Chapter 4
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Third grader Finn shifts excitedly in his seat. In a few minutes, he's going to give a multimedia report he's been working on for an entire month. The assignment for him and his classmates in their dual immersion school? To prepare and present a report on a country of their choice in their second language—a seemingly tall order for these small boys and girls.
Finn had researched and prepared a presentation on Costa Rica. As he waited for class to start, he thought about the steps he'd taken.
Back when the assignment was first announced, he'd shared the teacher-provided schedule of due dates and tasks with his parents. He told them he wanted to have most of the work completed before spring break—which he would be spending at his grandparents' house. Because Finn realized he didn't know very much about the digital storytelling app he would use as a platform, he enlisted his older brother to show him some of the technical aspects of the program, such as how to embed a video. During an online research session in class, while searching for an image of the Costa Rican flag, he learned that the country would be holding a presidential election in a few days. Finn made a note in the online planning document his teacher set up to remind him to check on the results so that he could report the most current information about the country. Then, over the course of a few weeks, he and a peer partner had reviewed one another's developing presentations and given feedback. They had tweaked their presentations and practiced their deliveries to make sure they could complete them in five minutes. It had been hard to make sure the presentation wasn't too short or too long, Finn thought, but he felt confident in the work he'd done. He had learned a lot, and he was ready to share.
Finn's success was due in no small measure to his ability to cognitively regulate. He set a goal for himself (i.e., have the project mostly done by spring break), sought help, and used an organizational tool to keep track of progress. He didn't do it alone; Finn's teacher also played an important role in his project's success. But in many schools, planning, organizing, and creating are left up to the child (or the parents). Students who succeed in these circumstances tend to be viewed by their teachers as "capable," "motivated," or "mature," and their accomplishments are often attributed to character traits rather than explicit skill mastery.
Finn and his classmates were lucky to have a teacher who knew better. She created the conditions that would allow her students to learn and practice the skills of cognitive regulation by
In other words, Finn's teacher integrated principles of social and emotional learning (SEL), specifically cognitive self-regulation, into content instruction. As we have noted in previous chapters, when SEL is confined to a stand-alone program with little integration into the milieu of the classroom, attainment of program goals is reduced (Jones et al., 2017). In this chapter, we explore the SEL competencies that most closely intersect with the academic instruction classroom teachers do each day, focusing on actions you can take to develop your students' cognitive regulation abilities.
We have already explored emotional self-regulation, which has some similarities with cognitive self-regulation. Self-regulated learning, in general, refers to strategic, intentional, and metacognitive behavior, motivation, and cognition focused on a specific goal. "Students can be described as self-regulated to the degree that they are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process" (Zimmerman, 1989, p. 329). In other words, cognitive self-regulation requires that students engage in behaviors that help them learn. They assume increased responsibility for their learning and are active participants in the processes and strategies their teachers use.
Zimmerman (1989) also notes the value of specific strategies that self-regulated learners use. In his words, "self-regulated learning strategies are actions and processes directed at acquiring information or skill that involve agency, purpose, and instrumentality perceptions by learners. They include such methods as organizing and transforming information, self-consequating, seeking information, and rehearsing or using memory aids" (p. 329).
All cognitive regulation depends on a person's being aware of his or her cognitive processes. The skill of metacognition, then, is the logical place for us to start.
Research has revealed that children may begin to develop metacognitive knowledge as early as age 3 (Marulis, Palincsar, Berhenke, & Whitebread, 2016). Metacognition is commonly understood to be "thinking about one's thinking," but it's more completely understood as a three-part skill set: the ability to (1) recognize one's own and other people's thinking, (2) consider the actions needed to complete a task, and (3) identify the strategies one might use to carry out those actions. For instance, preschool children with rudimentary metacognition can answer questions about how they completed a jigsaw puzzle, tell you what might have made the task easier (e.g., if all the pieces were different colors or the same), and tell you what strategies they used to complete the task (e.g., look at the picture on the box, sort the pieces by color, assemble the border pieces first). This ability to monitor and direct cognitive processes is critical for every learner regardless of age, and it's closely associated with the development of expertise in all fields (Sternberg, 1998). Think of how metacognition factors into teaching proficiency, for example. It's what allows us to plan and monitor lessons and reflect on past lessons in order to "debug" future ones (Jiang, Ma, & Gao, 2016).
