Self-Regulated Learning for Academic Success

How do I help students manage their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions? (ASCD Arias)

Carrie Germeroth, Crystal Day-Hess

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781416618560
• eBook ISBN: 9781416618591
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Just as all teachers know what it's like to teach students who struggle to set goals, follow rules, stay on task, and stay motivated, all teachers can recognize students who are able to self-regulate. They are the ones who approach challenge with confidence, plan their learning tactics, maintain focus, work well with peers, monitor their progress, seek help when they need it, and adjust their approach for next time. They are the ones who succeed in school. Fortunately, self-regulated learning can be taught—in every content area and at every grade level, from preK through high school. In this resource, Carrie Germeroth and Crystal Day-Hess of Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) present instructional strategies and specific ideas you can implement in your classroom today to put all your students on the path to positive, empowered learning and greater academic success.

The What, Why, and How of Self-Regulation

As every teacher knows, student learning is influenced by a complex set of factors, and there’s no single formula that can ensure success. But as a teacher, you also know you have a powerful role to play. An essential way to help students develop the critical thinking and independent learning skills they need to succeed academically is by supporting self-regulation in the classroom.

What is self-regulation? Simply defined, it is the ability to control one’s body and self, to manage one’s emotions, and to maintain focus and attention (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). Self-regulation begins to develop in early childhood, and, according to the model first articulated by developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1997), it proceeds in stages:

• Stage 1: Children are regulated by another person, typically a parent or a teacher. This outside regulator provides the rules for behavior and monitors the children while they learn how to apply these rules to themselves.
• Stage 2: Children begin to internalize rules for behavior and conduct and to apply these rules to other people. Although it’s typical for teachers and parents to discourage tattling, when young children tell on one another or point out that others are “doing things wrong,” it’s a positive sign that they’re starting to notice both rules and rule violations.
• Stage 3: Children begin to apply the rules of behavior and conduct to themselves, and they do so voluntarily even when no one is watching them. It’s at this point that children may be able to stop themselves from doing something “against the rules” and initiate actions that follow the rules.

Self-Regulation in the Classroom

Within the context of education, self-regulation can be thought of as the fourth “R”; it’s an ability students need not only to set and achieve academic goals in reading, writing, and arithmetic but also to interact appropriately with others in the classroom. The foundational nature of self-regulation explains why it is so often linked with the general concept of school readiness. Indeed, the following skills, identified in a national survey of kindergarten teachers as critical to school readiness, are all closely tied to self-regulation:

• Communicating needs, wants, and thoughts verbally
• Sustaining attention and being enthusiastic and curious in new activities
• Inhibiting impulsivity and following directions
• Taking turns and being sensitive to other children’s feelings (Blair, 2003, p. 1)

We know that students’ physical and social environments can have a profound effect on how well they do in school, and plenty of evidence suggests the same is true of students’ ability to self-regulate. The self-regulation skills of preschoolers have actually been linked to their eventual SAT scores. Difficulty with self-regulation translates into poor work habits, trouble concentrating, low motivation, and behavioral problems, some so extreme that they lead to expulsion.

The good news is that self-regulation in the classroom is something that can be modeled and taught—not just in the “ideal window” of early childhood but throughout a student’s schooling (Boekaerts, 2006). Students’ ability to manage their “thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in order to successfully navigate their learning experiences” is known as self-regulated learning (Zumbrunn, Tadlock, & Roberts, 2011, p. 4).

The Phases of Self-Regulated Learning

Like Zimmerman (2008), we recommend looking at self-regulated learning as a three-phase process.

During the pre-learning forethought phase, students focus on the expectations of a new task, what they expect the upcoming task’s outcomes to be, and the interest in or value they place on the task. In other words, students consider how much they care about what they’re about to do and how well they believe they can do it. It’s during the forethought phase that students set goals for themselves and plan how they will approach the challenge or solve the problem. Where will they begin? What strategies will they use? How much are they willing to do?

During the performance phase that follows, students apply their chosen strategy to do the actual “what” of the work. This is the time for internal troubleshooting. Students consider what is or is not working and what is or is not engaging or rewarding. Critically, they also decide whether they need help or guidance, whether they will stick to a task or abandon it, and what adjustments they need to make to complete the work.

Finally, during the self-reflection phase, students respond to and reflect on the task and its outcomes. How much effort did they invest? What worked and what didn’t? What approach might be a better choice next time? Ideally, students will apply these self-judgments to future learning, which will then effect the next forethought phase.

Zimmerman’s three-phase model underscores that with practice and the right teacher support all students can become successful self-regulated learners. By drawing on their previous learning experiences, they can assemble a better toolkit of strategies and build confidence in their ability to take on new challenges. By contrast, if students don’t believe that they can learn, they may not even attempt challenging tasks. And if they don’t reflect on the work that they do, the strategies they use, and the outcomes they achieve, they are less likely to use effective learning strategies in the future (Schunk & Ertmer, 2000).

Teachers can help students manage their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in the classroom by modeling appropriate strategies and creating supportive yet academically challenging learning environments. In this publication, we present research-based instructional strategies keyed to preK and kindergarten, elementary school, and middle and high school that you can implement today to support your students throughout each phase of self-regulated learning.

