 I thought I would introduce a few questions in the spirit of inquiry that I'll take up and be part of the conversation that started yesterday. You know, as I listened yesterday, I thought of so many connections. So I'm hoping, unlike Maureen, I actually woke up at like three and it was my brain was swimming thinking, well, how will I connect to what they said? How will I connect? So I'll do my best to connect to what I heard yesterday. But these are questions I'll launch my talk with for you to think about. And as others did at various points during the presentation, I'll give moments in time for you to think about these questions, think about what you're hearing, think about what it has to do with what you do in your context and how it might inform the kind of inquiry that you're thinking about doing. So the first thing I want to talk about, and I'm going to spend most of my time on this one, is what is self-regulation? And I think that's because if teachers have a sense of what is self-regulation and what are they trying to do. My experience, and I'll talk about this as you'll see, my experience as teachers can be energized and mobilized to draw on your expertise to develop all sorts of amazing practices that will actually support self-regulation. But I will talk also about research about a little bit, a taste, big ideas of how to support self-regulation. I hope to inspire you, inspire you to look a little bit more into this. I have a list of resources for you at the end of this presentation that you can draw up. I'll give you a taste is all I can do in the time I have. So I will talk a little bit and give you a sense of that. And then I do, I can't again spend lots of time on this, but after I've said all of these things, I hope I can just allude to why is it that supporting self-regulation can also support you to accommodate the diversity of learners that you'll find in your classroom. So how can we help those learners who are struggling by focusing for all of our learners on self-regulation? Facing all of our learners, not just those struggling, but all of those individual gifts and differences that students bring to classrooms. So those are the themes that I'll pick up today. So let me start, and actually I have this handy remote control, which I might actually make use of. So researchers are, and educators now, a self-regulation, you know, it's one of those things where I also don't want to admit how old I am, but I've been researching this area for over 20 years. And so it's so rewarding to me to see it become kind of the hot topic of the day, because I think it's really important. And so people have been talking about it. Educators are doing it. I know, and something I heard yesterday was how much excellent work is happening in British Columbia around this already. I know that. I've been in classrooms. I've seen teachers. I see a lot of this work happening. So again, it's kind of building on. I like that notion. It's deepening what people are doing, not starting fresh, not starting something new. But it's become a really kind of high on the radar screen kind of topic today. But people are talking about self-regulation from different perspectives. So I'm going to just kind of situate what I'm going to say in relation to some of other things that you may be hearing. One of the questions I'll add to my list for you is think about today what I'm saying in relation to some of the other ways people are talking about self-regulation. And you can see, you know, what kind of relationships you might see between that. But now there is a lot of focus these days on self-regulation from a bit of a developmental perspective, building on lots of research. And I pulled this from Learn, the magazine of the BC, of BC education, the summerfall issue, just because I wanted to link into, well, what conversations are going on. And this is one of the definitions. Self-regulation is the ability to respond effectively to various stressors and return to a state of equilibrium as central to the ability to learn. And there's a bit of a focus on how do you support students to be calm and focused and poised to learn. And that's one way of thinking about self-regulation, and there are people who are doing work in that area, and you'll be hearing about that. What I'm going to be doing is to talk about and link to research that looks at self-regulation from a slightly different perspective, from an educational perspective. And I'm going to link to research that's been done at least since the 1970s, with Flaville and then Anne Brown and Ann-Marie Palazar and Bernice Wong and others, many, many people who have looked at metacognition, strategic learning, and self-regulation. And so I'm drawing on a long tradition of research. And in fact, where I started and why I became interested in self-regulation is because I was trying to understand everybody wants students to be strategic and problem-solving and independent. And I said, what does that mean? What does that look like? How are the practices in the classroom environments we create? How does it foster strategic learning? And so that's kind of my entry point in the way that I and others have been looking at self-regulation. So I'm going to pick it up from that perspective. And I just want to highlight that there are many, many people working in this who have been. And we have excellent researchers in Canada who have been working on this for some time. And because we know it's coming to the fore and people are really interested, we thought, well, how are we going to mobilize the work we're doing? So we've actually started something called SRL Canada. And it's a network of researchers who have been working most of the time collaboratively with educators like yourself to study and investigate this kind of strategic learning as it plays out in classrooms and as it plays out in reading, as it plays out in math and writing and students' engagement in classrooms and their ability to navigate these kinds of environments we create for them. So I've given you the website here. It's kind of a budding effort. Right now you'll see the list of researchers who are doing it with links to all of our websites. So you can go, like, for example, to my website and you'll see stuff that I've done. You can download conference papers, anything you see there that you want. Let me know. Email me and I can provide you with copies. But what I wanted to point out, many of the researchers here, we have people across Canada doing this work. I'll speak a little bit about my colleague, Sylvie Cartier, who's in Montreal with whom I've worked a lot. But in BC. And by the way, you can get a copy of this. I've given already a PDF version of this to Maureen. So you can get this off your website. So this will be available to you as a resource with everything else from this event. And I just want to mention people who are resources here in BC who have done this for a long period of time. So Nancy Perry is somebody who's on the Provincial Resource Team who's been actively involved in this project. She couldn't be here today, so I'm kind of impersonating her a wee bit. Her work has been at the primary level. And so she and I both work at UBC here in Vancouver. And we're partnering across this year as part of this. Most of my work has been with Intermediate Secondary and Post-Secondary across that. So together we are the age range. