We have been working on Studio 5 now for approximately 3 years and had many impressed guests and visitors. The origins of the concept for Studio 5 were presented by Kurtis and Sam at Learning 2.0 conference, as an innovation for future education. Much of the thinking was based around Daniel Pink's book Drive, its 3 keywords for motivation; Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery and their link to ISHCMC's key mission words, Energize, Engage and Empower. And so the journey began, to explore the idea of releasing learning to our students. The aim was to increase student agency and efficacy inline with giving students time to follow their passions (Google hour) and the direction that the PYP was moving as the IB discussed its new guide. Other schools have also been investigating similar concepts to Studio but have found themselves bogged down in their discussions regarding exact modeling and predicted outcomes. We decided to move forward with a 60/40 model; 60% of the time led by teachers and 40% managed by students following individual goals and interests. With the careful guidance of the Studio 5 teachers, the model has over the past few years become more self-directed, focusing on personalized learning both academically, socially and emotionally.
As two cohorts of Studio 5 students have now moved from the PYP to the Secondary school we have been observing and reflecting upon their progress and their transition. Although Grade 6 and 7 teachers have initiated both academic and pedagogical changes, it is clear that the transition is not a smooth one for our students. As with all the work that is being undertaken with curriculum and AtL's it has become obvious that there needs to be a clear definition of what students need to know, through concepts, knowledge, and skills as well as an understanding of the pedagogy that will achieve this objective and the assessment that will align it all. The recent visit by Simon Camby and Andy Hancock raised many questions about our model and how it fits with the PYP, student learning, our curriculum, and external academic standards. We asked them to think about what we are doing and whether our students as learners would best be served with a Self-Regulated or Self -Directed model of education. Although they were only present for a day, their conclusion was unanimously in favor of a structured self-regulated model based on the creation of student learning toolkits that can be used to acquire knowledge, apply concepts and develop critical problem-solving abilities. They saw the great benefits of having the gradual release of the learning model in action, student agency, and efficacy and this being scoped and sequenced throughout the skills. From all the recent readings that I have been doing on this topic, I would conclude that Self-Regulated learners are what we want to be producing through our PYP and having them develop further towards being Self Directed through more personalized pathways as they pass through the Secondary School.
Hence, this week's Food for Thought. Building on what I shared before the October break, the EEF document about Metacognition and Self Regulated learning, I want to further our thinking in this direction so that we maintain our vision of preparing students for the future. Recently, this excellent post by Julie Stern was shared with me, Imagine What School Could Be… (You can read below) I believe this is an attainable future and one that would prepare our students for their future but to get there we need to have a well planned and articulated curriculum of learning skills, knowledge, concepts, and assessments.
"We need a particular type of innovation, the kind that makes the world a better place. This generation of young people needs to solve problems with a level of complexity and magnitude rarely seen over the course of human history.
Pollution and contamination of the environment, lack of access to resources for a growing number of people, changing weather patterns and ecosystems, the rise and spread of international terrorism, a polarized populace, global poverty, rapid urbanization and large-scale migration—the question for our generation of teachers is, “How do we prepare young people to tackle problems we currently don’t know how to solve?”
Consider these facts from The Necessary Revolution (Senge, 2010):
- More than a third of the world’s forests have disappeared in the past 50 years.
- Many diseases are far more prevalent due to toxins in products like food and children’s toys.
- Five hundred million chronically underemployed people live in slums, a figure that is increasing by 50 million each year.
- Senior business executives say “the greatest innovations of the 21st century will be those that help to address human needs more than those that create the most profit” (p. 6).
- Young people are deeply worried about the future of the planet and want to make a difference more than they want to make money.
- Thirty percent of U.S. students drop out of high school.
- Fifty-four percent of students who start college do not complete it.
- The most popular word students selected to describe how they usually feel in school was “bored” (Lyons, 2004).
What would schools look like if we were developing students as collaborative innovators ready to tackle the world’s most complex challenges?
And these from Creating Innovators (Wagner, 2012):
Now, put those facts next to these (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016a, 2016b):
Meanwhile,
Businesses want creativity and ideas that address human needs. Today’s young people want to do something meaningful, now. Meanwhile, students are bored and opting out of school in droves.
More than ever, students need to transfer their learning to real-world, highly dissimilar situations. What we know about dissimilar transfer is that it requires an abstraction to the conceptual level, deeply grounded in a knowledge base. We can and should start with low-road, academic transfer of learning but quickly move across the spectrum toward high-road, real-world transfer of learning.
Picture a school organized around real-world problems that require the flexible application of each subject’s concepts with an eye toward identifying and developing students’ passions. Students would engage in a variety of experiences that ask them to contribute to building a healthy, sustainable, and just world.
The students in this world-changing school are probably not sitting in desks in rows learning in 50-minute blocks of time, are they? Imagine students choosing an environmental or health situation to solve while they explore concepts of science and mathematics—for example, discovering renewable energy solutions for a major company or reducing infant mortality in a developing nation.