Metacognition can be explicitly fostered through instruction. One of the best-known techniques is reciprocal teaching, which provides readers with a protocol for planning, monitoring, and reflecting their understanding of a text (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Groups of students read a text that has been segmented at interim points and pause at designated stopping points to discuss the passage in order to develop a shared sense of understanding. The protocol requires students to jointly (1) summarize what has been read, (2) ask each other questions, (3) provide clarifying information to benefit others, and (4) formulate predictions about the next text segment.
Reciprocal teaching has amassed an impressive record of success, and it is used with students as young as 2nd graders. Significantly, gains in reading comprehension associated with reciprocal teaching are attributable not to the content of the text read but to the metacognitive prompting conditions of the protocol. Hattie's (2009) meta-analysis of reciprocal teaching studies attributes an effect size of .74 on student learning, far above the .40 effect size of a year's progress in a year of schooling (see our discussion of effect sizes in Chapter 1). These numbers make a strong case that metacognition deserves to be taught. And instruction in metacognition is most effective when it's embedded within the classroom's regular academic flow.
Third grade teacher Juan Cortez integrates opportunities for his students to engage in metacognitive thinking. As part of his efforts, he models his own metacognitive processes. Mr. Cortez thinks aloud each day, sharing his reflections about the content students are learning. For example, during a read-aloud about a strained friendship, Mr. Cortez paused and said,
I'm seeing that friends do kind things for each other. And I'm seeing that friends apologize when they hurt each other's feelings. I'm going to make a list of things I learn about friends in this book and then compare it to what I learn in this other book. And then I'm going to think about which of these things I do on my own.
Mr. Cortez also provides students with opportunities to engage in their own metacognitive thinking. A poster in his classroom list examples of metacognitive behaviors students can practice, including the following:
Mr. Cortez gives each student a small "personal goals" notebook at the beginning of the year to record what they want to accomplish both inside and outside school, and to reflect on their learning. Madison, a student in Mr. Cortez's class, described writing in her notebook:
I was thinking about my progress and I wanted to write it down so I don't forget. I had a goal to learn to solve problems with patterns. I wasn't so good at that, but today I did it. I made progress because I figured out the pattern, and I asked Mr. Cortez for another practice problem to see if I could do it again.
Here, we see Madison engaging in metacognitive thinking and becoming increasing self-regulated as she learns. Of course, she still needs her teacher to guide the learning and provide her with strategies, but she is assuming more responsibility for her own thinking and, as her eagerness to try out her solution demonstrates, becoming more motivated in the process.
Along with a growing capability to think about one's own thinking comes the capacity to direct one's thinking in order to change behavior. Attention is a prime example of such directed thinking, and its value in the classroom is obvious. As students move through school, they need to sustain attention over longer periods of time, and sometimes in conditions that they may find monotonous (e.g., teacher lectures, extended reading and writing tasks). The conventional wisdom holds that school-age students will generally maintain attention for 5 to 10 minutes, although it is important to note that relative attention is task dependent. Watch a child absorbed in an intrinsically motivated task sometime, and marvel at the singular devotion to the activity.
In truth, any person's sustained attention is punctuated with intermittent loss of focus. Things seem to pop into our minds out of nowhere, and then we're off-task or off-topic. The skill of maintaining attention, then, is not about extending one's attention span but rather about choosing to return to a task after attention has been lost. It includes noticing when attention has faded and having strategies to bring it back to full strength. These strategies can be as simple as writing a note about the thing that popped into your head and then returning to the task at hand, or taking a breath and refocusing.
Adults routinely use strategies to help sustain attention and effort. For example, when you have a task to complete, setting a timer can do wonders to help you focus. We often tell our own writing students about Anthony Trollope, a prolific author from the Victorian age. He would set a timer for 15 minutes and challenge himself to write 250 words during that time. Trollope would sustain this pace for three hours early each morning, then report to his job at the postal service. He credited adherence to this routine for the 49 novels he produced in 35 years (Trollope, 2014).
