Transcription
[Music] Hello everyone, um, welcome today to my talk on self-regulated learning as part of the Insights on Demand event. My name is Martina Kovala, and I am a Senior Researcher at OCR, an exam board. And today, I will be talking to you about self-regulated learning and how to promote these kinds of behaviors in your classrooms.
Now, the reason why I'm talking to you about this today is because my background is in self-regulated learning and metacognitive development in young children. I'm not going to be talking to you about a specific study or the research study and studies I've conducted. Rather, I will try and cover most common evidence-based approaches in promoting self-regulated learning in the classroom. So, it's going to be quite practical after the just the first few um slides on uh just basic definitions and just so that we agree what we're talking about today.
Um, throughout the talk, um, before I actually start with um different pedagogical approaches and um more kind of theoretical background, um, I wanted actually to ask something of you. I would like you to do a little task um where um I would just want us to kind of start thinking uh about the the kinds of behaviors and mental processes that we're going to be talking about today uh firsthand.
So imagine that um you have a goal today um to improve your overall fitness in the in the coming months or in the coming year. Now, my question for you would be, can you please think of different activities, different approaches you would take in order to work towards achieving this goal? You can add your answers in the chat box, and it doesn't have to be very elaborate, just very briefly, what would you be thinking of of doing first? And I'll give you a little bit of time to do that.
Right, so I can see that a lot of you have really interesting ideas on how to approach this um, and a lot of your answers will be related to either, for example, booking a time first to actually make to make time for for um working on your fitness or improving your health. Um, some of you would perhaps get equipment to prepare for um training you had in mind. Some of you might join a local uh class. Um, some of you might decide to actually start a food diary to keep track of um your your diet. Um, some of you might find a coach and have regular catch-ups with them um in order to get some feedback on um on how to improve um your training. Um, some of you might decide to monitor weight and and keep track of that.
Now, there are other obviously things that you might decide doing, but why I asked you to do this is to illustrate that all of these things that you just thought about are actually self-regulation. It's when you're trying to plan your behavior that leads to a specific goal. It's it means that you are actually taking control of your own learning. You're planning, you're controlling, you're you're evaluating. Um, in this instance, I asked you to do something uh to plan something towards a goal, but um, this is, you know, for your firsthand experience, and you can see that, you know, we do that all the time in our life. We don't just do that in the classroom.
Now, uh, to start and focus now on the classroom, um, what do we really mean by self-regulated learning? What what is that? And what kind of behaviors do do self-regulated learning uh learners display? So, these are a range of goal-directed, metacognitive, and self-regulatory behaviors which enable your learners to become more independent and autonomous learners. These kinds of behaviors, metacognitive and self-regulatory behaviors, lead to goal achievement, as you would have seen earlier in an example, and they are a tool for successful learning. Research tells us um and shows us consistently consistently that these kinds of behaviors actually promote learning, successful learning, and successful learning outcomes.
Now, I I mentioned metacognitive and self-regulatory behaviors, and I just want to give you an idea of what do I mean by these when I use them to today in the talk. If you, for example, look for yourself, you will find a lot of different definitions, and you shouldn't be discouraged by that because different authors, depending on which tradition they're coming from, they would actually use different uh different terminologies. But here, I want to focus on metacognitive knowledge or metacognition, often just referred to as metacognition. It's it really refers to one's own knowledge about their behaviors and their own behaviors and learning. Often, it's referred to as self-awareness or self-reflection. So, this is that kind of knowledge, internal mental kind of states or or reflections on our own learning or on our own overall behavior, actually.
Metacognitive regulation or self-regulation, depending on again which tradition you're coming from, um refers to metacog usually as much cognitive knowledge or mental cognition in action. So, it's more visible, and it's a result of that kind of careful thinking and reflection, and results in monitoring and control of behavior. So, when I say self-regulation, I usually mean a set of monitoring and control, planning, evaluation behaviors that we can actually observe in our learners very easily without explicitly asking them to tell us about them, unlike for metacognitive knowledge, we usually have to ask learners, "What have you been thinking when you were doing this?" Just as an example.
Now, why am I talking about this today? And why is this why does this matter to you? Um, it matters because research evidence um is demonstrating these positive impacts on on learner self-regulation, on the process of language acquisition and learning and proficiency. And if you're interested in specific uh research, you can um you can try and find uh something on that, and you'll find plenty of papers um and and books written on this topic. So, it's quite well-established that this is how we actually learn languages better if we're more self-regulated, and in fact, any other subject.
