Students taking responsibility for their own learning process
Journal Club: Self-Regulated Learning
The third journal club on Thursday 15 February was dedicated to discussing Barry Zimmerman’s 2015 chapter on Self-Regulated Learning. It gives an informative overview of and nicely defines concepts such as self-regulation processes, strategies, phases, events, self-monitoring, self-efficacy, and self-regulation of performance. For our TR-IDEE team and theme, there are many hooks we can connect to and handles and levers we can use.
Learning process or learning content? A distinction can be made between the way of learning and the what of learning. The chapter talks about the way of learning in particular. But in challenge-based engineering pedagogies, students are usually asked to take responsibility for both. Complex challenges in CBE need students to position themselves content-wise: what theme(s) to prioritize and focus on within the endless ‘solution space’. Additionally, there is not one route of ‘problem-solving’ or one kind of learning strategy within such complexity.
Pedagogical patterns. Stimulating self-regulation can be done in many ways, e.g. via personal goal setting, reflection, planning, learning strategies, self-reinforcement, self-recording, and self-instruction, to name just a few, and might be more or less effective in various personal contexts and education settings. That is why our pedagogical pattern language approach makes so much sense. It will document (validated) instructional design principles for teachers, course coordinators, and program leaders, but will not prescribe (how and when) to use them; that depends completely on that context and setting.
The role of the teachers. The chapter stresses that teachers can have a huge impact on students taking/feeling more or less responsibility for their learning. And the good news is: this can be learned! Work package III of our TR-IDEE program aims to develop train-the-trainer modules for TU Delft university teachers.
Life-wide learning. Some students enter academia with more self-regulatory skills than others. They might have learned those in their secondary schools, families, sports clubs, or elsewhere in society. Student learning does not only take place within the constructive alignment triangle of the learning objectives, learning activities, and assessment strategies of academia. An overly rigid focus on this triangle might overlook the essence of learning entirely; when we accept that knowledge, teaching, and learning are situated (see our BLOG on situatedness) we should make room for the community, both students and staff, to be the curriculum instead of the community to follow the curriculum.