Of course, Trollope didn't face the insistent lure of handheld digital devices. Anyone who has stood in front of middle or high school students in the past decade is familiar with the battle educators must wage against their students' in-class smartphone use. Just how bad is it? Rosen (2017) reported on studies of adolescents' behavior during 15-minute timed study sessions, noting that the researchers were discouraged to find that the average amount of time spent engaged in actual study was less than 10 minutes. More than a third of dedicated study time was lost to social media and phone checks. This would be depressing if the same study didn't also find that when students knew they would have a one-minute "tech check" after each 15 minutes of study, they maintained their study attention at higher rates.
Let's think about what was going on here. For these adolescents, it wasn't really the technology—having a smartphone—that provided the distraction; it was internal anxiety, the fear of missing out. When they knew they would be able to check their phones, they felt less of a need to do so. In other words, changing the environmental conditions to reduce students' anxiety increased their attention.
This insight is an important one. Although we can't explicitly teach attention, teachers do have quite a bit of influence on the conditions that can either contribute to or detract from a learner's ability to attend. For example, a quiet environment facilitates test taking, reading, writing, and other academic tasks. We know that, but do our students? The only way to be sure is to teach them.
Sixth grade science teacher Yasmin Farhad infuses information about the biological influences on attention into lessons on the central nervous system. She instructs her students about how to create learning environments that work in their favor. "We talk about attention and how the brain functions, especially in the frontal and parietal cortexes," she said. "I extend this to their reading habits. We discuss whether it is a good idea to have music playing in your headphones when you're doing your science homework. They link this to what they are learning about the brain." For Ms. Farhad, learning about cognitive regulation is a natural fit in her science class, where students are learning about the social, physical, and biological world. "I intentionally look for ways they can apply scientific knowledge to enhance their self-knowledge. One concept everyone masters? There's no such thing as multitasking! And they can explain why it is biologically impossible."
Teachers' metacognition plays a role in student attention, too. Expert teachers are able to monitor their audience for signs of restlessness and loss of attention. Further, they do not personalize outward student behavior as a sign of disrespect or attribute loss of attention to a student's flawed character. Instead, they change the pace and the activity, often incorporating some physical movement and communication. Teachers of young students might announce these as "brain breaks" to "shake the sillies out." Teachers of older students might lead a breathing exercise to refocus attention or call for a short partner-talk activity.
Such pauses are universally understood to be excellent classroom management techniques, but you can and should also leverage them to build students' sense that they can learn to regulate their attention. Pairing such breaks with reminders about the purpose (i.e., "We're doing this so you can refocus your attention") helps students become more aware of the importance of monitoring their own state and taking action to change it when necessary.
For example, U.S. history teacher Yvonne Mason uses the Think-Pair-Square technique in her classroom to help students refocus their attention on learning. First, there is some quiet time to reflect on a question or topic; then students share their thoughts with a designated partner before each partnership joins another partnership to "square up" and share their thinking as a group of four. Ms. Mason notes, "These brief conversations allow students time to process the content and check their thinking with others. I've found they are able to attend to the content longer, learn more, and develop a skill or tool for paying attention." This three-part routine provides students with time and space to consider a complex idea, and it has the added benefit of peer accountability. The habit of thinking alone and in the company of others is a useful skill in school and in life, and builds stamina to stay with a problem rather than turn away from it when answers don't come easily.
Have you heard someone describe a student as being "unmotivated"? Maybe you have heard someone describe you as unmotivated. Certainly you can come up with at least one occasion where you found yourself feeling unmotivated in the face of a task.
You probably had some really good reasons why you were unmotivated. (Nancy feels this way about learning hot yoga, something Doug is newly interested in.) But low motivation often comes down to a single fact: you didn't have any goals for the activity. Doug has tapped into personal goals for yoga that are attached to incremental improvement of the 26 positions he performs each session, and he's looking at this practice as a pathway to improve his running. Doug also has, in his yoga instructor, a model for how each position should be performed, and he monitors his steady improvement toward the goals he has set. Put simply, one's motivation, or lack thereof, is fueled in large part by one's goals.
This presents a challenge for educators, because unlike adults who can select to engage in certain activities while avoiding others, students are generally expected to engage in all the tasks we set for them. They have to be in school all day and participate in classes whether or not they find those classes particularly interesting. Because motivation is variable and influenced by one's goals, those who hope to foster academic motivation must help students establish and monitor goals for academic learning.