Developing self-regulation is an iterative process, and the strategies we present are designed to help students build and extend their skills as they move through school. Don’t be afraid to try strategies associated with grade levels lower than the level you teach. If, for example, you have an 8th grader who struggles to follow rules and stay on task, the scaffolding supports we recommend for elementary-age students are likely to be very helpful. Of course, many of our suggested strategies—such as modeling a positive attitude toward learning and providing simple mediation strategies—are appropriate for all grade levels and every classroom.

Self-Regulated Learning in PreK and Kindergarten

Young children just beginning to gain regulatory control over their attention, actions, and emotions learn best in environments that are playful. If you’re a preK or kindergarten teacher, a general way to help your students develop self-regulation is by emphasizing make-believe play—guiding them to create imaginary situations in which they act out specific roles. The broad content themes of early childhood curricula can be adapted fairly easily to provide more intentional opportunities for this kind of play. For example, during a “Wind and Water” theme, students might play pretend “hurricane” in one classroom, “aquarium” in another, and “underwater explorers” in yet another, each time following the rules of their “characters” and the scenario.

Let’s take a closer look at how to support self-regulation in the youngest students during each phase of Zimmerman’s three phases of self-regulation.

Supporting Forethought (PreK–K)

Remember, forethought occurs before learning activities and is largely about motivation, interest, and the confidence to take on the task. Because young students are naturally curious about their environment and engaged in learning, supporting forethought in preK and kindergarten is about encouraging these positive thoughts and behaviors. At this age, a teacher- and child-led instructional approach is optimal. By this, we mean that the students have some freedom to “design” activities, based on their own interest, and the teacher follows that direction, providing background information to enrich play and learning scenarios and thoughtfully creating new learning opportunities based on the how the play evolves.

What to Do: Plan for Play
Planning for imaginative play supports self-regulation because you’re asking the students to think ahead about what they’re going to play and then setting the expectation that they will follow through with that plan; in this way, it prefigures the planning older students will do to achieve learning goals. When you brainstorm play scenarios with young students, you increase their engagement in the activity to come and improve your ability to authentically assess their understanding of a topic or concept.

Ideas to Try Now
 Turn topics students are interested in into complex play themes. For example, they may keep coming back to the topic of pets (their own pets or pets they’d like to have), or you may notice several students pretending to be cats or dogs—or lions or bears! Think of a way to turn that interest into a more complex play theme that can support multiple roles and scenarios. An interest in animals, for example, lends itself to a veterinarian or zoo play theme.

 Use a story, video, field trip, or guest speaker to stimulate interest and build background knowledge. For our pet example, you might invite a local veterinarian to visit your classroom and talk about what the job is like day to day.

Supporting Performance (PreK–K)

When it comes to completing a task, preschoolers and kindergartners may need scaffolding. One of the central concepts of Vygotskian theory is the idea of mental tools—things like shopping lists and mnemonic devices that help people focus, remember, understand, imagine, and calculate.

What to Do: Use Simple Visual Tools to Support Memory
An external mediator—a tangible, outside object like a picture or a string around a finger—is one of the first mental tools young children can master (Bodrova & Leong, 2007). When children count on their fingers, they’re using an external mediator that gradually instills the mental process of counting; once they internalize the process, they don’t need the tool any more. Just as visual tools, such as manipulatives, help young children master mathematics content, using tangible and visual reminders supports early self-regulation during all kinds of learning activities.

Ideas to Try Now
 Give learners who have trouble remembering to put their names on their papers a pair of glasses with the lenses removed. Call them their “editor’s eyes” and ask them to use them to remind themselves to check their work before turning it in (Bodrova & Leong, 2008).

 Pair students for reading activities and give them photos or drawing of a set of lips and a pair of ears mounted on separate pieces of paper. The child whose turn it is to read holds the lips, while the listener holds the ears; then they switch. This visual reminder of their roles helps them maintain attention during the task (Bodrova et al., 2012).

What to Do: Model a Positive Attitude Toward Learning
A positive mindset is especially important during challenging activities, when students must choose between “It’s too hard; I can’t” and “It’s hard, but I’ll try.” You want to demonstrate the process of talking through a problem so that your students will begin to see how to negotiate challenging situations. This is an instructional strategy that is applicable at every grade level.

Ideas to Try Now
 Introduce the process of observing, researching, creating and testing hypotheses, and collaborating to find answers or new ways to solve problems. Explain to your students that together, you’re going to identify a problem through observation, research possible solutions, and try to find the answers to your problem. Create visual records of your quest, using pictures when possible, to make sure preliterate learners can follow along.

 Help students realize that answers don’t always come easily. Persistence is a key facet of self-regulation. By regularly modeling this “I’ll try and keep trying” attitude when confronting challenges in the classroom, you are giving your students a template for how to tackle tasks in later grades and in life.

What to Do: Provide Simple Mediation Strategies
Although we often exhort children to “use their words” or “work it out” during a disagreement, we don’t always provide them with explicit strategies for how to do so. But just as children need to be taught the fundamentals of literacy or math, they also need the building blocks of conflict resolution. Begin with tangible, hands-on methods. The goal is to illustrate ways to resolve conflict other than fight...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• The What, Why, and How of Self-Regulation
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright