual values.

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Students ask themselves, “How does what I do in school each day relate to my vision? What do I need to change to work toward my vision? What are some small steps I can take right now to begin working toward the vision on my board?”

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INSTRUCTIONS Students brainstorm a list of classroom values together as a group. This list can replace class rules and may include the following.

In this class: • We celebrate the accomplishments of our classmates.

• We always do our best work.

• We persist through challenges because we can do hard things.

• We view mistakes as opportunities for learning.

• We show kindness and respect to everyone.

• We approach challenges with curiosity.

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Students may enjoy thinking of examples of actions that would exemplify each value or what each value would look like in the classroom. They can draw pictures and describe actions compatible with each value. For example, for “We show kindness and respect to everyone,” a student may draw a picture of themselves inviting a student who is eating alone in the cafeteria to sit with them. Another student might interpret it as listening carefully to the teacher and draw a picture of that scenario.

UPPER ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL (GRADES 3—8) Students complete the preceding early elementary activity similarly, but these students can use the school or district’s set of core values as a springboard to create their classroom values.

For example, if the school values include respect for self and others, commitment to lifelong learning, and always giving your best effort, students can write their own interpretations of these values or draw a picture of what they would look like in action. Use these pictures for a classroom or schoolwide display of each value and its many interpretations or associated actions.

HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 9—12) Individually, students list values or things important to them, along with ways they may demonstrate these values through their actions. It is fun for students to do this through visual notes. For example, if students value excellence, they would ask themselves, “What would excellence look like at school?” Each student may list things like putting forth their best effort on each assignment, getting to school on time even when they feel like sleeping in, or doing the required reading so that they can contribute to class discussions. Each student lists written descriptions and draws a picture of what each value would look like. Students can think of examples of how repeated actions determine the type of person someone will become. Tying

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It may help to ask students: “What are some guidelines that would help you and your classmates be productive and feel safe and happy in this classroom? Can you make a value word into a sentence to create a classroom value? What are some real-life examples of the classroom value you created?”

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habits and goals to the type of people they wish to become gives students the motivation they need to stick with these values. It is the difference between completing an assignment because your teacher or parent is making you and completing an assignment because you know you value hard work and dedication.

Students ask themselves, “How do my values connect to the way I act and the decisions I make each day in school? What can I do if my values do not match my actions? How can focusing on my values help me stay motivated in school?”

Helping Students Create Hooks and Connections to Learning (Grades K–12)

1. Intrinsic value: Are the materials and activities interesting?

2. Attainment value: Are they important?

3. Utility value: Are they useful to me?

Teachers help students see the purpose of an assignment by addressing the preceding questions in the hook to their lesson. Students can also practice creating their own hooks for learning by thinking about how they can make their assignments more interesting, important, and useful. This activity helps students practice connecting what they are learning to their own interests, goals, and values to spark internal motivation. Employ this activity whenever students learn a new skill.

Students encounter plenty of learning situations and must figure out their own reasons why the material is interesting, important, or useful. If students always rely on the teacher to spark their interest, they will not cultivate their ability to spark their own interest. This is especially important when they encounter a teacher who is not particularly dynamic, or the subject is not exactly in line with their interests. Thinking about the utility of a skill before jumping into learning the skill helps students to activate prior knowledge and make connections.

INSTRUCTIONS Ask students to think of times when something was interesting to learn or when they felt engaged in a lesson. What hooked them into the lesson? What made them want to learn about the topic?

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) The teacher will need to lead and model the approach to finding a hook for learning. Go through the following steps with students as a part of introducing a new topic to the whole class.

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Students must feel both capable of and see the value in doing the work. Many students set a goal and focus exclusively on achieving the result. This is a quick way to become demotivated because it seems difficult to reach the goal from their current position. Instead, teach students to focus on linking the tasks they do each day to their values, interests, and goals.

By doing this, students make the work they do at school meaningful and make connections between their daily choices and the outcomes they wish to achieve. Professors Lonnie Rowell and Eunsook Hong (2013) list three factors that influence whether students value learning tasks. Students may consider the following when deciding how much effort to put toward a task; these factors can determine the level of internal motivation.

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UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) Students complete the graphic organizer in figure 2.4 by considering the following.