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about self-regulation across the age range. I will try to do justice to a bit of her work so that you have that, you have resources in the packet. But I just want you to be aware of that. But we have researchers in Victoria. Layton, I've also, Layton Schnellert is at UBC Okanagan. I don't know if many people know Layton. I have had the great privilege of working a lot with Layton and very, very closely with Layton over the last, oh, I don't know, I can't even say how many years. And so I'll speak a little bit of some of the work I've done with Layton as well. Particularly on teacher professional learning and inquiry. And then also Phil at SFU. So there's people in BC who are doing this work. And this is a resource, so again, I'll give you a taste of this, but this is an ongoing resource for you. Our goal, and I'll say this at the end, is to be a resource to your inquiry and to help reach out to teachers who are trying to do work and change their practices in this area. So I wanted to give you just an overview of some of the projects. This is mostly Nancy and me. Other people are doing other projects, but I wanted to give you a sense of what I'm gonna be talking about a little bit. So one of Nancy's work has really looked a lot at the qualities of classrooms that support self-regulated learning. And so I'll speak to some of that work, and it's great. And one of the articles that you were given kind of a pre-one by Nancy and a collaborator, Lynn Drummond, with whom she is a classroom teacher with whom she'd done a lot of work. So that's a great resource that gives you kind of a really rich description of self-regulated practices, how you can support self-regulation in primary classrooms. But Nancy has also focused on teachers. She does, we have an SRL cohort in our teacher education program of pre-service teachers interested in self-regulation and she's done work with practicing teachers on how it is that engaging in inquiry really supports them. So I really refer you to some of that work as well. In my work with Layton and with others, I've been looking at SRL supportive practices in understanding SRL and supportive practices in the intermediate secondary. But again, I've worked a lot with teachers and at how teachers engaged in inquiry can support systemic change. It's very powerful. So we've really documented that. So some of the resources, if you're interested in that piece, I'll speak a bit about that. Now I also did work at, I started actually at the post-secondary level. I started with learners who weren't successful in the K-12 system and I wanted to know why. What's going on for these learners? What's derailing them? Particularly in reading and writing, but also in other areas. And I did, I had to, I wasn't, I debated, should I talk about it? It's post-secondary, it's a bit older. But you know what, I did case studies and it's just such a good fit to the methodology that you'll be using. And what I found is that by doing case studies, I did over 100 case studies over seven years, at least a semester, often two years for each learner. And I really traced how were they engaged in learning as a whole person and I'll explain that. And what happened with them and how could we support self-regulation and what were the outcomes? And so I'm gonna tell you a couple of stories from that because they're very powerful and I think it shows how you can really learn in case studies. Last of all, I'm gonna tell you stories of SRL across the lifespan, partly also to make the point that I think that in those early years where you work, you can lay the seeds for effective self-regulation for a lifetime. And I'm just gonna tell you some stories of older kids and young adults where it broke down a bit because you can see where SRL broke down for them because I think you could say, I could do something about that. In fact, that's why I started in post-secondary and then went to secondary and then went to, I'm getting younger. Because I want to make a difference early for kids so that they don't get to the point that I saw for some of my post-secondary learners. So that's just to contextualize the work I do and where it comes from. And all of the stories I tell you are drawn out of research but I do a lot of case study research because it's very powerful not only for learning but for communicating what you learn. And so that's why I use those and present them. Okay, so what is self-regulation from an educational perspective? I think, and the research, from research, that you can think about self-regulation as strategic goal-directed activity. I have a goal. I do something. Did it work? Yeah, great. If not, nope, try something else. It's kind of, it's a cycle and it's very much like that spiral of inquiry that Linda and Judy talked about. But so self-regulation is a form of strategic goal-directed activity. It involves, it's a whole person kind of thing. I love a model of self-regulation because it's very encompassing. Because we know learning isn't just a cognitive thing. Students bring emotions to this. You know, like, oh dear, somebody's asking me to read a book. I'm too stressed. You know, or I get frustrated, right? And we know students have motivation like, I cannot do this. This is too hard for me. Forget about it. I give up, right? And all of that's involved. But it's also strategies that kids use, the kind of approaches they use to work with information, to learn reading as thinking, you know, to actually engage in reading. But it's also as this piece of metacognition. And we talked about this yesterday. Metacognition is that sense of, I know who I am as a learner. I understand what reading is about. I have the sense of learning in context. I understand what is demanded of me here. So it kind of has that sense of awareness, self-awareness about oneself as a learner. And strategic action, I'm doing something that's goal-directed. I did this, I choose this strategy because it helps me achieve a goal. I think that all individuals self-regulate from very young learners to adults. Now, in some discussions people, and over time, research on self-regulation started with older learners. And a lot of research has been done in intermediate, secondary, post-secondary settings. And early on people were saying, oh, I don't know about those young learners. You know, I don't know if young learners are ready to self-regulate, or if they're able to self-regulate. And I just want to suggest that that self-regulation is happening all the time. Think about, I just want you to think for a moment about the young learners that you know, and how strategic and goal-directed those learners are. So, and I started, if I think about one of the first descriptions I read long ago, it really influenced me of the Gotsky's talking about self-regulation. And he talks about a very, very young child who needs a cookie, wants a cookie. So it gets a stick, it's going, okay, I'm gonna get that. I go, okay, if that's not an example of strategic goal-directed behavior. Or I think about this little two-year-old I have the privilege of playing with all the time who wants something. So if she grabs a little stool and comes over and gets up on there so that she can get something. Again, kids are very strategic, they're goal-directed. From a research perspective, you know, people have done, there's a research study in 1997 by Newman and Roscos in Reading Research Quarterly where they actually looked at three and four-year-olds engaged in play and tracked the amount of metacognition and strategic action in literacy by three and four-year-olds. So, and Nancy Perry's work has documented in very young children in primary settings the ways in which kids can and are very self-regulating. And it's that moment. I mean, I looked at the full-day kindergarten plan and talking about inquiry for kids and self-regulation for kids and how important in these early years it is for kids to