Picture a senior who has identified politics and conflict resolution as his passion. He has chosen to analyze a nation with civil strife, the Central African Republic, and make recommendations for improving the situation. Monday morning starts off with a Skype conference call with a nongovernmental organization from Mozambique that will share lessons learned from the end of that country’s civil war in 1992.
After he finishes the call, the student and his team note down action steps and divide the tasks based on each member’s interests and expertise. They have two weeks until the next call and before then have two scheduled team meetings and a full-day lab session to work on this project with an expert and the teacher who is mentoring the group. This project is called the Grand Challenge.
At the end of year, the student’s team will present its work to a group of experts who will evaluate the students’ technical skills, application of conceptual understanding, ability to think critically, and collaboration skills. If the work measures up to the standards for a particular area, they’ll receive a badge denoting their skills.
This student has been deepening his understanding of concepts such as authority, rule of law, justice, conflict, and freedom since elementary school. He became a peer counselor in the second grade and has always had a passion for building empathy between disagreeing people or groups. He has read The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria, two books on America’s democracy by Akhil Amar, and many books on Africa and developing nations. He spent last summer as a peer counselor with youth in a special juvenile detention center where he deepened his skills and understanding of conflict resolution. He has already transferred his understanding of civil strife to several situations, as he analyzed Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War in eighth grade and Europe after World War II in tenth grade. He feels prepared for the Grand Challenge, as all of his learning experiences have led him to this level of thinking and application.
In addition to the Grand Challenge project and individualized course, he also participates in five courses that all seniors take: Thinking Like a Mathematician, Thinking Like a Historian, Thinking Like an Engineer, Thinking Like a Journalist, and Collaboration & Problem Solving. For each of these courses, teachers design learning experiences that help him hone his disciplinary thinking, deepen his conceptual understanding of the discipline, and learn key factual information. Each week he applies what he is learning in one of these courses to real-world problems that his peers have chosen as their Grand Challenge. During these disciplinary thinking labs, a team presents a problem they are facing as part of their Grand Challenge to the students in the class. The students are charged with using the conceptual understanding and thinking of the discipline to help the team better understand the issues, test a possible idea, or develop a solution. Teachers act as coaches who help structure the learning and provide feedback during these labs.
The last element of this student’s weekly schedule is coaching a disciplinary thinking lab for sixth graders. This helps him strengthen his thinking in an area of his choice, create a community in the school, and give the adult teachers more time to plan rich learning experiences for students and provide effective feedback.
As he thinks about what lies ahead for the week after his Monday morning call, he is excited. He knows the work he is doing is tapping into his passions and purpose. It is also intellectually challenging—he is always uncovering and applying conceptual understanding, evaluating his own thinking using intellectual standards, and applying that thinking to the real world. He believes that his efforts in school will truly change the world—and the great thing is that they will.
It starts with conceptual understanding. As you try out the strategies and become an expert conceptual teacher, know that you are taking a giant step toward preparing students to tackle problems that we don’t yet know how to solve. Your impact can be tremendous—and it’s just what the world needs now."
My reading has revealed that there are lots of different definitions regarding self-regulated learning and what it really means. Obviously, we could get caught up in semantics and join schools that are scared to commit and progress student learning. However, for the sake of moving things forward and having a common understanding of self-regulated learning that is very close to what we are doing in Studios I recommend this academic piece by Barry Zimmerman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology and Head of Learning, Development, and Instruction at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement: An Overview, Below I have extracted the section on defining Self Regulated Learning. However, the article also covers student strategies, motivation, and self monitoring of progress. Zimmerman has written several other academic articles about different aspects of Self Regulated Learners. His website, Learning and the Adolescent Mind has some resources but overall is a bit underwhelming when compared to his academic articles.
"DEFINITIONS OF SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
At one time or another, we have all observed self-regulated learners. They approach educational tasks with confidence, diligence, and resourcefulness. Perhaps most importantly, self-regulated learners are aware when they know a fact or possess a skill and when they do not. Unlike their passive classmates, self-regulated students proactively seek out information when needed and take the necessary steps to master it. When they encounter obstacles such as poor study conditions, confusing teachers, or abstruse text books, they find a way to succeed. Self-regulated learners view acquisition as a systematic and controIlable process, and they accept greater responsibility for their achievement outcomes (see Borkowski, Carr, Rellinger, & Pressley, in press; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986, 1990).
As familiar as this description may be, it is not helpful pedagogically unless it leads eventually to operational definitions of the component processes by which students self-regulate their learning. Although definitions of self-regulated learning involving specific processes often differ on the basis of researchers' theoretical orientations, a common conceptualization of these students has emerged as metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning (Zimmerman, 1986). In terms of metacognitive processes, self-regulated learners plan, set goals, organize, self-monitor, and self-evaluate at various points during the process of acquisition (Corno, 1986, 1989; Ghatala, 1986; Pressley, Borkowski, OE Schneider, 1987). These processes enable them to be self-aware, knowledgeable, and decisive in their approach to learning. In terms of motivational processes, these learners report high self-efficacy, self attributions, and intrinsic task interest (Borkowski et al., in press; Schunk, 1986; Zimmerman, 1985). To observers, they are self-starters who display extraordinary effort and persistence during learning. In their behavioral processes, self-regulated learners select, structure, and create environments that optimize learning (Henderson, 1986; Wang & Peverly, 1986; Zimmerman 8 Martinez-Pons, 1986). They seek out advice, information, and places where they are most likely to learn; they self-instruct during acquisition and self-reinforced during performance enactments (Diaz & Neal, in press; Rohrkemper, 1989).
