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.
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
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.