develop these competencies, to start to think about themselves as learners, to start to understand what reading is and about. So, you have these learners at this moment when they're really developing, their brains are developing at an incredibly rapid pace so to think that we can't support these things until they get to be intermediate. By the time they're in intermediate grades, much of their sense of themselves as learners, much of their understanding about reading, what reading is, it's set. Their motivation, their self-perceptions, right? So, anyway, rah-rah for primary teachers. I mean, it's... So, I really think you can make an enormous difference. Also, self-regulation is implicated in everything. I mean, a lot of descriptions in self-regulation are about self-regulation in sport. Now imagine, like, one example is learning to serve in tennis where you have to hit it in that dumb little box. And people talk about sport, you know, if you've been in sport, it's practice with a purpose. Not just go out and whack the ball when you're, you know, but I actually have a purpose, I'm strategically trying to learn. Teaching. Teaching is very self-regulated, goal-directed. And I'll make that point. Leighton and I have used a model of self- and co-regulation to actually describe teachers' inquiry. You have a goal, you plan something, you try it in practice, you see, did it work, right? And if it didn't, you try again, right? I think Linda and Judy's spiral of inquiry adds some great pieces to that, but it's a cycle that Leighton and I have been looking at, and other people have looked at, as a way of thinking about teaching, strategic thinking and teaching. But I'm gonna focus today on academic work in schools. One of the things that is really important to understand, and you're getting these children at this entry point into school, they don't come out of the box understanding these kind of tasks that we give them, or the kind of participation structures we create in classrooms. We have to help them learn. You know, that picture of Fay on the ground working with the students to teach them how to give each other feedback. They don't, you know, what we're doing is we're helping students learn how to engage in the kind of activities we set up in school. What is reading? What is writing? What is working with others? How do you collaborate and all these things? So our job is to help them learn how to navigate academic work. And I've worked with a lot of students who haven't figured that out. I saw that with working with older students. My job is to help you navigate this world, learn how to navigate, understand what people are asking you and to navigate these tasks. And key point, so I could like end now, but key point is individuals can take and feel in control over their participation in activities if they are supported to learn how to deliberately and reflectively self-regulate learning. So that's kind of the key idea. So now I just have to just check in where I am. Okay. All right, so what can self-regulation look like in a primary classroom? Here's an example from Nancy Perry, this article that she has provided, the one that she sent along in preparation for this. Just to give you a sense of a task, an authentic task that is described in this article by herself and her colleague around children learning in primary. She would call this a complex task because it's a task that really affords opportunities for self-regulation. Now not every task in a classroom would be like this, but she suggests that one way to support self-regulation is to create these kinds of environments and these tasks where kids really have opportunities to self-regulate. They have to make decisions, they have to think about how they're learning, they have to engage in meaningful authentic activity, they have to navigate and manage multiple goals. And so imagine a grade two to three classroom in which students have been asked, they've got to do a research project on animals and they have to find and select reading and resources, they have to do a bit of writing, they're gonna work on the computer, they're gonna work with their peers. So let's just think about that and we can talk about, well, what does self-regulation look like in that kind of task? So here's a little bit of a model. So the first thing I'd say is self-regulation is always in context because it's adaptive strategic performance based on what kinds of expectations there are in an environment. You as a teacher have a big role to play in setting up that environment and what those expectations are. So what does that mean to do research? You know that you're at, what are you really asking them? What does it mean to read these things? You know, what kind of books are they supposed to deal with? Your context defines what the demands are. A really self-regulated learner is gonna understand, well, this teacher really wants that, that teacher really wants this. What do they really want? They may say they want that, but they really want me to do that. So it's contextualized, it's adaptive behavior and context. Okay, so first thing I love about models of self-regulation is that they make a focus attention on what the individual brings to the context. What is that learner doing? How is that learner making sense of things? And this resonates with a lot of what was said yesterday. We know each of your learners comes with a particular background in history from their home environment, from what they've done in other kinds of classes before they hit you. They bring with them challenges, interests, strengths. They bring with them these kinds of knowledge and beliefs they've already started to construct about reading through interacting with their parents or in preschools or wherever. They bring with them a sense, even young learners of I can do this, I can't do that. So they have background knowledge. How important is that to reading and to developing media? So they bring all these things to the classrooms for them. So the first thing we have to understand is, how does what an individual bring shape what it is that they do in classroom environments? Okay, so here's how I would define a cycle of self-regulated activity, and it comes back to this idea. So the first thing they do is they interpret the demands and they set goals, and this could include defining criteria for, well, what does it mean for me to do a good job at writing a poem? What does it mean for me to do a good job at this? What am I really trying to achieve? So I'm gonna call that interpreting tasks and I'm gonna preview one of my main themes, which is this is absolutely critical. And it's often a missed piece of the puzzle because we often focus on how do kids read and not whether they understand what they're trying to do. So my attitude early on, and what I found through research is, how can you possibly self-regulate activity if you don't know what you're trying to do? Right, and so that's a really key, and you'll see it's a key piece of the puzzle. So the next thing is hopefully and ideally, you do a little bit of planning. Like, okay, well, so that's what I'm gonna do. Like, what strategy should I use? What did I do last time? Is there something I could do that's effective? Then you actually, if I can get my little, yes. Don't you like that? I mean, no. And then you actually do something. That's the action piece that we've been talking about. You actually try something and do it. Then what you do is you say, okay, how'd that go? Ideally, you do that in relation to, you know, kind of what you thought or the criteria of what makes good performance. And then if it doesn't work, you don't give up. You say, mm, better