Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hey everyone, and welcome to talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big trends in language teaching. Today, we're continuing a conversation about self regulated learning with Nathan, Haio and Fleur. I'd like to start this episode by exploring the ways we can help learners develop these skills more effectively before then looking at the ways that schools and institutions currently try to support self regulated learning. So let's kick off the first part.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Of this conversation I want to look again at. I asked you all earlier how you got involved in this topic of self regulated learning, how you were interested and flora and hire. You mentioned stories about your own experience being a self regulated learner.
I guess, looking back, I want to ask what would have made you a better self regulated learner?
What would have helped you take control? And Nathan, I don't think you told us whether you were a very self regulated learner.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: I was very motivated.
I'm not sure what direction that motivation was heading in all the time. I think maybe it wasn't towards language learning early on, but yeah, I think for me, I've always been quite a driven person. It's about sort of finding an interest that I can target, that drive or that motivation towards. So in terms of regulation, I would say very self regulated in some aspects, especially if we think about the concept that Hayo has introduced in terms of life wide learning, I would say mine was quite wide, but in other aspects, sort of not having that think, yeah, in the US where I'm from, in middle school, taking Spanish classes, for example, I wasn't very motivated. I wasn't very self regulated. It was just another thing that I had to do. It wasn't until later on when I moved to Thailand, actually to teach English, when I had a very real reason, a real sort of interest for learning Thai, that self regulation kicked in.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:19] Speaker C: So I think as teachers, it's kind of, I think helping learners to find that spark or to kind of help to ignite that fire within them, I guess because for me, once that was ignited, the self regulation part came quite easy. That was just about finding the right people to interact with and searching online for different strategies and ways of learning, vocabulary and things like that.
[00:02:44] Speaker D: I think for me, I had some teachers thinking back to when I was at school who were good at what we would now call self regulated learning, but there were very few of them. And sometimes they were in subjects that I liked anyway, I was good at. So in a way, I didn't need it as much. I really needed it in subjects where I struggled and I didn't necessarily have it in those subjects. So I could have done with more support.
Yeah, I think definitely I could have done with more support generally, but I didn't really know that was something that was important at the time.
[00:03:17] Speaker E: That's an issue, isn't it? You don't know what you don't know.
[00:03:19] Speaker D: No.
[00:03:19] Speaker E: Especially as a learner.
[00:03:20] Speaker D: Right, exactly. And when you're younger, yes, you don't know. You just know you have to do this subject and you go to school and you don't think beyond that in some ways. Then as you get older you look back and think, oh, actually I could have done that differently and I should have done that differently.
[00:03:33] Speaker E: Yeah, I would have benefited from structure. So I was also a very driven, motivated learner, very interested in languages and I think in some ways quite successful, but I don't think I was nearly as efficient at it as I could have been if somebody had actually said, hey, you're doing what we call self regulated learning, but there's actually these different components to it. You do this really well, you don't do that at all. You do that a little bit now string them all together in a meaningful order and see what happens. I think that would have been much more successful.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes, and that's everything from setting your own goals, regulating the work you're doing, assessing yourself. Et.
[00:04:14] Speaker C: Think that makes, I think that makes perfect sense. Especially, I remember when I moved to China to start teaching there. I was doing mostly test preparation courses and that structure is kind of built in because, you know, the test is at the end and there's a certain target score and that sort of distinguishing then between who's self regulating and who's not can be quite difficult because everyone's following a very structured sort of systematic path. But I think when we sort of extrapolate from that and we try to see, okay, do I need to control this path or do I just need to inform them of certain steps and to make them aware of certain strategies? I think that's where we can start to harness that self regulation within a structure, within some kind of informed practice that we have. Because I do think that experienced teachers are necessary in those situations. I've always been critical of the idea that the teacher's role is somehow lessened in this idea of promoting self regulated learning because that expert can be quite, and as Hayo mentioned, providing that structure to students and giving them some ideas for steps that they could take or to explore.
[00:05:22] Speaker E: Yeah, and I think that's what the paper is possibly most helpful for is that it tries to bring together those different aspects at different stages or elements, whatever you want to call them, in a very clear, structured order. What we didn't have space for to talk about in this paper, although we did actually, I think, include it in an earlier paper on using technology to motivate learners, is the notion that when you introduce new ideas to your learners, such as self regulated learning, that you do that gradually and that you plan that over a longer period of time. I think that's a mistake that I've made in my early career. Right.
[00:06:04] Speaker D: Same.