1. Students consider how they can make the topic they are learning interesting. Is there a way they have enjoyed learning something new before? For example, would they like to look up a video, see a virtual tour of an exhibit, model it with manipulatives, or create a song or essay about it? Does the topic relate to any of their personal interests?

2. Students try to orient themselves to the important skills they need for this task. What could the possible applications of this skill be outside school?

3. Students outline the possible uses of a particular skill now and in the future. How could this skill connect to their long- and short-term goals?

Creating Hooks Name: Class or Section: Teacher:

How Can I...

Make this interesting?

We are learning about the U.S. Civil War in history. In the past, I have been more interested in history when I could watch a video or visit a battlefield to find out more about the content and backstory instead of just reading facts and seeing dates on timelines.

Orient myself to the

As a citizen and future voter, it is important for me to be informed about the history of the United States.

Outline the possible

These facts will be useful when I am taking the tests required to graduate. I will also need to take history in college. I am sure this skill will come up again. My grandpa likes to visit the battlefield parks, and now I will know what he is talking about.

Know how engaging

I want to graduate from high school and go to college.

This information helps me do well in this class and on the required testing.

important skills?

uses of this skill?

in this particular task aligns with my goals, vision, or values?

FIGURE 2.4: Creating hooks example.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

©️2022 by Solution Tree Press

4. Students connect the current task back to larger goals and personal values. How does engaging in this particular task align with the students’ personal values, classroom values, or both? How can they make this task meaningful?

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Strategies for Using Goals to Increase Motivation There are several different types of goals. Goals can be short-term, proximal goals, or long-term, distal goals. Ideally, a student’s short-term goals should provide steps that work toward their long-term goals. Students can also have a mastery orientation where they “define academic success as learning something new” or a performance orientation where they “demonstrate their competence relative to others” (Rowell & Hong, 2013, p. 160). Mastery goals align with the growth mindset and foster internal motivation, whereas performance goals align with the fixed mindset and do not set the stage for internal motivation. Setting short-term mastery goals with frequent opportunities for feedback helps students align their actions with their vision and the results they are hoping for. Classrooms that focus on mastery emphasize effort and give students room to make mistakes, learn, and grow instead of focusing on end results, like grades and test scores.

• The goal is not specific enough. You don’t know how to start or how to determine whether you have achieved it.

• The goal is too big, and you cannot accomplish it right now.

• You don’t have a plan or a system in place to achieve the goal.

Self-assessing allows students to develop an awareness of their current abilities by evaluating themselves on their performance, knowledge, and their actions and attitudes about learning.

It can happen during the planning phase and when students are evaluating outcomes. This awareness of strengths and weaknesses makes students capable of setting applicable learning goals. Goals describe the results you want to achieve from learning and are important to the learning process because they guide you in planning, deciding what to direct your effort toward, and determining when to pay attention. Setting clear, specific, and doable goals for learning has a positive effect on student performance in the classroom (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

Intentionally planning to learn by setting goals affects the effort students put toward their work in the classroom more than any other strategy. Goal setting can determine what students do to learn in the classroom because they gain self-efficacy (or a belief in their own ability) to change their behavior and produce results when they successfully set and work toward short-term goals (Akamatsu et al., 2019).

Setting Goals for Metacognitive Strategy Use (Grades K–12) Students can begin to think about goal setting by looking at their metacognitive strategies inventory (see figure 1.4, page 26) and consider turning red or yellow strategy areas into goals.

This activity offers a way for students to analyze the metacognitive strategies they are not currently using and set goals to begin using strategies to increase their learning. Do this activity at the beginning of the year and then once every nine weeks or four times throughout the year. This activity helps students become aware of metacognitive strategies and then focus on which strategies they are currently using and which strategies they need to work on.

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Everyone has had the experience of setting a goal for themselves and then not getting around to it. This can happen for several reasons.

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INSTRUCTIONS Have students find their filled-out metacognitive strategies inventory that they placed in their strategies notebook. Remind them of the strategies for their grade level. Read each strategy aloud and prompt students to look at how they rated themselves on their use of that strategy.

See the following sections to learn how to adapt this activity to different grade ranges. As they are looking at their inventory, ask students to consider the following: What strategies did I color red or yellow? Where is there room to grow? Does my goal relate to a strategy that I am not using or that I do not use consistently?

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2)

UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) The teacher has students complete the following process using the metacognitive strategies inventory (see figure 1.4, page 26).

