Self Regulated learners in writing

Article


This was an interesting study on self regulation and writing. It is quite an interesting piece as it talks about how they used writing to help some children become self regulated learners. They broke up the persuasive writing process to teach them to be more self regulated. There was a lot of modelling and setting up criteria and goals to help the children understand where they are going when writing a persuasive piece. They talked and were quite clear what they needed to do to write a good persuasive piece. This along with looking at how they can work collaboratively to improve a piece of writing helped the children to become more self regulated as they were taking responsibility for their learning. Another important aspect is that the children set goals that are achievable and precise so that they are clear with where they are going. I thought it was interesting that one of the students who the teacher thought would struggle with being self regulated actually wasn't as they set themselves realistic and achievable goals.
The fact that it mentions that a student carried this idea of setting achievable goals over to their own personal life is great as ultimately we want the children to transfer the skills they learn in the class into the real world. This will definitely help them to become, as one of my previous blogs mentions, 21st century learners.
The feedback the children got was also an important part of the process too, as it needed to be focused on the goals set. Which in my own personal life I prefer feedback based on what I am working on not on other aspects.
The teacher said that it is important for the children to be driving their own learning. Ultimately that is what I would like the children to do to help to become a self regulated learner. I feel sometimes this would be easier to do with older children. However over the last few years I have started to give the children I teach more control over their work. I will continue to work on this as my aim is to get the children to be self regulated especially in the collaborative environment.

Poor Maths Results

This article on Poor Maths Results was interesting as I heard of this way of teaching maths and came across this article. I found it interesting in that they have done studies to say that ability grouping does not work. During my last few years I have had another look at reading groups as I don't always think that reading abilities groups work, so adjusted my reading programme with good success. However for maths I had not really considered it. I think when they stated that if children are only exposed to lower curriculum than the expectation is low. I question this a bit as  I expect they have to have a certain amount of numeracy knowledge in the first place. With  ability groups they do move on to other levels and I don't think the expectation is low.
 The article also talks about how teachers have to be trained in the way they teach this way without ability groups and I get that. After having a bit of a think about this I think that having the right type of open questions could work. I have many questions though like do you pair them up when attempting these open questions so you get different view points from different levels. How do you ensure that the lower leveled children share their ideas and don't get overwhelmed with the higher ability child's work and just follow their thinking completely or is that okay.
Problem solving in maths is important and can be challenging and a lot of fun for the children and really puts the children's maths skills to test. I need to find more information on this type of teaching to fully understand the practical approach to it.