change. I didn't, you know, that's not my, writing's not very organized. I better redo it. I didn't get that what I was reading. I better reread that section. I don't get that word. I better ask somebody or look it up or whatever. And a key piece, you'll see my little dark arrow get there. It's through engaging in cycles of self-regulation that you actually change your knowledge. You build knowledge about things. You can construct perceptions of agency. Now, and I think they made an allusion to this, but I really wanna, again, I say everything that I'm gonna build to right up front. Really what's critical is that if you think about a learner who sets a goal, thinks about it, tries something, self assesses and goes, hey, look, I did that, and who then deliberately realizes you can help them realize, I had a goal, I did something, it worked. Look at me, aren't I good? What you do is you actually build through that and I'll make this point. You can't tell kids, hey, feel better about yourself. But you can get them to experience success and look at it, realize it, pause for a moment and think, what am I gonna do next time? Ooh, I could be successful again. And so what I'm gonna, I think it's interesting because when I first started this, I thought, oh, it's all cognitive, you know, there's constructing new understandings and all of this. And when I worked with learners, I thought, oh my goodness, it's all about motivation and emotion. It's all about them understanding and feeling engaged in. When you talk to learners, that's what they highlight. When you do interventions or, not that, I don't like that word either. If you do instruction that supports self-regulation and you talk to learners afterwards about what was so good about that, they say, oh, I can do it. I feel so much better about my ability to succeed. So that's a really key piece. So self-regulation, focusing on self-regulation has, it supports the entire learner to be engaged in learning. Now I mentioned, I really do think you can learn a lot from case studies. So where I started, because I really wanted to understand what does strategic learning look like and what are learners doing and where is it their strengths and where is it breaking down. And I was really surprised by what I found. Because again, at the time I started, everything was about strategies, teaching strategies. And I had a sense that that was not quite enough. You know, because I wrote a paper that was called From Learning Strategies to Strategic Learning. And I thought, well, you know, it's nice that a lot of times what was happening is you can teach students a strategy, but if they don't know why they're using the strategy or for what purpose or if they're not choosing it or, you know, so how is it that we can get students to really be strategic? And that's where I came to this model of self-regulation and a lot of people in the time, late 80s, early 90s, started to move that direction thinking about, well, strategies, yeah, but in context. With learners able to kind of control and pick strategies based on their own strengths, but based on the task and all those kinds of things. So what did I find? Across 100 case studies, when I looked across them, very powerful, imagine all the case studies you guys might have, but I looked across 100 different case studies and here's what I found. 76% of the time, the reason learners were derailed is because they didn't get what they were trying to do. 76% of the time. And I'll give you a couple examples of that because they didn't understand the task demands, they didn't get, so again, I'll say this again later, I'm always previewing, but at least once in one time called students with learning disabilities actively inefficient and it's a descriptor that's stuck with me, think actively inefficient. These are those learners who are trying so hard and who are doing all of these things but like in what direction, right? And so what I found when I started working with these students and looking at practices that supported self-regulation, one of my big interventions, if you're gonna use that word, was to help students look at what they were trying to do. In fact, if you came, you know those powerful questions you can ask as a teacher, every time I work with a student on anything, anytime, it's like, so what are you trying to do there? Does the student get it? You give an assignment, it's like, so what do you guys think you're supposed to be doing there? And even just getting students to repeat that back, articulate it, one little thing you can do in a classroom, absolutely powerful that will support self-regulation. There are many, many things you can do in classrooms that are small but extremely powerful just in the discourse, that language that you use in classrooms all the time. And that went, and it actually helps learners realize they're supposed to ask themselves that. What am I supposed to be doing here? So that was really important. And then, of course, strategies. Students need to learn how different ways to approach taxes, but they need to be able to mobilize them to an end and to use them strategically. And then there were also students who had trouble with monitoring, defining what they were trying to do. So let me give you some examples from what I've done. So this is a quick example of a student in grade eight, an actual, fictional name, actual student. She was, her task was to read and learn from a textbook chapter in science. And this is a very common phenomenon, what I observed, is when you talk to Lily about it, she had no idea. She really hadn't had that much experience learning from expository text, a lot of narrative, not a lot of informational text. And she just looked at it in the science teacher at that moment, we worked with science teachers who were looking at literacy. And they were, she just felt lost. She's just going, but the science teacher thought she knew what she would be doing. Well here, read this textbook, learn science from this book. And she didn't really know. So what was her strategy? She'd find the bold words, she'd memorize whatever was there, or she would like write verbatim in an answer to a question, what it is she saw in the text, very common strategy. You know the problem, she got 100% on all of her homework assignments for using that strategy. So when I came in to talk to her and tried to say, well why is that not the best way to learn from text? Because they really want you to work with the information, that's why you're failing your test. She said, oh no, forget about it, I get 100% on all my, so two points in this case study. One is, evaluation practices make a big difference in terms of students' construction of understandings about what academic work is about. She has learned learning and sciences about finding the bold words, copying out the, right? And it works, so it's just kind of a cautionary note. But in classrooms, when we're working with kids, we can do the opposite, we can create rich engagements in reading that helps students construct really rich understandings about reading. So that we're working against this kind of sense for what she had. So two points, one point is classroom practices matter, second point, how she understands learning and science and learning from text really matters. That's something she's bringing, and if I ignore that, I'm not getting that window into how she's thinking about reading and about herself as a reader. Another example, this is a study that I did in, it was kind of an inquiry-based project, I'll talk more about it, it was in Richmond, lower mainland, I had a great privilege of working for many years with Richmond over time, and we had