• Write down all the strategies that are red (or the student never uses). For example: I create my own examples.

• Write down all the strategies that are yellow (or the student sometimes uses).

For example: I think about what I want to learn, set goals, and make a plan before I begin working.

• Choose one strategy to work on from the red category (or yellow if you do not have any red). For example: I create my own examples.

• Turn this statement into a goal by using the following sentence stem. Example: When I am learning, I will

.

• Students should keep their metacognitive strategy goals somewhere they can see them each day. They can draw an illustration next to their goal to help remind them what to do. Example: When I am learning, I will create my own examples.

Students ask themselves, “What process can I put in place to remind myself to work on this goal each day? Who can I tell about this goal that will hold me accountable? What evidence will I have that I am accomplishing or not accomplishing this goal?”

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The teacher helps all students work on the first five statements on the metacognitive strategies inventory by presenting them as restated goals. The picture for that strategy should appear next to the goal to help the student understand. The teacher could laminate and affix the goals to each student’s desk. Alternately, the teacher could give students an object associated with the goals to keep on their desk, like a light bulb eraser for paying attention to their understanding; plastic glasses to put on when it is time to implement their strategies for focus; a brain-shaped stress ball to remind them to think about what they already know; a box of crayons to draw pictures; or a special pen or marker for checking their work. This helps students see goals are something you choose to carry out with your actions each day.

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Setting SMART Goals (Grades K–12) This activity is a process for setting a goal to ensure the resulting goal is possible to monitor and achieve. To achieve a goal, students must fully understand what they are working on and when they will achieve it. As discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), goals should be SMART (Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014; Doran, 1981).

• Strategic and specific: What will you do? What are you trying to achieve?

• Measurable: How will you know when you achieve your goal?

• Attainable: Is this goal achievable in the next two to six months? Do you currently have the skills to reach this goal?

• Results oriented: Is this goal important enough to you to put work into achieving it?

• Time bound: Does your goal have a specific deadline?

INSTRUCTIONS At the beginning of a new school year, have students set goals based on their vision and values. In each class and at the start of each grading period, students set goals to show where they are going next. Students set goals for lessons in a particular subject or at the beginning of each new unit when they are learning something new. Students should update goals after receiving feedback or when they are asked the question, “Now what?”

Ask students why they don’t always achieve the goals they set as a way to introduce the preceding activity and summary information about goal setting (see page 53). What are some things that get in the way of achieving goals?

EARLY AND UPPER ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—5) Encourage students to ask themselves, “What small steps can I take right now to align my actions with the vision on my vision board?” Students practice setting goals as a class or in groups. Model and introduce goal setting and how to write an achievable, trackable goal.

Students in third and fourth grades can then practice writing their own goals.

MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 6—12) Have students reflect on their vision and dreams on their vision board, then brainstorm small steps they can take right now to align their actions with their larger vision and values.

They go through the following SMART process to make sure their short-term goal will work (see figure 2.5, page 56). Teachers go through the example in figure 2.5 before students create their own goals. Students put goals in their strategies notebook behind their vision board or in a place where they are visible daily.

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SMART goals help students create short-term mastery and growth-oriented goals. These goals offer tangible rewards and are easier to stick with, thus encouraging students to keep setting goals for themselves.

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Strategic and Specific I want to turn in my assignments on time.

Measurable I will have no zeros for missing work and will turn in 100 percent of my work.

Yes, because it is the beginning of a new nine-week grading period. Over the last nine weeks, I turned in 80 percent of my assignments.

Results Oriented Yes, this is important to me because I would like to improve my grades, and not handing in work lowers my grades.

Time Bound I would like to achieve this by the end of this nine-week grading period.

My Goal: I will turn in 100 percent of my assignments on time this nine-week grading period.

Source: Adapted from Doran, 1981.

FIGURE 2.5: SMART goals.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Students ask themselves, “Have I placed my goal somewhere I will see it daily? Is this goal specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and trackable or time bound? What’s next once I achieve this goal?”

Establishing a Goal-Achievement Process (Grades K–12) A goal gives students something specific to focus on, but they will have trouble achieving their goal if they keep their same habits. To change habits, students must create a new process or way of doing things. Prompt students to think about what they need to change from what they are currently doing to achieve this goal.