But when it comes to influencing learning, not all academic goals are created equal. Let's take a closer look at the differences between performance goals and mastery goals.
Some goals are about a student's standing relative to others rather than learning for learning's sake. These performance goals often have a social comparison element, because they can involve comparing one's performance against the performance of others. A good example of a performance goal is having a 4.0 grade point average (GPA). Certainly a student who sets this goal is likely to work hard to achieve it for several good reasons; perhaps she wants to be class valedictorian, she understands that class ranking influences college admission, and she knows her parents value exemplary grades. But pursuit of performance goals can come at a cost. A tight competition for the top ranking might mean giving up orchestra class in favor of a weighted advanced placement (AP) class.
This was the dilemma Nancy's daughter faced when she was a high school senior. At the end of her junior year, she and another student were tied for the top GPA. She had calculated that she needed to take a certain number of AP classes in order to be named valedictorian, but doing so would mean that she would not be able to take a fourth year of orchestra, an unweighted course that she loved. Ultimately, Nancy's daughter decided to remain in orchestra and finished the year as salutatorian without regrets. She later said, "It kept me playing violin during a really busy time in my life. I got an additional year to get better at it." Nancy's daughter got into a good college, played in one of the university orchestras ("the one for fun, not competition"), and earned a degree in computer sciences.
Performance goals are not inherently bad, and neither is having a performance goal orientation. It's actually very human—reflecting a natural desire for accomplishment, recognition, and esteem. But when a learner's goals are primarily of a performance nature, it can actually undermine learning. Performance goal–oriented students demonstrate higher levels of anxiety, in part because they worry about "looking smart" and not being perceived as "stupid." At its worst, a performance goal orientation can inhibit risk taking. How many of us have encountered a student who chooses to take a less challenging course because he sees it as a guaranteed A rather than stretch his abilities in a more difficult course? This is an example of a performance-avoidance goal, in that the student is trying to avoid performing more poorly than other classmates in the more challenging course.
Unlike performance goals, mastery goals focus on the learning itself—and tend to be about achieving one's personal best irrespective of how others perform. Students with a mastery goal mindset are more resilient and persistent in their learning, have more positive attitudes toward school, attribute their success to their effort, and use cognitive and metacognitive skills more effectively (Midgley, 2002).
Many of the goals we hold for ourselves are mastery goals. For instance, chances are good that you undertake professional readings in order to strengthen your teaching. You may not be aiming to be Teacher of the Year, but you do want to be a better educator this year than you were last year. The difference between performance and mastery goals is the difference between wanting an A in Spanish versus learning to speak Spanish. We aren't suggesting that earning a good grade is an unworthy goal—just that it's crucial to foster a mastery goal orientation to parallel the performance goals already inherent in schooling.
A study of science students ages 13 to 15 suggests doing this will have a lasting positive effect (O'Keefe, Ben-Eliyahu, & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2013). Students were surveyed during the school year and found to hold predominantly performance-oriented goals. These same students were later enrolled in a three-week summer science enrichment program that was structured to have a "mastery goal–oriented environment." The program was set up to feature curriculum experiences aligned with students' expressed interests. It encouraged intellectual risk taking and investigation (e.g., teachers asked students, "What do you think?" rather than providing answers); provided formative and summative feedback focused on students' learning processes and use of strategies rather than the learning outcomes achieved; and featured a learning environment socially engineered to encourage friendship, peer collaboration, and mutual emotional support. When program participants were surveyed at the end of the summer program, they had shifted from a performance goal orientation toward a mastery goal orientation.
Yes, this is evidence that the structure of the learning environment influences student goals. But the really interesting thing is that when these same students were surveyed a third time, well into the following school year, their mastery goal orientation persisted, even when their current learning environments were performance goal–oriented. The takeaway here is that adopting and strengthening a set of beliefs about mastery can become a part of a learner's internal nature.
So, how can teachers structure the learning environment to enhance a mastery goal orientation? Rather than publicly displaying students' reading performance levels, which encourages competition, social comparison, and a performance goal orientation, perhaps create a bulletin board for students to report on the strategies they are using to improve their reading (e.g., choosing a book with a friend to read and discuss, reading aloud to a younger sibling). When giving students formative feedback, always include mastery goals, such as discussing a student's "personal best" attainments and reviewing his or her growth trajectory on quizzes and tests. You might also survey students about their interests and create learning opportunities that tap into existing mastery goals that are lying just below the surface, waiting to be utilized.