[00:06:05] Speaker E: Now, I want all of you to be 100% autonomous. All right? From tomorrow. Okay? But I think the framework that we included in the earlier paper was you start by preparing learners, right, which essentially is just awareness raising. It's alerting learners to the possibility that maybe one day you're not going to be there anymore and that there are possibly resources, tools, other people out there who might help you, who might support you in your learning. So it's really just planting a seed. And then the next one is to encourage learners to start to practice some of the necessary skills in a controlled environment. So, for example, within the classroom, you might say, well, imagine that you're going to interview somebody in the community, right? Well, you're not going to just randomly walk up to someone and say, hey, can I interview? There's ways of doing that, better ways and worse ways, right? So maybe that's an opportunity to talk about communication strategies and planning, how you go about a certain activity. And only once learners have practiced that in that sort of safe environment and have a level of confidence around that, might you go ahead and say, well, now you go and do it yourself outside of the class. Actually go and speak to some people on the street, right? For example, depending on the age level, obviously, but you still support them. You might still give them a bank of expressions to help them to open a conversation, for example. Right. And you still ask them to report back and give them feedback on how they did. So it's still in a sort of a controlled, managed, monitored environment. And only after learners have say to you like, okay, I get what you mean now, then you can actually leave them to start figuring out their own plans to engage in learning by themselves. And it's only really if we do all of these things gradually and carefully that learners build up the necessary, not just knowledge but also the confidence to be able to do it.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: Yeah. Like you say, you've got to start early on and start small because I always sort of think of it as something that you do when you're revising for an exam. Then you suddenly start planning and whatever. But it's got to be something that's right at the beginning, regardless of an exam. And also give them a variety of strategies, I think, as well, because not everything works for everybody, so give them a choice of doing different things.
[00:08:22] Speaker E: Slow and steady as well, right? Yeah.
[00:08:24] Speaker C: And I think feedback on strategy use as well is very important. I think about some of the students that I worked with early on that I would have considered self regulated and highly motivated, but strategies that they were using probably weren't the best. Trying to memorize 50 words from a dictionary.
[00:08:41] Speaker D: That's never going to end well, is it?
[00:08:43] Speaker C: Just get this dictionary knowledge into my head and I will have the language so we can have these learners that do have. They are maybe prepared in a sense where they have the sort of the motivation or the will or the drive, whatever term we want to use, but strategy awareness and then feedback on strategy use, how's that working out for you? So I think just creating some time and space, whether it's through some kind of journaling activity or something, where what I've done fairly recently is have students complete a task and then ask them to write out the process. What exactly did you do? Take me through step by step and sort of write that out. And a lot of times just creating that awareness and having them discuss it or to get feedback can be quite powerful.
[00:09:27] Speaker E: Well, I like that, what you just described, because it really forces the learner to reflect on what they do, possibly also encouraging them to query why they did certain things. But it also gives you insight into what led to a certain result, because it's so easy as a teacher to say, okay, you successfully completed the task. It may have just been luck, or it may have just been as a result of a whole bunch of wrong choices that canceled each other out. Story of my life, really.
So whether it's verbalized or written down or whatever, but that is really a powerful technique. A little bit time consuming perhaps, but I think a good investment on occasion.
[00:10:08] Speaker D: And also if it's a wrong answer instead of just it's wrong, you find out why they came up with that.
[00:10:12] Speaker E: And it may not even be a problem that it's the wrong answer. Yeah.
[00:10:15] Speaker D: Which is interesting.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: So we've talked a lot about individual experiences and individual learners and approaches for teachers to support their learners. And I kind of want to zoom out a little bit and look more broadly at the state of education today and how we support self regulated learning within it. So I guess my first question is, do you see many teachers these days effectively supporting self regulated learning? Do you see many schools and institutions doing a good job of it? Do the teachers around you or the teachers you've interacted with regularly support independent learning, autonomous learning, etc.
[00:10:56] Speaker E: So Chris has this habit of asking multiple layered questions.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: I do.
[00:11:02] Speaker E: Then he hopes that we'll make sense of it.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: I'm never sure where to start, to be honest.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: I mean, you always do a very good job of it.
It's so I can throw them all at once.
[00:11:13] Speaker E: It's so complimentary.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Back for five minutes, you guys hash out.
[00:11:16] Speaker E: Yes. Well, I mean, the two main questions embedded in the one that you just asked are, firstly, whether teachers do this, and then a related question. Do they do it well?
