Self-Efficacy and Self-Regulation

In an article that I found online by Schunk, it is stated that students use goal setting and self regulation as a learning process for setting a variety of goals in their own personal study and work habits. 

In my particular CSEL, I did constructivist theory which looks at students as developing their own understandings and knowledge on their environement and their world view. The students then apply what they have learned to their work. When a student is putting self-regulation and self-efficacy with that, they are able to look at waht they are persoanlly putting into their school work to see if they are being an effective component to their studies and also to their group work. When they are able to see that they are contributing and seeing how they can do more or less to  help the group, they are realizing their assests to the group and more imporantly seeing the effects of their input. 

A way to encourage the students to put forth efforts in their groups or in their individual work is to point out the importance of self-efficacy and self-regulation and really encourage students to push into that and see where their strengths and weaknesses are. This will make the students more diligent with their time and studies, too. 

PLE

In my particular case study scenario, I have a small group of students who do not seem to get anything done while they are working together. The dynamic of the group is not working and because of this, they are unable to get their work accomplished. Lisa seems to be the one that continuously distracts the small group and makes it hard for them to focus. 

From a behaviorist standpoint, I would make sure that I am praising the group when they are doing something well such as completing a task or working well together. Since I want the behavior of bickering or the group not cooperating well to stop, I will make sure that I am ignoring that and not giving into their bickering or back talk. Instead I will focus on praising them for their work that they are doing and the task that they are accomplishing in order to reduce their negative behavior. 

As far as constructivist approaches goes, I liked a lot of the suggestions that were listed on this particular website. On this website, one of the key approaches that I really liked was the one that said "verbalize the cause-and-effect relationship when negative consequences occur". In this particular instance, I think it is extremely important for kids to mold their own understanding of why consequences are happening and how they can learn from them. If we are scolding kids on their negative behavior, they are likely to tense up and not respond well. If we are instead coming at the negative behavior with a more positive and loving approach and asking the kids questions about their behaviors to help them think, the kids are both learning that it is not okay to behave certain ways but also that they need to be responsible for their actions and mold an understanding of what it looks like to learn from mistakes. 

Both of the approaches are useful when disciplining kids and both approaches I tend to use regularly. My camp taught a lot about constructivist approaches and the effects of kids understand the consequences and changing their behavior and I use behavioral approaches when I am tutoring a child. 

http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/practices/practice1devries.html

Metacognition

Question: Consider a lesson plan you might use.  Which metacognitive skills/abilities are involved as students gain facility/knowledge in this domain?

Last week as a class, we were asked to form a lesson plan for a constructivist or cognitive learning lesson. I used the idea of teaching shapes to first graders and how to implement that into a classroom. As a teacher, there are also a lot of metacognition aspects that I would like to implement, too so that I will be able to expand my students' thinking skills. 

On the website Metacognition: An Overview, the author, Jennifer Livingston talks about the idea of metacogition in the classroom. One aspect that I foudn interesting and helping is that it is about helping the students "think about their thinking". This can come in a variety of ways but one way that I found interesting was the aspect of questioning their work and what they wrote to make it more salient in their homework. This can be seen in the way that the students look more in depth of why they said an answer. For instance, if a student is looking at objects in the real world that represent the shapes, they will be able to apply what they are looking at and asking more in-depth questions about what they see such as "why do the shapes really matter for that particular object". These type of questions will really help the students gain a better grasp on the material.