Perhaps the most important way to encourage a mastery goal orientation is to adopt and model it yourself. There is a strong relationship between teachers self-regulating their own learning and the likelihood that a mastery-rich environment exists in their classroom (Gordon, Dembo, & Hocevar, 2007). This is reflective of other research indicating that teachers teach in ways that are consistent with how they themselves learn. Be sure to share with students the experiences you have had with learning something new and why you chose to do so. Dominique paddleboards, and he talks regularly with his students about what he is doing to improve his skills, keeping mastery goals at the center of his conversations. This also gives him opportunities to discuss resilience (see Chapter 2) as a means to persist when facing challenges.
Noah Rodriguez actively works on goal setting with his 7th grade science students, walking them through the process of examining pre-assessment results, developing individual objectives based on the results, and determining evidence of mastery. Here are some evidence-focused goals his students set:
As illustrated here, the goals you help your students set should always be developmentally appropriate, and students should have regular opportunities to return to and update their goals as they continue to progress.
Another key element of cognitive regulation is a student's ability to recognize and resolve a problem. Finn, the 3rd grade student profiled at the beginning of this chapter, recognized that one problem he needed to face in order to complete his project on time was the week he would be spending at his grandparents' house. His solution was to start the assignment early in order to have a substantial part of it completed before he left. In resolving his problem, Finn drew upon several processes, with support from others.
Solving a problem necessarily begins with recognizing that the problem exists. This is a function of experience and expertise; we learn to anticipate problems in part because we have made mistakes. This is a key premise in the growth mindset research, particularly that one can "fail forward" if given the opportunity to reflect on what contributed to the unsuccessful attempt. It is possible that Finn had previous experience with waiting too long to begin an assignment. We remember writer Anne Lamott's (1995) account of her brother's similar experience, and the subsequent wise advice of their father:
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." (p. 19)
Admittedly, making mistakes can be a hard way to learn, but it contributes to problem recognition, especially in seeing a familiar pattern ("Hey, this situation is just like one I faced a few months ago!"). The ability to recognize problems and apply solutions in novel situations is a measure of one's ability to transfer knowledge (Perkins & Salomon, 1992). We see this same ability among elite athletes in team sports and in world-ranked chess players, who seem to be able to anticipate the play evolving on the field or the consequences of a chess move and then play it forward before it has occurred. They rapidly adjust their strategy in order to solve the problem. Once again, it is pattern recognition at work.
Children and adolescents often need support and guidance to recognize and resolve problems. To them, academic or social challenges can seem overwhelming and create paralysis. Of course, this has developmental overtones, too. Very young children benefit from learning the power of an apology as a way to restore a situation. But as children get older, their problems often become more complex.
In the school where we work, teachers follow a problem-solving script to help students develop a plan to tackle challenges they can't seem to resolve on their own:
Take the case of Ariel, a 10th grade student having difficulty balancing the workload in her classes. She fell behind in assignments but avoided her teachers rather than seek resolution. After a while, getting back on track seemed impossible to her. But a conversation with her mentor (which involved following the script shown) set Ariel on a course of talking with each teacher and developing a recovery plan to renegotiate two assignments and catch up on the rest.
The same script can be used to help students trying to solve a complex problem in class. (Ariel's math teacher uses it all the time.) It's powerful because it explicitly models how to map out a multistep solution.
Students with strong cognitive self-regulation are able to distinguish which problems they can solve on their own and which problems (or when within the problem-solving effort) they'll need assistance to solve.
The importance of help seeking and avoidance acumen becomes clear when we consider that children who seek help every time they encounter difficulty or challenge fail to develop the kind of resiliency and grit needed to persevere and become independent learners. Or that children who consistently refuse help (even when it is obvious to their teacher that help is the only pathway to success) can frustrate both themselves and those who teach them.
Well-meaning adults can unwittingly contribute to both of these problems. Take learned helplessness as an example (Maier & Seligman, 1976). The operative word is learned; learned helplessness is taught by others and through circumstance. It might be the teacher who provides answers instead of scaffolds, or the teacher who swoops in too quickly and too often to prevent students from struggling.
