SRL Promoting Practices

This image reminds me of SRL: the island is each child, imbedded in the greater ecosystem of the classroom. Nevertheless, each child offers autonomous culture and knowledge which needs scaffolding and guidance to reach its success and flourish.

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Dear Leyton,

Now that I have already completed my short practicum, I now have a better sense of my class and what would be an appropriate measure of instruction and activity to bring to my teaching. My SA has already told me what I will be teaching in my long practicum, so I want to apply my learning from the textbook accordingly to plan my lessons. I will be teaching world religion unit for social studies.

(Page 78) Create Opportunities for self-regulated learning

• Designing activities and tasks that require active learning and SRL

• Creating opportunities for students to experience and control challenges

• Ensuring students have opportunities to engage in full cycles of strategic actions

• Sustaining attention to process goals over time

I want to create opportunities for SRL in my teaching practice by incorporating both social collaboration and scaffolding. Examples of this can be:

• Students can be in groups of three to do their world religion inquiry project. They can choose a religion they want to do research and present on. While such big task on a group can lead to distractions and confusion, there will be lots of scaffolding and redirection to help students practice SRL in their project.

• I can also create "I have come, I have conquered" plan. This is where students identify three challenges they foresee and come up with a game plan to conquer these challenges.

• I would also like students to create their own rubric assessment piece. This is for them to construct their own goals, and be more aware of how they can be stretched through this project.

Foster autonomy

• Providing opportunities for choice and decision-making

• Encouraging students to take ownership over their learning and performance

• Bridging from guiding learning to fostering independence

• Engaging students in shaping classroom practices

I am being reminded of two assignments I had to do for this term. One is the relational geography from Miriam's EPSE 308 class, and the other is the literacy assignment from Bel's EDUC 350 class. Both of these projects has incorporated this sense of individual autonomy by relating the core of the lesson to students' personal experiences. For example, the literacy assessment has helped me to understand what literacy development can look like and how it differs from person to person. However, at the core, it has allowed me to understand myself to a greater level. One way I can bring student autonomy over the social studies unit is by allowing them the question "How is the religion you have chosen for your project personal to you?". This open-ended question allows students to take different levels of engagement and to invest in their answer with personal connections.

Weave supports for SRL into activities

• Identifying and promoting SRL as a means to an end (vs. and end itself)

• Integrating supports for SRL process into the curriculum

• Focusing instructing explicitly on learning and thinking processes

• Assisting students to learn how to make good choices and decisions

I know this sounds grand, but one way students can make decisions and practice SRL in their project activity is by... choosing which religious ground they want to appreciate by visiting. Because I am all into experiential learning, I don't think learning about religious backgrounds in a classroom could be as rich as per se, visiting a religious worship place. Students can visit on their own, and if the school would allow it - to visit UBC as a class since we can visit the Jewish Center, Christian worship place, and the longhouse.

On these visits, students would have to constantly self-regulate themselves to respect the sanctity and reverence of each place. Students also would need to actively reflect on their experience at these locations by answering prompt questions as:

• What are your first impressions? Anything familiar? Strange? Curiosity?

• How does this place of worship differ from what you thought it would look like?

• What should we consider when visiting a place of worship?

• How does visiting this place of worship help us to grow appreciation to each religious background?

• Having looked at the place of worship, are there any evidence that goes against any mainstream prejudices to the faith?

• What do you wonder about?

Support learners' flexible use of knowledge, skills, strategies, and beliefs

• Supporting students development of rich forms of knowledge, skills, strategies, values and beliefs

• Supporting students to build on those to engage in adaptive and flexible forms of thinking

I want to honour student funds of knowledge and skill sets by giving them opportunities to exercise them in the project. More specifically, I want to them to use their creativity by creating a "memoire box" to the "friend near me". This project is to be done individually (so that I can assess them individually) and they are to create something like a letter to someone of the faith background they studied. In the letter, they include what they have studied over the term, what surprised them, and what they still wonder about.

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Butler, D. L., Schnellert, L., & Perry, N. E. (2016). Developing Self-Regulating Learners. Don Mills, ON: Pearson. [Chapter 6]