For example, if a student is failing English because they have ten missing assignments in the last nine weeks, the student may set the goal, “I will complete and turn in 100 percent of my assignments on time for the next nine weeks.” It is a nice first step to set this goal, but if

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SMART Goals

Attainable

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nothing changes, the student will have trouble accomplishing it. Behaviors like writing assignments down in a planner, estimating how much time each assignment will take, and setting aside time each day to complete work and study will help the student achieve their goal on time. See the following upper elementary through high school section for additional steps for this goal process example. Many times, students quit working on a goal when they become frustrated at not seeing immediate improvement. If teachers prompt students to focus on the process instead of the goal, they will feel successful when taking the small steps each day toward the larger goal. Having certain items to complete each day helps form habits a student can stick to, even through minor setbacks.

Establishing a goal-achievement process is one way to make sure your actions line up with your goals. Students establish a goal-achievement process by asking what they need to change about their daily habits or routines to achieve this goal. The process becomes like a checklist.

If students are completing the actions in their process, they are working toward their goal.

INSTRUCTIONS After presenting the example and summary of this activity, ask students what they need to change about the way they are currently doing things to reach their goal. What would the process of reaching their goal look like? What are the steps? Students then write their goal at the top of a blank page or worksheet and come up with a series of steps (or changes) to help them work toward their goal, which they place in each box. You will find an example worksheet in the upper elementary through high school section that follows.

If you want to laminate this figure, have students use the stars in each box to check off the process step as they complete it each day. This allows students to self-monitor their progress toward achieving their goal and reflect on what might be going wrong if they are not.

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Students practice modeling a goal-achievement process as a class or in groups to introduce the idea that to work toward something big, they must take positive goal-oriented actions each day.

UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) Once students are used to a goal-achievement process for their personal goals, consider using a goal-achievement process for student projects. The end goal of the project is at the top with the due date, and each box contains one step toward completing the project (see figure 2.6, page 58). Each step has its own due date. Determine the deadlines for each small piece of the project by starting at the final due date and working backward. The teacher should model this for students before asking them to try it on their own.

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Break the new goals into steps to elaborate and make the metacognitive process of goal achievement visible. Doing this helps students understand that achieving their goals is often about the ways they choose to spend their time each day.

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Goal-Achievement Process Plan Date:

Name:

What systems do you have to put in place to achieve this goal?

Goal: I will turn in 100 percent of my assignments on time during this nineweek grading period.

I set aside time today to do homework and study.

I used my homework folder to transport assignments to and from school.

I looked at my planner to make sure I have all needed materials before leaving school.

I kept my homework folder on my desk to remind myself to turn in my work, and then I turned in my assignments.

FIGURE 2.6: Goal-achievement process plan.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Students ask themselves, “Am I completing the process steps each day to work toward achieving my goal? If not, what is going wrong, and how can I fix it?”

Strategies for Cultivating Resilience and Grit to Maintain Motivation When students are trying something new, they don’t always succeed right away. Instead, success is the result of steady motivation, persistence, and continued effort over time. It is a measure of resilience and the ability to pick oneself back up after failure. Psychologist Angela Duckworth (2016) found that intelligence was not the main factor determining whether her students were academically successful. Her best performers didn’t have the highest IQ scores or the most talent, and some of her students with the best IQ scores weren’t her top performers.

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My planner is on my desk, and I have written down each assignment.

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Duckworth (2016) notes that in education, teachers tend to focus on measuring IQ, but that in life, one’s level of motivation and perseverance also determines success. Duckworth (2013) calls this determination grit, or the quality of having the “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.” She developed a grit scale (see https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-scale) to measure student grit and discovered students with more grit are more likely to graduate.

When students understand that most people who have tried something difficult face setbacks and bumps in the road, they are more likely to persist when they face their own difficulties in reaching their goals.

Tough (2012) goes on to clarify that, in a sense, developing grit and perseverance is about cultivating what psychologist Martin Seligman (2006) refers to as learned optimism. When students experience a negative event, they must learn to avoid reacting to it as permanent, personal, and pervasive. The ability to persist is dependent on the ability to attribute failure to certain changeable characteristics you can control. It also depends on conscientiousness or the ability to continue to try hard in the absence of any material incentive, even when a task becomes difficult, repetitive, or boring (Tough, 2012).