an inquiry community going, and teachers, what they were doing is they had formative assessments that they did at the beginning of the year to look at students learning through reading in subject area classrooms, like Lilly, okay? And what they did is, this is, I'll explain this because you won't be able to see it, they said to students, this is from 611 students across classrooms, and they said, so what do you think you're supposed to be doing here? Task interpretation, right? And what they did, in fact, just more generally, they created portraits of all their classrooms at the classroom level, they created portraits of their classrooms that looked at students' motivation, their emotional reactions when they're given these kind of tasks, task interpretation strategies they were using, so they created these profiles of self-regulation for their classrooms, of kids learning about a subject through reading, and then they based their inquiry on that. Each teacher kind of looked at their own, they set grade level goals, but then each teacher also looked at their own classroom and said, what am I gonna pick this year to work on based on what I see in this profile? So I'll come back to that as an example of work that we did and what those teachers experienced from that and what the benefits were for kids. But this is data from, we just did kind of a, okay, well if we look across 611 students, and what this shows is very nicely, 80% of the kids thought they were supposed to read the tasks when they were asked to read, to learn what the other 20% were thinking they're not sure, but that was encouraging. 82% felt like they had to find important details or facts. Encouragingly 77% focused on understanding, that's this one, and understanding information, so that was good. But troubling was these little bars over here, which is only half or less than half of the students thought they had to do that more active meaning making with information that you really want when students are learning and thinking with text. So they knew they had to understand it, but finding links between information, making connections, inferencing, applying, those things were just not on students radar screens. So the subject area teacher said, ooh, that's not great. Obviously in my classrooms I better be. And so a lot of teachers chose as goals linked to the performance standards that I'm gonna help my kids making inferences or reason judgments or. So it just gave teachers a window into how teachers were thinking. So anyway, my first point is, when we're working with readers and developing reading, remember it's a really important goal that students develop understandings about texts and reading and writing. And there are many, many ways you can do that, but helping them understand what meaningful reading and not losing the meaning. And that's that kind of sense of two thirds of your time is spent in meaningful reading and maybe skills at the service of reading. That kind of activity helps here, right? Because it helps students focus on meaning. All right, another example of self-regulation breaking down. I mentioned strategies. So here's some strategies from older learners. First studying, I read it over once and hoped to retain it. For reading, I just reread and reread and reread. I just read and I hope I get it. For math, I've looked at math too. If I don't understand something, I'll keep going over it, but not really like it. I read, use rules, find a reasonable answer, cheat. If I'm using them, strategies, I'm not aware of it. And for writing, and I'm gonna give you this case study. She said, this is one of my favorite cases. I write my thoughts as they flow through my mind in sentences and I write down my point and in the end I have a myth. All right, so again, students need to have strategies to be able to use strategies strategically and be aware of them and be able to talk about them. Be aware of them. So here's my favorite case study that I always have to tell and for anyone who's heard me before, I'm sure you might have heard this story. So this is Jennifer, she's just coming out of high school and I use this as a case study because it's the power of case studies again. But also she illustrates kind of the whole learner and how it is that self-regulation is so powerful as a framework. So here's her perceptions of her writing ability. She said, my writing is unorganized. Chopi would be the best way to describe it. She wrote down her point in the end had a myth but this is where that kind of motivation and emotion links in to learning and you know these kids, right? So she says, I had to write a research 500 worth essay for scholarship. I couldn't organize it at all. I couldn't get any organization flow going. I kept jumping from point to point. I got frustrated with it and I just didn't apply. Just gave up, right? Okay, so she was one of the cases where I actually worked with her to foster self-regulation and in my way, in short, I helped her work through cycles of self-regulation. So what are you doing here? What are you gonna do about it? How's it going? Gonna do something different? And I actually just kind of scaffolded. I acted as a facilitator to her walking through cycles of self-regulation. So the first thing we did is we talked about what to do, what makes a good essay and all those kinds of things that you might do. And then this is the piece I'm gonna to speak about her strategy use. And the problem she had taking, and this is another one of my key things, taking ownership over strategy. So she'd been taught outlining. She comes to me, she says, I've been taught how to outline. My papers are not organized. Outlining is stupid. I hate outlining. Forget it. I'm not outlining. Fine. So we talked about what made a good paper and I worked with her and we co-constructed strategies together. I said, what are you gonna do? She goes, I gotta be organized. Maybe I'll make a plan. I said, okay. What are you gonna do to make a plan? She said, well, I'll write down my main point. I said, okay. So she did that. We did that. She wrote that. And I go, okay, now what? She goes, well, maybe I'll make a more detailed plan. And she took her points and she broke them down into kind of sub points. And then I said, okay, what next? And she says, well, maybe I'll take that and I'll just translate it into an essay. And she did that. She actually turned each point into a sentence. She had a really organized essay. She starts turning an essay. She's getting like Bs and As in essays, right? So at the end of that, she looks, so I asked her, you know, how'd this work at the end? And she says to me, she goes, well, she goes, you know, outlining, outlining, it's stupid. But I don't know what I would do without my plans. So this is, but you see why I love this case study because what it does is it really communicates the importance she's learned outlining. That's great. But unless she understands it as a goal-oriented activity that helps her achieve something she cares about and unless she takes control over that strategy, she's not supported to self-regulate learning. And all I needed to do was to get her to think about it in part of a goal-directed cycle. And then she was really engaged in that. So outcomes for her, I actually tracked. Her task performance improved. She had personalized strategy, but this is the most important outcome. She just became more strategic. And this is the power of moving from teaching strategies to supporting strategic learning because she started to just be strategic about other things. She came to me and she'd say, hey, you know, now when I'm note-taking, I don't just write down everything. I mean, you know, and