3 minute read
Conclusion
Our charge as educators is to meet our students’ learning needs. To this end, teachers around the world are embracing social-emotional learning. You may be feeling nervous about providing this instruction—social-emotional learning likely wasn’t a focus of your teacher preparation program. We encourage you to try a few of the instructional activities and reflect along the way. These activities were purposefully designed for the adolescent learner and have been found to be highly engaging. We commend your efforts to help your students improve their self-regulation with these evidence-based instructional activities. Through our work with thousands of middle and high school teachers, we have witnessed growth in the ability of students to self-regulate, resulting in increased learning, goal attainment, and prosocial behaviors. Self-regulation fuels adolescents to become socially and emotionally engaged, career-equipped, lifelong learners.
CHAPTER 1
UNDERSTANDING SELF-REGULATION
Self-regulation is a complex internal process associated with metacognition, motivation, behavior, and management of emotional reactions. We selfregulate when we plan, self-evaluate our progress, and continually adjust our course of action for improved outcomes. By practicing self-regulation, we are empowered to evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts, demonstrate responsibility for our actions, and stay motivated toward achieving our goals (Frey et al., 2018; Noonan & Gaumer Erickson, 2018; Schunk & Greene, 2018). Self-regulation provides a process for reflecting on and adjusting the behaviors that impact our learning (Usher & Schunk, 2018). When we consider how well we self-regulate, it’s important to identify both strengths and areas requiring additional focus.
WHAT TEACHERS SAY
—Kate, English language arts teacher
Consider your classroom instructional activities, assignments, and assessments. How do you promote students’ self-regulation? Do you regulate for students by telling them how to study, giving short-term due dates for long-term projects, or providing class time for them to catch up on missing work? How could you shift the responsibility to students while providing them with the scaffolding necessary to facilitate success?
Instead of planning and monitoring for students, teachers are shifting to coaching students to self-regulate. As a coach, you guide the students, ask them questions, and prompt them to consider their progress, but you do not design the plan for them. Students will develop and improve their selfregulation as they practice planning, monitoring, adjusting, and reflecting with teacher support.
Let’s follow along with a teacher as she shifts from regulating for her students to promoting their self-regulation. Mrs. Cooper teaches freshman English, but her process for promoting students’ success on a large project can apply to any subject. We will revisit Mrs. Cooper to learn how she applied the concepts in each chapter and see the reactions from her students.
Mrs. Cooper’s Research Project
Mrs. Cooper teaches freshman English, and one of her goals is that every student becomes proficient in researching a topic and writing a research paper. Reflecting on past years, approximately half of her students turned in their research papers on time, and more than 10 percent of students risked failing her course, due in large part to incomplete research projects. Her previous strategy was to break down the preparation for the project into manageable steps and determine short-term due dates. She then gave this outline to students and provided some time in class for independent work. Mrs. Cooper monitored each student’s progress and met individually with students if they missed two of her short-term due dates. When she met with students, she told them what they needed to do to get back on track.
This year, Mrs. Cooper has decided that she wants students to take more ownership over completion of their research project. First, she hands out the rubric that she will use to grade the research papers. She explains how rubrics work and then describes each indicator. Students reflect on their past research papers, identifying strengths and areas that are harder for them. Students then read the score descriptions on the rubric, and each student marks where he or she would like to score on each indicator. She encourages students to identify moderately challenging goals (indicator descriptions). After class, Mrs. Cooper reviews each student’s rubric goals to ensure that the result, should the goals be met, meets the overall mastery level of 80 percent for the research paper. For students with low expectations of themselves, Mrs. Cooper provides specific verbal and written encouragement, persuading them to set more challenging goals for particular rubric indicators.
Mrs. Cooper is encouraged that students are accurately self-assessing their areas of strength and weakness related to the project, and each student now has a clear understanding of the success criteria.
