What if there was a way to help all students learn better and more efficiently?
Making self-regulated learning skills a focus of K-12 education would help all students.
Imagine there were a set of skills that predicted academic achievement in K-12 education, across subjects. And what if there were effective interventions available to help students learn those skills? Wouldn’t we want to make those skills an important learning outcome in K-12 education? I certainly would, which is why I wrote a whole book about them!
Self-regulated learning involves the active and thoughtful pursuit of academic goals via planning, monitoring, and adjusting one’s cognition, motivation, behavior, and affect. These knowledge, skills, and dispositions are important predictors of successful learning and performance in modern schooling, work, and life in general. Often, when students struggle in school, it’s because they haven’t yet been taught how to self-regulate their learning effectively.
That’s why we need teachers and school psychologists who know how to identify students who struggle to self-regulate their learning, diagnose what parts they could use help with, and then teach them the skills they need to be successful. Thankfully, Cleary and Russo have updated the successful Self-Regulation Empowerment Program, providing school psychologists (and interested teachers) with the tools they need to help students learn to self-regulate successfully.
I really hope more school psychology programs incorporate this Program. And, frankly, it would be great to see educator preparation programs do the same. Self-regulation is a big part of How People Learn, and the more we incorporate it into education, the better our students will do. (And it works in higher education, also!)