she goes, now when I'm cooking, what I do is, you know, and so really it's what you're doing is you're empowering learners to know what it looks like and what it is to be strategic and problem-solving and that's what these students, in my 100 case studies, it was one of the most common findings along with increased perceptions of agency, a sense of control that they can do it. And because she sees herself doing things. And those last essays where she did really well, I didn't help her at all. We didn't even do them together. She'd come in and she'd say, oh, you helped me. And I said, I didn't even look at that. What is that about? You wrote that, you did it. You used your plans and you did that. And this is what she said, you know, the marks are different. When you're walking around the class, we're getting our essays back. My marks are average or above average, so I feel better about it like I don't feel like I'm such a dense. So how powerful is that, right? So let me, again, I'm spending too much time. Okay, good. Okay, so the last thing I just wanna say is about that. It's not a great picture. So I think students over time, even young learners, start to experience challenges very early. And what you can find is they have a lack of confidence. They have a lack of control, a sense of control over things. And that's what we're after for students to have a sense of control. They can get frustrated. So they may try, but be actively inefficient. They may give up, they may rebel. I mean, they may just say, you know what? Better for me is get me out of this situation. This is too difficult for me. So my takeaway points from my case studies. And I think if you understand self-regulation and where it breaks down, I think it empowers you as teachers. It's kind of, say you talked yesterday about reading recovery, maybe being something that's valuable because teachers develop a kind of a sense of what reading is, a model of reading. And my goal here is that you have kind of a model of self-regulation in your mind, because I know that that will energize teachers to make changes and practice based on your expertise and what you know about your learners to say, hey, that's what I'm after. I know I can think about ways to make that happen. And learn from colleagues who are doing this kind of work. Anyway, here are my takeaway points. If students are to take control over learning, they need to learn how to actively interpret and articulate expectations, actively and reflectively self-direct learning with their goals in mind. And lastly, we can't tell students to feel successful. They have to experience it. And if you get them walking through cycles of self-regulation, what's beautiful about that is that if they try something and it doesn't work, it's that, okay, well, that's all right. What are you gonna do differently? What didn't work? Did you get them to diagnose that, right? What didn't work for you? Okay, well, what would you do slightly differently? And then they're empowered to work through struggles. They're empowered to make differences. So they start to feel, even when they're not successful, they can still feel like they can do something to be in control they don't give up. I did spend a lot of time on what is self-regulation and how it breaks down. And I knew I would do that. And that's because I think that's the most important message from today is what is self-regulation? What does it look like in classrooms? How meaningful it is? Why it's important? But I do wanna just nod to some of the work that's being done. Excellent work to support self-regulation and to just let you know there are tremendous resources out there for you if this is something that you wanna pick up in your inquiry projects. These are the kinds of things that are happening that you can link into. So I did actually have a slide to emphasize this point about why it's so important in the early years to lay the seeds for lifelong self-regulation. I think you have such an opportunity with young learners. I think you can help them construct productive conceptions about academic work, learn how to navigate academic environments, especially those learners who may come from backgrounds where they don't know exactly what it means to learn in school, to understand themselves as learners in relation to task demands, to start to be able to take control over their learning, make choices, control their learning and ways that work for them, to take responsibility and control for their learning is what we really want them to be able to do and to feel in control over their learning, which is a really key piece of the puzzle. So I think that you can create environments that are supportive of their metacognition, their motivation and their strategic action. So I mentioned this project that I've been working on and my colleague, Leighton Schnellard and I, but also Sylvie Cartier in Montreal is doing similar work as our others, where we're really looking, I love this framework that was presented yesterday, teachers or decision makers in classrooms and you have to pull together so much in order to make decisions about how to support your learners and your environment given where they're coming from. So an inquiry oriented approach towards professional learning and educational change is ideal because it really builds on teachers and teachers' expertise. And what we've been tracing is how it is that teachers are drawing on resources like this kind of workshop, like materials, like each other in order to make changes in practice to support self-regulated learning by kids. So we've actually been looking at that and in one of our projects, we actually traced that as a way of fostering educational change and we looked at when you have something like this over the ministry and districts and schools are almost like working towards goals and like common goals and a concerted effort like fostering early reading, how that creates the conditions for educational change. So it's really exciting, that's why I'm so excited to be here. So that teachers draw on knowledge tools and resources to meet students' needs and settings and who can work alone or collectively to foster changes. Now we actually, Layton and I have been using a very similar model, look familiar. This is like the one that we used with students but we've used it in order to understand teachers' learning and teachers' professional development and practice change. Because you can think about that, as I said, that's what teachers are doing. You're kind of setting goals based on the curriculum, based on what you want for your learners, based on maybe these teachers' formative assessment data about where their kids were. You do some planning, you do stuff, enact practices, you monitor and teachers through that build a sense of agency about your teaching. They build a new knowledge. So we've been looking at really cycles of inquiry, spirals of inquiry. And I said to Linda and Judy, I really like they added this kind of focusing, the kind of scanning and focusing as a way to help set goals. I really like that addition to this notion of a cycle of inquiry. It's very consonant with what they were talking about yesterday. And through that, as I said, teachers build a sense of knowledge and agency. And one of the reasons, as I said, I focus so much on self-regulation is because I think in doing that, it empowers teachers to have like with learners, I said, if you have a clear vision of the goal, you can mobilize your strategic activity in order to do that. Same with, I think if you have a clear vision of what self-regulation is, you can mobilize your expertise and those of your colleagues. So one project, Leighton