21st CLD Self-Regulation

SELF REGULATION SUMMARY

Self-regulation occurs when learners consciously organize, monitor, evaluate, and ultimately take control of their learning.

Today’s youth must prepare for the reality of 21st century life and work. They must prepare to:

• Take responsibility for their lives and work
• Engage fully with their communities
• Continue to learn beyond school age
• Work with minimal supervision
• Design their own work products
• Incorporate feedback to develop and improve

Educators must work with learners and guide and empower them to:

• Create opportunities to learn effectively
• Take responsibility for their own learning
• Develop initiative and self-direction skills

Educators must develop clear learning goals and success criteria so learners plan and monitor their own work. Learners foster self-regulation skills in groups when they decide how, when, and where they will complete the work. It’s equally important that learners:

• Receive feedback that’s supportive of their progress
• Have the opportunity to improve their work based on the feedback

By designing such learning activities, educators give learners agency over their actions and learning. In this way, educators help them become lifelong learners who will continue to learn and grow throughout their lives.

Educators must consider these questions when designing learning activities to deepen self-regulation:

• Is the learning activity long-term and do learners have the learning goals and success criteria in advance?
• Do learners plan and assess their own work?
• Do learners have the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback?

Is the learning activity long-term and do learners have the learning goals and success criteria in advance?

Length of time is a basic prerequisite for self-regulation. For the purposes of the rubric, a learning activity is long-term if learners work on it for a substantive period. An activity spanning five or more days is long-term. The following scenario isn’t long-term:

• Learners documenting what they ate on two different days

The following scenario is long-term:

• Learners keeping a journal about their nutrition over the course of a week

Learning goals define:

• What children will learn in an activity
• How these goals fit with prior and future learning

Success criteria are the factors used to determine whether learners meet the learning goals. They provide evidence of learners’ progress and success in the activity.  The educator may provide the learning goals and the associated success criteria. Or, to foster more learner ownership, the class may discuss the learning goals and success criteria together.

Do learners plan and assess their own work?

When learners plan their own work, they make decisions about the schedule and the steps they will follow to accomplish the task. Planning their own work may involve:

• Deciding how to break down a complex task into smaller sub-tasks
• Choosing the tools they will use
• Creating a schedule for their work and setting interim deadlines
• Deciding how learners will divide work among themselves
• Deciding what pieces of the work they will be do in or outside of class

If a task is long-term but educators don’t give learners detailed instructions and timelines, learners don’t have the opportunity to plan their own work. Additionally, learners making decisions about small aspects of tasks doesn’t qualify as planning their own work.

In the following scenario, learners don’t plan their own work:

• Over two weeks, learners work in groups to research and debate climate change with their peers. The educator assigns specific roles to each learner. Learners follow the steps and timeline provided by the educator.

In the following scenario, learners do plan their own work:

• Over two weeks, learners work in groups to research and debate climate change with their peers. They decide who will research which aspects of the topic and who will speak at different points in the debate. Learners also make their own deadlines for completing their research, writing their speeches, and practicing them.

Do learners have the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback?

Feedback is one of the most significant influences on improving learning. Effective feedback helps learners to address the gap between current performance and performance goals.  Effective feedback tells learners specifically what they are doing well and offers specific guidance to help move their learning forward.

Feedback may come from the educator or from peers. Learners might also have the opportunity to revise their work based on their own deliberate process of self-reflection.

In the following scenarios, learners do not revise their work based on feedback:

• Learners studying environmental conservation creating games in Microsoft MakeCode Arcade where players make decisions to preserve the environment, posting the first version of their games for classmates to play without opportunities to receive or implement feedback
• Learners creating PowerPoint presentations about a topic in world history, giving their final presentation without any opportunity for practice, feedback, or revision
• Learners writing persuasive essays that the educator will assess according to a rubric shared with them at the beginning of the learning activity, then using the rubric only after getting their essays back to see why the educator gave them a certain grade

In the following scenarios, learners revise their work based on feedback:

• Learners studying environmental conservation and create games in Microsoft MakeCode Arcade where players make decisions to preserve the environment. After developing a beta version of their game, learners trade games with a partner and give each other feedback to improve their games before submitting them.
• Learners create PowerPoint presentations about a topic in world history. They practice their presentations, receive feedback from their educator and peers, and revise their presentations based on feedback before giving their final presentation.
• Learners write persuasive essays that the educator will assess according to a rubric shared with them at the beginning of the learning activity. They use the rubric to reflect on their own essay drafts and make revisions.

Support self-regulation with Microsoft tools

With OneNote Class Notebook, educators may easily share learning goals and success criteria with learners at the beginning of the activity. Learners may consult the goals and criteria pages throughout the activity to ensure they meet the learning benchmarks. Additionally, within Microsoft Teams, educators may share learning goals and success criteria with learners by adding a rubric to a Teams assignment.

OneNote Class Notebook and Microsoft Teams also aid educators with the feedback cycle. Within Teams, educators may offer feedback on submitted work and then return the work to learners for them to improve. In OneNote, if learners add their work to the collaboration space of the notebook, both educators and peers may offer feedback that learners use to improve their work.

To plan and manage their work throughout a learning activity, learners may use a variety of Microsoft tools.

• Microsoft To Doapp allows learners to create a daily planner for their projects. Learners may create a task for each part of a project. If they collaborate on a project, they may share the tasks with peers.
• Tasks by Planner and To Doapp in Microsoft Teams helps manage class projects. Learners break down the project into specific steps and assign parts of the project to each team member. The team then tracks each other’s progress.
• The Tagfeature in OneNote also helps learners stay organized. Learners organize research, brainstorms, and drafts with specific tags. They may also itemize the steps of a project.