Before we begin introducing the concept of grit to our students, it is important to consider that many children come to school from lives and communities where they face trauma, adversity, violence, exploitation, systemic racism, and poverty. Educator Bettina L. Love warns that removing history and social context from the discussion about grit is dangerous as many students have been forced to become gritty in order to survive (Love, 2019). In these situations, teachers can help students realize that grit is a quality they may already possess.

Educators can help students think of personal, historical, and cultural examples that illustrate grit in the face of challenge and adversity. Researcher Ethan Ris (as cited in Strauss, 2016) also points out that we have to be careful not to use the concept of grit to “romanticize hardship” or as a reason to target activities focused on cultivating grit exclusively toward low-income or minority children who often already demonstrate large quantities of grit each day. In addition, it is important to point out that teaching about grit should not be used as a way to blame students who experience hardship for their difficult circumstances or to teach students compliance and conformity in the face of unjust systems (Strauss, 2016). We cannot teach students about grit and then ignore pressing social issues that impact their ability to grow toward their true potential. As Love (2019) puts it, students “deserve the right to use their grit to thrive, not just survive.” Since persistence helps individuals to achieve their goals, students can learn a lot from stories of people who demonstrated resilience when faced with

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In his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, author, journalist, and public speaker Paul Tough (2012) explains that students successful in college are not always the same ones who had made the best grades in high school. Instead, they are the ones who were able to develop other skills like “optimism and resilience and social agility.

They were the students who were able to recover from bad grades and resolve to do better next time” (Tough, 2012, p. 52). They bounce back and continue to remain focused when they have a “break up or fight with their parents” (Tough, 2012, p. 52). They seek out help when they need it. They stay focused on their goals even when more potentially fun distractions or activities come up, like hanging out with friends, going to a game, or seeing a movie (Tough, 2012).

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difficulty or hardship. However, it is important to note that some situations are not worth persisting through. Students must be equipped with the strategies to discern which tasks align with their values and are worth continuing to focus their time and attention on.

Students in grades 3–12 watch Duckworth’s (2013) TED Talk, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance to understand what grit is and why they are learning about it. All students can read stories or watch videos and interviews appropriate for their age and grade level about gritty people from history or pop culture like Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Malala Yousafzai, Barbara Corcoran, Oprah Winfrey, John Lewis, or Bethany Hamilton. The school librarian may be able to put together a set of books appropriate for your grade level on this topic so students can read independently, in book clubs, as a small group, or as a whole class.

There are also many fiction and nonfiction stories students can read, or the teacher can read to the class, to further explore the characteristics and attributes of people who persevere in the face of difficulty.

The following activity is based on the work of Duckworth (2016) and helps students learn more about how people they know persevere in working toward their goals.

Conducting Grit Interviews (Grades K–12) Students choose a person they know like a parent, grandparent, friend, or neighbor and ask them to tell the story of how they achieved a big goal. Grit interviews are a great way to see demonstrations of perseverance in a student’s real life. This will help students understand that even adults make mistakes and have difficulties. With continued effort and hard work, students will use what they learn from these hardships to reach their own goals.

INSTRUCTIONS See the following sections to learn how to adapt this activity to different grade ranges. Do this activity whenever students need motivation to keep going.

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) Students watch age-appropriate videos or read books about people who have displayed grit.

UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) Students interview someone they know about their journey to achieve a personal goal.

Students come up with some of their own questions that directly relate to the person they are speaking with but should also consider asking this person the following.

• “What goal did you set?”

• “What were some obstacles you encountered as you were working toward your goal?”

• “How did you overcome these obstacles?”

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Ask students to consider what would have happened if the person (or character) had given up when they first encountered difficulty.

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• “What helped you keep going when you were having a hard day?”

• “When did you achieve your goal, and how did it feel?”

Students put their interview in a traditional news article format with a picture and write-up.

Younger students in third through fifth grades have a picture and the following questions below it, with space to write in each answer. Students can also consider doing video interviews.

Ask students, “How did the famous people you read about or the person you interviewed overcome obstacles? How can you use this information to help yourself the next time you face an obstacle?”

Turning Disappointments Into Opportunities for Growth (Grades K–12)

INSTRUCTIONS Ask students, “Look back at the values exercise. What is one value you are working toward?

What are some examples of ways you demonstrate that value?”