and I did with a set of intermediate teachers, I think we had 50 or 60 teachers who all attended just something like this where we were talking about what is self-regulation, what does it look like in your classrooms? And the project we said is all the teachers went away and they said, I'm gonna do one thing in my classroom to try to support self-regulation and we're gonna all do it. Then we're all gonna share and we're gonna try. And in a week period, teachers went to each other's classrooms and I had the best conference of my life because I went to all of these teachers' classrooms and got to see what teachers were trying together in classrooms to support self-regulation. And this is what they did. All of the various ways that teachers thought of way in each of these different kinds of things. They were working on reading, writing, math in both whole groups, teachers teaching, co-teaching in classrooms, working in support settings. And it just showed me, it just gave me it's that sense of the resource teachers are and how their resources to each other. So it was absolutely fabulous to see what teachers were doing in those environments. I have to throw an example, kind of like they, here's one example. This is from, Layton was working with one of his colleagues at a grade five to sixth classroom and I brought this in because it was students learning to write poems about residential schools. And they, grade five, six students, they were reading books, they were learning, they had a lot of background information. Together they generated criteria for what counted as a good, a free verse poem. And then they wrote their poems, but the most important thing is they had these criteria, they generated together, they had them on the board and while kids were writing, they were developing strategies for themselves that were working and they were referencing the criteria while they were writing. It wasn't just something they looked at at the beginning and then looked at at the end. They were always, as they were writing, thinking about how am I doing this, how am I doing that? It was just a beautiful classroom environment of teachers using these principles. And in fact, kids developed this, strategies for themselves. When they developed strategies that were working for them, they wrote them down and they developed strategy sheets for themselves. This is one example of how one teacher worked in a classroom to support self-regulated writing in this time, but also it's a complex task in that students are also learning about residential schools and having that as part of the conversation in the classroom. The other thing I just wanted to say, I mentioned very quickly these teachers at the secondary level, so that was an intermediate project. Next project, fast forward teachers using formative assessment, getting classroom portraits of learning through reading for their students and then making change based on that. So Leighton and I, and if you're interested in this, we actually have lots that we've written about it, that Leighton and I actually traced. Okay, so what happened? What happened for teachers? What happened for students? And this is, so the teachers who were co-constructing an interpreting formative assessment data together, planning for that, trying things in their classrooms, monitoring and all those things, this is what they say, this is from the teacher's perspectives. They said they observed improvement, they said my students improved in the things that they targeted. They actually had data where they monitored, very powerful for teachers and you have that opportunity to engage and inquiry you and your teams and to actually make a difference in those kids' lives and to see it, so powerful for these teachers. So they actually said that. They were inspired to engage in professional learning because they observed the problems in their kids' learning and they saw a gap between what the students were thinking and what they wanted. We had subject area teachers, science teachers, social studies teachers, humanities teachers, working on literacy in their classrooms, learning from text in subject area classrooms. They said they really could better understand their students because they had this information about how students were thinking and interpreting the work that they were giving them. We saw that they drew on resources and that's what we were after, not that we gave the program, again it'd be my life yesterday, we didn't give a program and that's part of my message here, right? There isn't a way you as teachers make decisions, you can draw on multiple resources in order to make changes in classrooms to meet your students' needs. You have a guiding light but there are lots of resources you can draw on, others who are doing this work, research of others who have done this work and done it well. You can draw on those good ideas and that's what teachers were doing. They really, we documented that they, like you have in your, but we documented that teachers were doing things differently and changing their practices and they were also sharing their insights. They would say, you know what, we did this, we shared it with our school staff, we presented it, you know, they took owners, the teachers took ownership of what they were doing and were sharing it with their colleagues. And also we noticed that they persevered in the face of obstacles, so just like students, if they tried it one year and it didn't quite work, they weren't, they weren't like, you know, kind of depressed about it. They said, well, you know what, next year, this is what I'm gonna do. One message just quickly, what many teachers said after first year is, you know what, I just tried too much all at once. So a message is, start small, start a little bit, try something, right? So I like the idea, one student, one bit, one change, don't like revamp, like you can look at some of these descriptions and it's a whole classroom, really well worked out completely. You know, aim like, okay, what can I do building from your practice now? That's one change that will make a difference for your learners. So that's what we learned from teachers. We also, for students, this is just interesting, you might say, well, what happened for students, right? For students, what we found is that when teachers focused on that higher level learning, things like inferencing reason judgments, we could actually observe shifts for the kids in self-regulation, understanding, and in performance. But if teachers focused on details and text features and more surface structure stuff, the kids got really stressed out. And we didn't see improvements in learning, which was really interesting and a bit surprising. I think what we found, I think it's a combination, it's probably skills outside of meaning versus the meaning is staying the focus with, but anyway, that's what we found. And this is a takeaway point. If we looked across all the different things teachers tried in all these different classrooms to support learning through reading, it wasn't like, it was like, teachers tried all sorts of different kinds of things. They built from workshops, like Faye's workshop was very popular, by the way. But they built from workshops, but if they had these qualities, they made difference for students. Sustained attention to goals, not just once. So I'm working on self-regulation continuously, integrating process and curriculum, attending explicitly and talking about reading, thinking, learning, and most important, moving from guiding learning, which we're really good at, engaging students and learning to supporting students to take ownership over it. Like just the Jennifer