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:28] Speaker E: Which is not the same. And then the other is, do organizations do this? And I guess you could ask, do they do it well? And I really think it's meaningful to try and talk about both of these. And to start with the first one, I think that there is a hugely increased awareness of the importance of self regulated learning and autonomy, et cetera, among teachers. Right. When I started my career 25 years ago, autonomy is still a very new thing, and that's not the case anymore. There's a high level of interest, et cetera. And I think that, generally speaking, it's much more embedded. Teachers try much more actively to develop it. However, we still have a large number of issues around this. One is that still, in many teacher preparation programs as well as teaching teacher support. So both preservice and in service, it's given scant attention. It's talked about as a concept, but from what I gather, usually as a theoretical construct, not so much in the sense of, well, how do I actually do this? Where do I start? Et cetera. So that's one big issue. The second is that it's still very, and that probably ties in with the organizational bit. It's still very uneven.
When I go to universities or schools and I do observations, et cetera, I see some teachers are doing a fantastic job and some teachers who don't give it any attention whatsoever. So as a learner, from a learner's experience, it's very unpredictable and there's no continuity. And as we've just already established, this requires a long term, slow and steady approach. So if that's interrupted, it's not going to be as successful as it could be, right?
[00:13:08] Speaker D: Exactly. Yeah, I'd say the same. It's very piecemeal and a lot of teachers have got the willingness but a lack of time, and they've got a lot of other pressures from curriculum, exams and parental expectations and so on, which means that something that isn't specifically there that you have to do will probably get missed out. And they don't know where to start, of course. And if it's not followed through in other subjects, then it doesn't have much effect and students can't understand why they're doing it one lesson and not in the other.
It needs a sort of structure across the whole school to embed it properly.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:41] Speaker E: It's like going to the gym today and then not for three weeks and then three days in a row.
[00:13:47] Speaker D: What I do that doesn't work?
[00:13:50] Speaker C: No.
[00:13:51] Speaker E: Gosh, yeah.
[00:13:54] Speaker C: For me, I think it's really the organizational level where I would like to see the most change.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:00] Speaker C: Because I work with preservice teachers and in service teachers on different programs. And usually when this topic comes up, I guess because it's a vested interest of mine, strategies and self regulation, one of the common responses is that wouldn't work in my school, or we can't do that within our curriculum, or there's too much to teach and it's easy to brush that off. But at the same time, having taught in similar contexts, I think I'm very much reminded of that this is what we need to cover. This is what the test is on. And if it's a private institution, this is what we're paying for in terms of parents and students and that kind of thing. So I think at the organizational level is where these kinds of ideas need to be more carefully implemented. I think in a systematic way like we've outlined in the paper, sort of going from that engaging sort of initial stage all the way through empowering and the other steps in between.
Because if there is no benefit to introducing these concepts into a course where you only see the learners for six weeks or eight weeks or one term or something like that, then it can be very challenging. And I think for teachers as well, we maybe start taking this idea of that. We're not necessarily here to promote lifelong and life wide learning, but I need to get these learners to a certain score by this date or my job is on the.
Yeah, I think it's a tricky situation and I think now that we have a position paper with someone like Oxford University Press and it's not just an individual researcher throwing out ideas in a journal article, for example, I think that there could be a lot more interaction now with this kind of support behind it in terms of not just what the teachers are doing, because it's easy to say, oh, well, the teachers aren't doing a lot or the teachers aren't doing enough, but what is the organization doing?
How's the organization addressing it?
[00:15:59] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. I think in the paper, in the framework, the top half of it, and that was deliberate, even though you could argue that pedagogy and therefore the bottom half of the figure is the most important, but it is shaped by what happens at other levels. Right. And I have the same experience as all of you, I'm sure, is that teachers say, well, I like this autonomy stuff or this strategy stuff, but I haven't got time for it. So, yeah, that is not down to the individual teacher. So the top half of the framework is essentially the wider context, basically the environment outside of the classroom, beyond the teacher and the learner. And there are three layers. There's the societal, there's the institutional, and there's the direct managerial. And we'll probably talk a little bit later about how all of those need to come together and how they relate directly to the pedagogy. But at this point, what is important to recognize is that if, for example, at what we call on the paper, societal level, which could be, for example, a ministry of education setting guidelines or having policies implemented, if they do not encourage or possibly even allow for learners to make meaningful decisions about their own learning, then clearly that's going to have an impact on what actually happens within an institution, how leaders and managers are going to instruct their teachers and how teachers are going to be teaching. Right. So it really is important to look at the broader picture to understand the landscape.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELt the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. You can also get practical advice and resources on this topic by downloading our position paper. Just follow the link in the description.
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