EARLY ELEMENTARY (GRADES K—2) The teacher models the following activity for students as a whole group, using the classroom values and different actions students could take to demonstrate those values.

UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) Students make an outline of their hand and wrist to create a “tree with branches.” In the sky above the tree, they write a value they are working toward, such as doing their best. They write their name on the trunk. As a class or individually, students brainstorm ways to display the quality of doing your best. For example, students complete all their practice problems to the best of their ability. They listen to the teacher. They pay close attention. They correct their problems if they made a mistake. Each of these statements goes on a branch pointing upward toward the sky.

Students ask themselves, “Do I have a value with five real-life examples of that value?”

Point out to students that if a storm comes along, one of the branches could break off the tree. Just like the tree, sometimes when students are reaching and stretching, they get “knocked down” or they try something and it doesn’t work. Ask students the following.

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It is important for students to understand when they try something, they may not always succeed right away. Everyone must learn to overcome obstacles and try again to move toward their values and goals. Discuss with students their different reactions to disappointments that they may perceive as failures. Students use this activity to help develop resilience. This activity can also help students understand that the way they react to disappointments (or feedback) determines whether they will get stuck and stay the same or use failure as an opportunity for learning and growth. This strategy shows students that quitting isn’t the only option if they don’t succeed the first time.

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• “What will happen when the branch breaks off?” (Answer: The tree branch will eventually grow back.)

• “Can the tree continue to reach toward the sun?” (Answer: Yes, there are still four more branches the tree can use to continue to stretch upward.)

• “When you experience a setback, what can you do?” (Answer: When students experience frustration or when the first thing they try does not work, they can try another strategy to continue reaching toward their values or goals.)

Strategies for Evaluating Learning Through Feedback, Reflection, and Revision

• Think about places other than the classroom where they receive feedback, such as sports, music lessons, or dance class.

• Tell a story about a time when they were receptive to feedback and a time they were not.

• Think about what happens when they choose to use feedback and when they choose to discard it.

Feedback from the teacher can increase learning and motivation, and promote self-regulation (Sparks, 2018). The way teachers typically learn to give feedback focuses on the transmission of information. When educators teach students to become more self-regulated in their learning, they emphasize developing strategies or processes. Teachers serve students best by giving feedback not just on the product but also on the process the students used to produce it. During active learning, teachers should aim to give feedback that focuses on learning goals as well as the tasks the students are performing (van den Bergh, Ros, & Beijaard, 2013). If teachers approach feedback as a learning opportunity, they help create an atmosphere where students value mistakes for their ability to produce subsequent opportunities for learning.

Research demonstrates that although teachers believe they are giving a lot of feedback, students report receiving very little teacher feedback. In observational data, researchers see very little teacher feedback in the classroom (Hattie & Yates, 2014). This is because many times teachers provide feedback in a group context, when students tune out, or because teachers mistake praise for feedback. Education researcher John Hattie explains that teacher feedback should help students understand “what they don’t know, what they do know, and where they go [from here]” (as cited in Sparks, 2018). Feedback should answer the following questions (Hattie & Yates, 2014).

• Where am I going, and what are my goals?

• How am I doing, and what progress have I made?

• What should I do next?

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The metacognitive process thrives on feedback from peers and teachers. Students should have the chance to reflect and revise after receiving constructive critique. Feedback is integral to learning, and to succeed, students must learn to accept, analyze, and even seek it out. As a first step, have students do the following.

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Feedback should be goal-focused and address where the student is now in the process of working toward a specific objective. Constructive critique is more effective when it focuses on specific learned skills rather than grades. According to cognitive psychologists, John Hattie and Greg Yates (2014), teachers should be giving different feedback based on where a student is in the learning process. The three types of feedback are as follows.

1. Corrective feedback: For beginners, feedback should focus on skills and whether what they are doing is correct or incorrect. Give this feedback to students as soon as possible.

2. Process feedback: Learners with some experience need feedback on the strategies they are using and how they are applying what they learned. Give this feedback after students have a chance to monitor, evaluate, and revise their own work.

Although valuable in building relationships, educators should approach praise as separate from feedback. When you are talking about a student’s work, you should stick to describing their work and avoid talking about the student as a person and their qualities. It should be positive, direct, specific, and target only skills where students have received adequate instruction.