Let's compare two classroom conversations:
Student: How do you spell government?
Teacher: G o v e r n m e n t.
Student: How do you spell government?
Teacher: Let's think about this, because I believe you know more than you're giving yourself credit for. What would the root word of government be?
Student: Govern.
Teacher: You're right! Can you spell that? Try it on a scrap piece of paper. [Student writes the word govern.] Now what's the suffix? Write that down, too, and see if it looks right. [Student adds -ment.] What do you think?
Student: I think it's right.
Teacher: You've got it! I use the same strategy when I have to write a word that I'm not sure how to spell. I think about what I might already know about the word, and I write it down to see if it looks right.
Simply telling a student the correct spelling is expeditious, to be sure, and all of us have done exactly this on multiple occasions. Frankly, if the student asking this question were a 1st grader, most of us would just furnish the spelling. But if this were an older student, one who already has at least some knowledge that she is not using, the second approach—the problem-solving approach—is a much better choice, empowering the student to leverage her own cognitive resources rather than teaching her that she doesn't need to figure out the spelling herself or that you don't think her capable of figuring it out. Our students aren't helpless, and it's important that we do not teach them to be.
At the other end of the continuum is the student who refuses help when the situation clearly demands it. Think of the toddler rolling around on the floor insisting that he wants to put his own snow boots on even though he lacks the motor skills to do so.
One version of this kind of behavior that you may be familiar with is students who resist taking advantage of the resources provided to help them. We know this scenario well. The school where we work offers numerous tutoring opportunities to assist students with homework, catching up on late assignments, studying for tests, and redoing work that was not successful the first time. We call it academic recovery, and we actively promote its use. Yet there are always some students who reject this kind of assistance, even in the face of their failure to complete assignments and demonstrate mastery of content standards.
Woven into their refusal of help are a variety of dispositions and habits, including work avoidance, denial, and automatic reactions to emotionally charged situations. Putting these students on the path to constructive help seeking may require a team effort from teachers who remind them of academic recovery opportunities, administrators who meet individually with them, and family members who pitch in to encourage the development of more productive habits. The work isn't easy, but if we want students to be persistent, we must be, too.
Developing students' ability to decide when they can solve problems independently and when they need (and should accept!) help deserves to be an explicit instructional target. We subscribe to what Sapon-Shevin (1998) calls the helping curriculum. She posits that all students need to learn four dimensions of help. We'd actually take that a step further and say not only that students need to learn these four dimensions, but also that mastery of them is essential to a successful personal and professional adult life. Everyone needs to master four problem-solving basics:
Fourth grade teacher David Greenfield credits the helping curriculum for establishing the kind of emotionally supportive classroom climate his students need to thrive: "I introduced it on the first day of school, and we began with some short lessons in what each of these behaviors looks like and sounds like, and then I use these when it's relevant to talk about decisions characters make in the books and articles we read." His students have noticed that the problem or the resolution in a text is often linked to one of these ideas. For example, the novel Maniac Magee (Spinelli, 1990) provided the basis for an ongoing conversation about helping. "We kept a list going throughout the novel of cases where the major characters either correctly or incorrectly enacted one of the helping ideas," Mr. Greenfield said. He noted that helping has become part of the language of the classroom. "When a student is stuck, I hear classmates prompting each other's thinking about help. ‘Do you need some help from me, or are you still working it out?’ is one I hear a lot," said Mr. Greenfield. "It's pretty awesome to hear them talking with each other in such supportive ways."
The ability to solve problems is directly related to decision making. Nested within resolving a problem is the ability to think about different possibilities or paths, select one, and then take action. The capacity to hold on to two different concepts and think about each is called cognitive flexibility. It's expressed in academic tasks such as being able to compare and contrast theories, generating hypotheses, and engaging in consequential thinking to identify cause and effect (Jones et al., 2017).
To develop cognitive flexibility, students need opportunities to make decisions. Young children might vote daily on which of two stories will be read aloud by the teacher. Elementary students might compare and contrast how Christopher Columbus has been portrayed in historical narratives and contemporary writing, and debate the topic. One of our middle school colleagues keeps an active game of Scrabble going as she competes against the class to build words, using it as a means to discuss the strategies they are applying. Secondary students might research the naming of schools honoring Confederate generals and write letters to legislators expressing their opinions.
