5 minute read
What Will I Find in This Book?
WHAT TEACHERS SAY
—Rachel, geometry teacher
The seventy-five instructional activities within this book come from practice-based research. Through our collaboration with thousands of middle and high school educators, the initial instruction, scenario-based guided learning, and independent practice activities have been tested and refined in diverse classrooms. Each chapter contains a variety of options to make it easy for educators to select activities that can be most effectively incorporated into their context, based on their grade level, content area, student population, or a variety of other factors. In other words, you don’t need to use every activity included in this book—choose the ones that will be most useful in helping your students reach the learning targets.
Like learning anything else, self-regulation takes practice over time. In addition to purposeful instruction, students need practice in authentic settings to become proficient. Use your specific content area and context to pinpoint ways for students to practice self-regulation. The best way to help students develop self-regulation is by facilitating multiple opportunities for them to practice the components while providing them with constructive feedback and prompts for self-reflection. In each chapter, you’ll read about Mrs. Cooper’s research project. This vignette describes how one teacher facilitated students’ development through ongoing practice, reflection, and feedback. We have also included quotes from real people to illustrate how educators and students engage with the instructional activities. These quotes come directly from educators and students in schools that have implemented self-regulation instruction and practice. They were collected via interviews, professional development evaluations, and student work examples.
This book is designed as a stand-alone toolkit that any educator in a middle or high school can use to improve instructional practices related to self-regulation; however, we encourage you to embark on this journey with other educators. Use the instructional planning form at the end of each chapter to take notes, modify the scenarios to resonate with your students, and contemplate ideas for facilitating students’ practice of the concepts. After reading each chapter, discuss your ideas with colleagues and try out a few of the instructional activities with students. Share your successes, and brainstorm solutions to any barriers you encounter. Chapters 1–7 provide
instructional activities, scenarios, and performance-based assessments, with each chapter focusing on specific learning targets. The allocation of time for each instructional activity may vary depending on class size and the depth of students’ discussion, but in general, most activities require less than fifteen minutes. The epilogue provides a systems perspective for continuous schoolwide improvement of implementation and impacts.
Chapters 1–7 follow a structure that describes deliberate teaching and learning methods, organizing instructional activities into three categories which gradually shift the responsibility to the students, building their competence along the way. 1. Initial instruction: These activities support students’ development of knowledge around critical concepts, make connections to their lives, and build a shared vocabulary to promote discussion of the critical concepts. Select activities that best match the needs and interests of your students to meet the identified goal of instruction. Initial instruction concludes with a check for understanding. 2. Guided collaborative learning: By applying critical concepts of self-regulation using vignettes that approximate adolescents’ experiences, students are able to engage in the learning and collaborate with peers to explore diverse perspectives in a nonjudgmental environment. Choose activities that will be relatable to your students, or modify the scenarios within the activities to make them applicable. Guided collaborative learning concludes with a situational judgment assessment. 3. Independent practice with feedback: After students understand the concepts of self-regulation, practice with feedback is vital for skill development. This practice can be focused on academic, social, emotional, or personal goals. As the teacher, you can facilitate practice for course-specific projects, essays, presentations, test preparation, or academic success in general. You can also guide students to self-regulate progress toward their personal endeavors, such as health, community activism, or mastering a skill. These activities serve as performance-based assessments.
Chapter 1: Understanding Self-Regulation
Through instructional activities 1–13, students will describe self-regulation; identify why it is important in their own lives; articulate the components of self-regulation as plan, monitor, adjust, and reflect; describe the complexity
of the self-regulation process; and reflect on their personal strengths and areas for growth related to the self-regulation components.
Chapter 2: Making a Plan
Through instructional activities 14–25, students will differentiate between a goal and a plan; describe a variety of real-life situations in which selfregulation planning is beneficial; determine behaviors, processes, and timelines for quality, situation-specific planning; and create personalized, detailed plans for reaching their goals.
Chapter 3: Monitoring Your Plan and Progress
Through instructional activities 26–40, students will identify a variety of ways to monitor both progress and actions, determine methods for monitoring actions and progress within situation-specific self-regulation planning, and design effective monitoring techniques for their personal and academic endeavors.
Chapter 4: Adjusting Your Plan
Through instructional activities 41–52, students will acknowledge that everyone faces challenges and will determine options for adjusting efforts in order to maintain progress toward an objective.
Chapter 5: Reflecting on Your Efforts and Outcomes
Through instructional activities 53–64, students will articulate the purpose of reflection, determine reflection methods for a variety of situations, and engage in self-directed reflection throughout the self-regulation process.
Chapter 6: Putting It All Together
Through instructional activities 65–75, students will analyze situations and determine how each component of self-regulation could be addressed, analyze personal self-regulation habits and knowledge, and apply the self-regulation process to their own endeavors.
Chapter 7: Measuring Growth in Self-Regulation
This chapter guides educators in determining methods for assessing students’ perceptions, knowledge, skills, application of skills, and outcomes related to self-regulation. It discusses the purposes and uses of these data.
Epilogue and Next Steps
The book wraps up with resources to guide implementation, including instructional criteria and a practice profile that support educators’ reflection on instructional design.