When defining self-regulated learning, it is important to distinguish between self-regulation processes, such as perceptions of self-efficacy, and strategies designed to optimize these processes, such as intermediate goalsetting (Zimmerman, in press). Self-regulated learning strategies refer to actions and processes directed at the acquisition of information or skills that involve agency, purpose, and instrumentality perceptions by learners. Undoubtedly, all learners use regulatory processes to some degree, but self-regulated learners are distinguished by (a) their awareness of strategic relations between regulatory processes or responses and learning outcomes and (b) their use of these strategies to achieve their academic goals. The systematic use of metacognitive, motivational, and/or behavioral strategies is a key feature of most definitions of self-regulated learners (Zimmerman, 1989a).
The second feature of most definitions of self-regulated learning is a
"self-oriented feedback" loop (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Zimmerman,
1989b). This loop entails a cyclic process in which students monitor the
effectiveness of their learning methods or strategies and react to this
feedback in a variety of ways, ranging from covert changes in self-perception to overt changes in behavior such as altering the use of a learning
strategy. Phenomenological theories of self-regulated learning (e.g.,
McCombs, 1986, 1989) depicts this feedback loop in terms of covert
perceptual processes such as self-esteem and self-concepts, whereas operant
theories (e.g., Mace, Belfiore, & Shea, 1989) favor overt descriptions in
terms of self-, recording, self-instruction, and self-reinforcement responses.
Social cognitive theorists (e.g., Bandura, 1989) caution against viewing this control loop in terms of only negative feedback (Le., seeking to reduce
differences between one's goals and observed outcomes); they report a
positive feedback effect as well (i.e., seeking to raise one's goals based on
observed outcomes). Regardless of theoretical differences in what is monitored and how outcomes are interpreted, virtually all researchers assume
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that self-regulation depends on continuing feedback on learning effectiveness.
The third feature of definitions of self-regulated learning is an indication of
how and why students choose to use a particular strategy or response.
Because self-regulated learning involves temporally delimited strategies or
responses, students' efforts to initiate and regulate them proactively require
preparation time, vigilance, and effort. Unless the outcomes of these efforts
are sufficiently attractive, students will not be motivated to self-regulate.
They may choose not to self-regulate their learning when the opportunity
arises, an outcome that requires a comprehensive accounting of their
academic motivational processes. Operant theorists (e.g., Mace et al., 1989)
claim that all self-regulated learning responses are ultimately determined by
contingent external rewards or punishment such as social approval, enhanced status, or material gain, whereas phenomenological theorists (e.g.,
McCombs, 1989) view students as motivated by a global sense of self-esteem
or self-actualization. Between these two ends of the continuum, other
theorists favor motives such as self-efficacy, achievement success, and
cognitive equilibrium.
An important aspect of theories of self-regulated learning is that student
learning and motivation are treated as interdependent processes that cannot
be fully understood apart from each other. For example, student perceptions of self-efficacy are both a motive to learn and a subsequent outcome
of attempts to learn (Schunk, 1984, 1989). Self-regulated learners are not
merely reactive to their learning outcomes; rather, they proactively seek out
opportunities to learn (Zimmerman, 1989a). They self-initiate activities
designed to promote self-observation, self-evaluation, and self-improvement such as practice sessions, specialized training, and competitive events
(Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986). Their heightened motivation is
evident in their continuing tendency to set higher learning goals for
themselves when they achieve earlier goals, a quality that Bandura (1989)
called self-motivation. Thus, self-regulated learning involves more than a
capability to execute a learning response by oneself (i.e., self-control) and
more than a capability to adjust learning responses to new or changing
conditions from negative feedback. It involves proactive efforts to seek out
and profit from learning activities. At this level, learners are not only
self-directed in a metacognitive sense but are self-motivated as well. Their
skill and will are integrated components of self-regulation (see McCombs
and Marzano, this issue)."
To conclude, I don't think that any of the above is radical or goes beyond what we have been aiming at for the past few years. What I hope is that it provokes conversation and discussion about the strategies and toolkits that we are explicitly teaching our students to make them effective and successful self-regulated learners. This does mean, as we are undertaking our curriculum meetings, that we all develop a better whole school perspective on what students know regarding knowledge, concepts, and skills. I know that we all share the same goal of creating inquisitive, motivated learners who, as the Julie Stern post emphasizes, are able to plan, monitor and manage their own learning. There are lots of examples across the school that involve peer tutoring, collaborative learning, good teacher feedback, and metacognition. As the evidence, from many sources, points out, for these strategies to be effective they do need to be accompanied by explicit teaching of content and skills by teachers. What we need to do is ensure that this is consistent and built upon throughout an ISHCMC education.