Building good decision-making skills also requires students to practice reflecting on and evaluating choices made. High school anatomy and physiology teacher Meg Norton uses excerpts from Guinea Pig Scientists (Dendy & Boring, 2005) to talk about the decision making of scientists who experimented on themselves. "When we study the infectious disease cycle, we read and discuss the wisdom of Daniel Carrión's decision to inject himself with bartonellosis in order to study it," she said. "Spoiler alert: he died. It's easy in retrospect to say it was a bad decision, but I want them to speculate on how he might have arrived at this choice." As a class, Ms. Norton's students make a list of pros and cons as Carrión would have understood them, as well as a separate list of things he did not know. "Sometimes it is not knowing what we don't know that leads us to bad decisions we make for all the right reasons," Ms. Norton tells them.
It's a major turning point in the lives of students when they realize they can't possibly keep all the information they need for school in their heads. They need to write things down and map out processes. They need to study in order to master concepts. In other words, they need to use organizational skills.
Happily, scaffolds to help students develop organizational skills are fairly common—much more so than scaffolds for other components of cognitive self-regulation addressed in this chapter. They include physical and digital organizers such as files and notebooks, which show learners that organizing information and materials makes retrieval much easier; work plans; and teacher-created checklists and time lines to help students plan and revise more complex projects, such as the one Finn completed about the country of Costa Rica.
The ubiquity of organizational scaffolds in the adult world is a reminder that people develop these skills at wildly varying rates and to widely divergent degrees of mastery. Generally speaking, though, middle school seems to be about the time when we see the divide between those who have developed some facility with this aspect of cognitive self-regulation and those who haven't. That divide is particularly wide the area of study skills, which are an important element of organizational skills.
Hattie (2009) groups study skills into three categories:
Collectively, study skills have an effect size of .63, which means they exert a strong influence on learning. Many of these elements have already been discussed in this chapter, but it is important to note that the ability to use each independently is key—in fact, it's a major outcome of cognitive regulation.
One simple approach to building both study skills in particular and organizational skills in general is just to call students' attention to them. Figure 4.1 is adapted from a questionnaire developed by Gordon and colleagues (2007); it's intended to help secondary students gauge their knowledge of organizational and study skills and dispositions. We have reorganized the questions to highlight how the items cluster into categories.
Note: This figure has been reformatted for more accessible reading in this e-book. View the original figure here.
Rate each item on a scale of 1 (never) – 5 (always). Select the answer that best describes your approach to learning.
Self-Monitoring
Deep Strategy
Shallow Processing
Persistence
Environmental Structuring
Source: Adapted with permission from "Do Teachers' Own Learning Behaviors Influence Their Classroom Goal Orientation and Control Ideology?" by S. C. Gordon, M. H. Dembo, and D. Hocevar, 2007. This article was published in Teaching & Teacher Education, 23. Copyright Elsevier, 2007.
Seventh grade math teacher Juan Carlos Ruiz administers this type of inventory during the first month of school to get his students thinking about their learning processes. "The math they are introduced to this year is pre-algebra, and they have to spend time outside of class to master it," he says. "Lots of kids this age are still stuck on the idea that they just need to memorize algorithms and all will be well. But I need them to think mathematically." The class does several mathematical calculations with the data, including measures of central tendency (i.e., mean, median, mode). Most of all, they discuss the habits of mathematical thinkers. "We have Back-to-School Night in early October, and I have the students prepare a short report on their results, as well as their analysis of their habits," which Mr. Ruiz feels is a good way to get families involved in helping their children. "Middle school math gets more challenging, and parents aren't always sure how they can help. So I show them. Talking about good organizational skills and mastery goals is the best way they can help."
Teaching students cognitive regulation is an important aspect of social and emotional learning. When you provide students with appropriate learning opportunities, you create a classroom environment that is more focused and intentional. The objective is to ensure students understand that they have the power to recognize their own thinking, pay attention (and develop skills to regain their focus if needed), set and monitor their goals, recognize and resolve problems, develop decision-making skills, and become increasingly organized.