Self-Regulation and the Common Core

Application to ELA Standards

Marie C. White, Maria K. DiBenedetto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134688968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts created new challenges for teachers and pre-service instructors. Self-regulated learning, using one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to reach goals, can help students become independent, self-directed learners. This book provides educators the support they need to apply the principles of self-regulated learning in their teaching for success with the Common Core. In this book, Marie C. White and Maria K. DiBenedetto present information on how to apply academic self-regulation by integrating two models: one which addresses how students develop self-regulatory competence, the other which focuses on the various processes within the three phases of self-regulated learning. In addition, Self-Regulation and the Common Core provides specific lesson plans for grades K-12, using the standards and the integrated framework to promote higher order thinking and problem-solving activities.

Part I
Linking the Common Core and Self-Regulation

1
Spirals and Crosswalks

“Why is my first grader preparing for college?” This question reflects a significant misunderstanding of the Common Core initiative by many parents, and it is a question teachers should be able to answer. Some school districts have ignored the question, while others have partnered with parents to respond to it. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were designed to provide teachers and parents with a clear understanding of what students are expected to learn and how they can help their students achieve success in academics. The standards are intended to serve as a guide towards attaining the knowledge and the skills required for success in college and careers. The establishment of consistent state standards offers educators and parents novel opportunities in developing and sharing curriculum and instructional best practices that include training in self-regulation.

As more states uniformly adopt the Common Core, decisions about curriculum and teaching methods continue to be made by local communities. According to Reeves (2012), the hierarchy of standards implementation is not generally understood, and this misunderstanding contributes to much of the confusion surrounding the Common Core. Standards decisions are made at the state level, curriculum decisions are made by local districts, and local teachers and principals make instructional decisions. Federal and state agencies set the standards, and superintendents, principals, and teachers choose the best curriculum and methods to meet the required learning goals for their specific student population.

As learners grow and develop physically, mentally, and emotionally, they can also mature towards becoming proactive learners and eventually take charge of their learning. It makes common and educational sense to link the standards to strategies that enable students to “spiral up,” aligning their progress with the Common Core standards for text complexity. As students navigate what is known as the “staircase of complexity,” they remain in an upward progression towards more complex texts, secure in their prior knowledge and proficiency in literacy skills from previous years of learning. It is educationally appropriate to prepare students for the complexity of college- and career-ready texts. When we consider each grade level to be a “step” of growth and development towards acquiring the necessary skills to reach specific goals for all readers, we are equipping students to develop the language skills and the conceptual knowledge they need for success beyond the academic setting and helping them shift their focus to lifelong learning. Teachers are given the opportunity to scaffold and support learners as they set proximal goals, monitor performance, and reflect on their progress towards becoming college and career ready.

Standards for All Students

In learning environments where Common Core standards are aligned with self-regulated learning (SRL), teachers, students, and parents could have a better understanding of the expectations and the processes to meet them. The National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) set attainable goals by providing a pathway to college and career readiness for students. There is evidence that prior to the governors taking action, four out of every ten new college students, including 50 percent of those enrolled in two-year institutions, were taking remedial courses. In addition, feedback from employers has reflected inadequate preparation of high school graduates for success in the workplace (Bautch, 2013).

The College and Career Readiness anchor standards complement grade-specific standards, with the former providing broad standards and the latter providing specific goal-related skill development. Taken together, they define the skills and understanding that all students must demonstrate to be college and career ready as they progress from simple to complex skill development. For example, becoming college and career ready requires more than students entering the postsecondary arena having the ability to fully participate in their career training without remediation. It requires sustained motivation and attention to take charge of one’s learning processes. Ready for college means that a high school graduate will not require remediation in English and mathematics and they will have the knowledge and the skills necessary to qualify for and succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing college courses. Career ready means that high school graduates have the English and mathematics knowledge and skills needed to qualify for and succeed in the postsecondary job training and/or supplemental education necessary for their chosen career. Whether preparing for college or a career, academic learning must become a proactive activity, requiring self-initiated, motivational, and behavioral processes as well as metacognitive ones, all of which make up Self Regulated Learning (SRL). Self-initiated processes enable students to become controllers rather than victims of their learning experiences (Zimmerman, 1998). Self-regulation is not an academic skill, such as the literacy skills outlined in the Common Core; rather, it is the self-directed process by which learners transform their mental abilities into academic skills.

Learning is a multidimensional process involving personal, behavioral (both cognitive and emotional), and contextual components (Zimmerman, 1998). Therefore, the academic standards that make up the Common Core can only serve as a guide for the content and skills our students are required to learn, and that is insufficient college- or career-ready preparation. Learners must be able to apply cognitive strategies to a task within the context of a specific setting. Building and using a toolbox of effective strategies that change over time as skills are developed is how one becomes self-regulated. The standards are common, but the attainment of each standard is an individualized quest dependent on the diverse and changing interpersonal, contextual, and environmental conditions experienced by the learner. As a result, learners must be taught to constantly reassess the effectiveness of the strategies that work in one academic subject and do not transfer to others.

Self-regulated learners will know when to shift from methods of understanding a text using a strategy to memorize key words to using an organizational strategy for more complex texts to enhance integration of knowledge and reading comprehension (Zimmerman, 1998). Self-regulated learners will seek help and use resources appropriately to attain their goals if they see they cannot persist on their own to complete the task. We propose that if students are trained at the kindergarten and first-grade level to use the self-regulatory strategy of help seeking, then the stigma our culture associates with seeking help will be removed from the academic setting in the early grades (Karabenick & Newman, 2006; Nelson-Le Gall, Gumerman, & Scott-Jones, 1983; White & Bembenutty, 2013). This acquired skill could provide the learner from an early age with significant strategies to use when in need of resources or assistance to complete a specific task, study for an exam, or do homework.