For example, with a student who is a beginner at a skill and got nine out of ten mathematics problems correct, a teacher would not say, “You are so smart! You got a 90 percent, and that is an A.” Instead, they can try something like, “Your goal for this lesson was to learn to add fractions with like denominators. You went from being unfamiliar with this skill on the pretest to getting nine of ten problems correct! What great progress! Let’s look at your process for solving number three, and why you were tripped up by that problem.”

“Personal theories regarding why things happen” in students’ lives are called attributional beliefs (Rowell & Hong, 2013, p. 160). Students can attribute the outcomes they experience to internal, changeable, and controllable factors, like their level of effort or how much they studied. Students can also attribute outcomes to external, stable, and uncontrollable factors, like an especially easy or hard test, their general ability, or luck. Where students attribute their successes and failures determines the motivational potential of that attributional belief. It is easier to stay motivated when students attribute their successes or failures to causes that are internal, changeable, and controllable (Rowell & Hong, 2013).

While confident students who do well in school tend to attribute their academic successes to effort and ability, students who struggle in school and who may have low self-concept tend not to give themselves credit for academic success. A student with low self-concept’s confidence does not increase when they do well because they do not take credit for it; instead, they attribute the success to an easy test or luck (Rowell & Hong, 2013). Teachers can help these students by pointing out the connection between their efforts and their results.

When students analyze their graded work as well as their strategy use, they are able to link their efforts to the results they receive. The following strategy for analyzing graded assignments and revisiting and organizing the strategies notebook can help students to make this connection.

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3. Self-regulated learner feedback: When they become more advanced, learners need to know how they can use the strategies they learned in other contexts to apply, extend, analyze, and create. Give this feedback after the student has learned and practiced a strategy.

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Analyzing Graded Assignments (Grades K–12) Critically reviewing graded assignments is an effective way to prompt students with questions that help them analyze and reflect on their test performance to see how effective their current study strategies are for them.

Use this activity to identify strengths and weaknesses and decide how students should focus their future study or practice time, and to analyze strategies students used to prepare and determine how effective those strategies were. Also use it to look at mistakes and ask students why they missed those questions. Is there a pattern or a certain concept they do not understand?

INSTRUCTIONS Students should complete this activity after receiving a graded assignment, test, or quiz. See the following sections to learn how to adapt this activity to different grade ranges.

Teachers meet with students to find out why they are struggling with a graded assignment.

Watch students work or have them explain their thought process if possible to find out about the strategies they are using. The teacher should emphasize an attitude of curiosity and reflection about why they missed a question and what strategies led to correct answers and accurate information. Students should use their deduction skills to look for clues. They can work with the teacher or in a small group to learn the process they need to arrive at the answer. Then the students correct their missed items.

UPPER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND HIGH SCHOOL (GRADES 3—12) Teachers use the template in figure 2.7 to have students practice analyzing their graded work more carefully for helpful information and feedback. Teachers should also consider creating their own graded-work analysis customized to their class based on figure 2.7. By carefully reviewing how they performed on the graded assignment, students can decide what they need to do next time.

When students reflect, they pause and consider what they learned from a particular activity.

Having time to think about their learning allows students to make meaning from their learning experiences. Students should reflect on the following.

• What they learned: “What have I learned in this lesson?”

• What they planned to do and what happened: “Did my plan work?”

• The strategies they used: “Were my strategies effective? Why or why not?”

• What they will do next time: “Would I use the same strategies next time?”

Reflection emphasizes that students can learn from errors and there are no real mistakes if students learn something they can apply next time. Reflection can be external and gathered from others’ comments and feedback, or internal and based on your own thoughts and self-evaluation.

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Mindsets and Motivation

Before completing this graded assignment, I practiced or studied by: F Reading over my notes F Doing practice problems F Making my own practice test or practice questions F Using flashcards F Playing a game F Rereading the textbook or teacher-provided articles F Trying to recall as much as I can and then checking what I remember with my notes F Making my notes into a map, diagram, or timeline F Teaching the material to someone else F Having someone quiz me or studying with a group F Creating a mnemonic or way to help myself remember F Other

I didn’t know the answer.

I didn’t understand the question.

I learned it but I couldn’t remember.

I misread the question.

List the questions you missed, correct your answers, and share why you missed each question in the following space (attach a separate piece of paper if needed).