story, from learning that if you use outlining, like them knowing I'm using outlining because it serves this goal. When those four qualities were there, students had the biggest gain. So the other thing I just wanna say, I don't have time to summarize, so that's the work I've done. I've done it with Layton. It's very similar to work that's being done elsewhere as well. I do wanna speak to Nancy Perry's work. I don't have time, in the short time I have left, to go in depth, but I will just speak to her work and really direct your attention to it. And again, I chose not to go into it in depth because you have an article in the reading teacher that she provided that actually is a lovely example where she takes that complex task that I mentioned at the beginning, and she really walks through how did teachers in primary classrooms across time set the stage for learners to be very self-regulating. So I really recommend that to you. I would just say that she and others have done a really good job of looking at strategies and ways to establish classroom environments. What I don't have up here is developing a community of learners. Really an important piece of the puzzle, but she talks about complex tasks and how those afford opportunities for self-regulation and how then you create the context where you as a teacher can support it. She talks about ways to support teachers to take that kind of control and learn how to make decisions by giving choices and helping students know how to make good decisions when they have choices, by having students have opportunities to control challenge based on how they are doing as learners, by having engaging students in self-evaluation or self-assessment because then that helps them understand the goal, what they're supposed to be doing, supports interpretation of the task. And she talks about the value of teachers in support, but also peers helping each other and learning how to help each other. And she talks a lot about evaluation practices that are like what I talked about as an inquiry cycle, that feed into inquiry cycles rather than our summative social comparison kind of evaluation practices. So she talks a lot about these as classroom practices that support self-regulation. And so this is the example that she gives and she talks in that grade two to three classroom, it's in science, it's complex because reading and writing are implicated in meaningful ways and because, and I just pulled out, you know, with the tasks complex and for these reasons, which creates this fabulous opportunity for you to work on the curriculum and process at the same time and to scaffold students learning through that process. So again, that's about all, just to say there's so much out there in an hour, I can't go over all of it. Okay, my last slide before you get one final little chit-chat. And that is self-regulation and inclusion. Both Nancy Perry and I are really interested in how do you set up classroom environments in a realistic way for teachers, you know, that in order to support all the diversity of the learners who come to your classrooms. And so again, I can just, I'm just gonna nod to some of the ways in which supporting self-regulation will help you to do this. Sometimes I think the message that goes to teachers is you have to individualize learning, therefore you have to have a separate thing for every single learner that you have to design and control, like no way. Right, I mean, you just can't do that. That said, you can construct classroom environments that accommodate all that diversity and enable learners to find a path that works for them and still be meaningfully engaged. Something like that research project that Nancy set up for kids, there's so many degrees of freedom in there for all the kids to be working on learning about animals, but for kids to maybe choosing texts that are at slightly different levels of difficulty. For, you know, to be choosing which animal they want where they have that background knowledge so that they can be more successful at accessing the text. You know, for them, yeah, to be making choices and for them to be expressing their understandings in different kinds of ways, right? So you have a complex task or just classroom environments where you allow for that variability creates opportunities for you to accommodate diversity. So what I can say then, just if you're interested in this, it's really worthy of you kind of picking it up as part of your inquiry. Like, so how, if I'm really interested in my classroom, I have all these diverse learners. I have learners who are reading at different levels who come in with such different backgrounds. How do I set up an environment where I realistically can accommodate them? By supporting self-regulation, you set up these contexts that accommodate diverse learnings, but the other thing that you do is you have the potential to draw students into the process of individualizing the curriculum because if students know how to make good choices, for example, it's not dependent on you matching the text all the time to the students. They learn how to pick texts that work for them. If they learn how to monitor performance and maybe make changes in what they're doing, they can maybe troubleshoot or work with a peer before they come to you as a teacher. So in a way, you're engaging teachers as part of that. And I'll just, one quick example I have to give. I was working in one support setting with a teacher one time and when I first got there, she and I looked and we said, okay, this is a problem. We walked into the class the first day and every single kid sat there with their hand up waiting for the teacher. And so what her challenge was is she'd go to each one, she'd do something really, really quick. She'd look at what they were doing and throw in a solution and then move to the next one just to get them working. What she did in her classroom over time is she shifted it so students were self-regulating. They knew what they were trying to do. They had strategies they had recorded for themselves. They used their strategies. If it didn't work, then they had a way of signaling to the teacher but they were working so independently that she could focus her time much more effectively. So you can draw students in by they can be helping you individualize and second, you can create more independent or last, you can create more independence in learners so that they're helping each other and working themselves. So a lot of what we're talking about empowers learners in your classrooms. And if you read Nancy's article, she talks about how at the beginning of the year students didn't necessarily know how to do all of these things but by the end of the year she had all these students working independently and going back and forth and making decisions. And that, but how that she talks about how the teacher set the conditions for that to work. So point being though, I think just there's great synergies and great connections between thinking about self-regulation and thinking about ways of empowering learners who are not being successful in schools. Last, I just do wanna emphasize this point I heard yesterday that teachers can work together collaboratively to and that note, Layton in his dissertation and in the work that he's doing now is really looking at co-teaching and support teachers and classroom teachers working together in classrooms around inclusive practices. His dissertation was in writing. Brilliant, brilliant dissertation. I gave the reference to it if you wanna take a look at the work that he's doing and he's doing with one of the school districts in his area that I know that that's work that's going on as well.