At the middle and high school level, our teachers are working with a population (67 percent of eighth graders and 76 percent of twelfth graders) that is writing below grade level (Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008). Promoting students from elementary to middle school without obtaining mastery of the literacy skills needed to perform adequately at the next level has negatively impacted college and career readiness. As a result, the Common Core standards make writing an equal partner to reading, and more importantly, writing is assumed to be the vehicle through which a significant amount of reading proficiency will be accomplished and evaluated.

There is a need for explicit and systematic instruction that emphasizes writing strategies. At the earliest grades, the Common Core provides the framework to introduce young writers to self-regulatory strategies for planning, revising, paragraph and sentence construction, and word processing. Studying, collaborating with, and emulating models of good writing is a self-regulatory instructional method that has shown significant results in gaining writing proficiency over time.

High school graduates need the foundational skills to enable them to learn not only at the entry-level jobs, but also throughout their careers. With this in mind, training in self-regulated learning becomes the center of the Common Core. Standards for achievement have been set and reset, yet actual training in the metacognitive processes required to meet the standards has not yet been instituted. Shifting the focus to becoming self-regulated learners while ascending the “spiral staircase of complexity” can provide students with strategies that, when developed over time, make them lifelong learners.

Explicit instruction in SRL is rarely reported, yet is practiced in many classrooms daily. We propose that there are many teachers who might not realize they are integrating explicit segments of SRL instruction into their lesson plans that can be more effective if done systematically and consistently. Classroom practices in general require the consideration of students’ individual differences, and so is the case with the ability to self-regulate. Contrary to some beliefs, it does not take several years of experience before teachers can begin to consider students’ needs and abilities when planning and implementing instruction. We believe that pre-service and in-service teachers can be trained and mentored to implement tasks that encourage proactive learning and nonthreatening peer and self-evaluations, all characteristics of classrooms that support SRL.

Taking the Crosswalk: From the Common Core to Self-Regulated Learning

There are crosswalks from city, state, subject, and grade-level standards aligning the Common Core with standards that already exist. Each section of the book introduces a crosswalk from the Common Core standards to SRL. Standards-based education shares many commonalities with SRL theory. Standards-based classrooms are places where the focus is on student-centered learning through critical thinking, problem solving, cooperation, and individual achievement. Both sustain the belief that student performance can be raised when specific goals are established, monitored, and reflected upon while carrying out a specific task.

The Common Core standards invite students to use higher-order thinking skills and employ all of the dimensions of learning using metacognitive awareness. Self-regulation is a vital component to the metacognitive processes (Zimmerman, 2000). Instruction in SRL serves as a framework for metacognitive knowledge and skill acquisition, which in turn builds secondary scholars who are college and career ready. There are pedagogical approaches, curriculum choices, and student learning processes evident in learning environments that support self-regulation and that are helping teachers and teacher educators transition successfully into adopting the Common Core standards. The standards encourage students to seek help, to practice accurate self-monitoring, and to apply metacognitive skills within various learning contexts, all of which are self-regulatory strategies that encourage proactive learning and independent evaluation.

The benefits of exploring both SRL and the Common Core standards is that SRL provides a toolkit for teachers to help their students become motivated to learn, to engage in productive performance strategies, to self-reflect upon the feedback they receive, and to use this feedback to guide future efforts and performance. By aligning the Common Core standards with self-regulation training, teachers can empower their students to become independent agents of their own learning and in turn increase the efficacy to transfer and adapt the skills they have obtained to life events beyond the classroom. In addition, the proposed integrated framework is dynamic and fluid; it provides the skilled teacher with a framework for constantly adapting teaching methods to meet the diverse needs and learning differences of students in the classroom setting.

References

Bautch, B. (2013). Reforming remedial education. Washington, DC: National Conference of State Legislatures.

Karabenick, S. A., & Newman, R. S. (Eds.). (2006). Help seeking in academic settings: Goals, groups and contexts. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Nelson-Le Gall, S., Gumerman, R. A., & Scott-Jones, D. (1983). Instrumental help-seeking and everyday problem-solving: A developmental perspective. In B. M. DePaulo, A. Nadler, & J. D. Fisher (Eds.). New Directions in Helping (Vol. 2, pp. 265–283). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Reeves, D. B. (2012). The myths of Common Core. American School Board Journal, 199(3), 36–37.

Salahu-Din, D., Persky, H., & Miller, J. (2008). The nation’s report card: Writing 2007. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

White, M. C., & Bembenutty, H. (2013). Not all avoidance help seekers are created equal: Individual differences in adaptive and executive help seeking. SAGE Open, 1–14. doi:10.1177/2158244013484916 Zimmerman, B. J. (1998). Academic studying and the development of personal skill: A self-regulatory perspective. Educational Psychologist, 33 (2–3), 73–86.

Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Attainment of self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 13–39). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

2
Theory-Based Instruction

Self-Regulation of Learning

Social cognitive theory relies upon the belief of the human agency, where the person, behavior, and the environment work in a reciprocal fashion (Bandura, 1997). Instructional applications of social cognitive theory involve models, self-efficacy beliefs, and self-regulated learning (SRL) (Schunk, 2001; Zimmerman, 2013).

This book describes how SRL develops a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Linking the Common Core and Self-Regulation
• Part II Elementary School
• Part III Middle School
• Part IV High School
• Index