Do you see any patterns or connections between the questions you missed?

FIGURE 2.7: Analyzing graded assignments.

continued

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I missed questions due to the following reasons (make a tally):

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Before doing this graded assignment: F I did not prepare, or I have not seen this concept before the graded assignment.

F I worked on this concept or studied the day or night before.

F I worked on this concept or studied two or three days before.

F I worked on this concept or studied four or five days.

F I worked on this concept or studied at least a week in advance of this graded assignment.

Were you prepared for this graded assignment? If not, what would you do differently in the future?

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Organizing the Strategies Notebook From this chapter, students should have the following to add to their strategies binder (introduced in chapter 1, page 9). Make sure that they have taken the time to reflect on their use of each strategy and evaluate how it is working for them.

• Graphic notes or pictures from the “Exercise Your Brain and Help It Grow” activity • Growth mindset statements and fixed-mindset characterizations • Vision board for the cover or front pocket of the binder or notebook • Determining school and classroom values pictures and examples

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Based on the questions you missed, what do you still need to work on?

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• Sample hooks for learning from the “Helping Students Create Hooks and Connections to Learning” activity • Metacognitive goals • SMART goals with a goal-setting process plan • A transcribed “Grit” interview • The “Turning Disappointments Into Opportunities for Growth” strategy example • A graded assignment analysis using the strategy presented in “Analyzing Graded Assignments”

Summary Academically and in life, motivation is the force that helps propel students forward. Setting goals and determining values will guide and direct their efforts and give students a reason to try and a destination to move toward. These goals and values help students develop the motivation required to put forth the effort to plan, monitor progress, and continue to persist despite obstacles, roadblocks, and bumps in the road to academic success. Self-efficacy and mindset affect whether students believe in their own ability and think their efforts have an impact on their academic outcomes. Students who lack self-efficacy and a growth mindset will have trouble maintaining motivation and momentum toward achieving their goals.

When students challenge themselves, negative thoughts can distract or prevent them from reaching their goals. Learning to talk back to our negative thoughts with a more positive response helps students maintain the motivation and momentum necessary to keep moving forward. Instead of accepting everything they think as truth, students learn to engage in a practice of challenging their own negative thinking. Developing a growth mindset makes it possible for them to choose a response and a thought process that maintain their motivation to continue to work toward goals.

Lastly, it’s hard to stay motivated when you cannot see your progress or do not feel like the results that you achieve are under your control. When students develop strategies for evaluating learning through feedback, reflection, and revision, they gain the insight necessary to continue to grow toward their vision and goals. Practicing strategies for positive mindsets, goal setting, cultivating grit and resilience, and evaluating their own output and learning help students have more control over their level of motivation as they work toward becoming a more self-regulated learner. In the next chapter, we will consider how emotions affect a student’s ability to stay motivated and persist toward their goals.

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Adding the preceding items to their strategies binder will keep the binder a relevant and current resource for their independent learning journey. The strategies binder will be valuable to educators as comprehensive reports on how individual students are progressing in their goals and classwork.

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INDEPENDENT

Students must feel both engaged in learning the curriculum and empowered to pursue their own goals and interests. The only way teachers can achieve this is by making students partners and eventually leaders in their learning process. In The Independent Learner: Metacognitive Exercises to Help K–12 Students Focus, Self-Regulate, and Persevere, author Nina Parrish provides K–12 educators with practical strategies for teaching students how to learn and to practice metacognition. These research-backed teaching strategies equip students with intrinsic motivation, emotional literacy, and problem-solving skills, all of which will be invaluable in their classrooms and future professional lives. By reading The Independent Learner, educators, no matter their grade level or content area, will discover how to create a classroom environment that promotes engagement and self-regulation.

Readers will: » Learn the benefits and components of self-regulated learning

» Discover numerous research-based strategies and activities they can use across grade levels and subject areas » Create an engaging classroom culture that promotes student agency

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» Receive reproducible tools and templates for maximizing student learning

NINA PARRISH

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THE INDEPENDENT LEARNER

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LEARNER METACOGNITIVE EXERCISES TO HELP K–12 STUDENTS FOCUS, SELF-REGULATE, AND PERSEVERE

ISBN 978-1-952812-43-9 90000

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement to download the free reproducibles in this book.

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Nina Parrish