How does how does that behavior develop? And how do these self-regulatory, metacognitive skills develop? Where they have um actually, they they're of social origins. Despite the name suggesting self-regulation, it might you might think that it's a very kind of uh lonely uh type of behavior, but actually, it comes, it if it evolves, it comes out of social interaction when children are very little. This is developmentally speaking. First, they're regulated by others, by significant others, and these others can be usually carers or parents at the beginning, and later it becomes teachers or peers.
Now, as a child is regulated, monitored, controlled, evaluated, their behaviors are evaluated and planned for by others. With time, as they're exposed to those kind of behaviors, as they're exposed to other regulations, they internalize these behaviors. They internalize these strategies in in these um these kind of sets of uh behaviors, and it becomes their own behavior. So, it becomes self-regulation. And now they can actually use these strategies on their own and actually uh monitor and control and evaluate their own behavior. So, they've learned that.
Why is this important to you? Well, it matters because that actually mirrors teaching as well. So, not only are these developed in a very early stage in our lives, they can also be teachable, and they can also be modifiable. And this is where you come as a very important actor in all of this to actually promote and to and to give examples to your learners, to provide tools for how to actually become more efficient, self-regulated learners.
Now, how do we regulate? How do students self-regulate? What practically speaking are these behaviors? And what is regulated? Usually, this I reference here an author, Pintrich, who has done a lot of work in in building different building a framework on on how to explain and better understand self-regulated learning, especially in classrooms. So, you can actually look up for more details on his work, but this is from his framework.
So, how do we, what are these behaviors? Well, these self-regulatory behaviors, as I've already mentioned, now would be planning behaviors, monitoring behaviors, keeping track of our own behavior, control to modifying our own behavior, and or continuing with the previous kind of um useful uh behavior that doesn't need to be modified or changed, um, and evaluating our own behavior. And this is in this order, kind of makes logical sense, but actually, in practice, these don't necessarily always happen in that order. They can, you know, students, as I will I'll show in an example later, can engage in a lot of these in a different order.
And what are we planning, monitoring, controlling, and evaluating? Well, we're planning, monitoring, controlling, and evaluating our cognitive processes, such as attention, writing, when we're trying to memorize, when we try to focus on something. We can we can actually plan for that. We can monitor those kind of behaviors. We can control them, and we can after the activity, we can actually evaluate those. We can do the same with emotions. So, we can regulate our frustrations, we regulate our expectations, our shame uh related to failure, excitement, low mood. So, all of that is actually in our control. We are agents as learners. Um, we are agents of these um emotions.
The same with motivation. So, how persevere, how persistent we are, and how much um perseverance we actually display um in in working towards our goals. Um, our self-belief, self-efficacy, all falls under motivational aspects of learning, and they can also be planned, monitored, controlled, and evaluated. Similar to our context, which can be uh social or physical. We can uh regulate um how we work with others. So, when I'm talking, I'm here, I'm talking about regulation of our own learning in relation to others, as opposed to regulating others' learning. So, just to give you an example, a student might learn that actually or realize that actually working with other students, with other learners, helps them to to um to keep them motivated, and therefore they might decide to learn with someone else. And that means that they are regulating their learning in relation to others.
And also [Music] in terms of learning environment. So, students might figure that they are learning much better in a quiet area, in a study, as opposed to on the kitchen table, learning at the kitchen table. So, you can see that these are these framework, the frameworks generally, but this in particular is quite used um in educational psychology, but um it helps us to kind of understand and to um structure our understanding of uh students' behaviors in the classroom. So, we can kind of say, "Oh, what I'm now observing, actually, I can see my learner, my student monitoring their own learning." So, they're or they're reflecting on their emotions after after, you know, a session where they really struggled with something. So, this really helps us to kind of structure our thinking and to understand better our learners.
However, in reality, in practice, um, these are all very much intertwined. And I'll give you an example. It's not very clear what I'm trying to say, so I'll give you an example of a student who might, I don't know, struggle with um pronunciation, for example. That means that the fact that they've understood that they have um a problem with something means that they're they're metacognitive. So, they're engaged in cognitive thinking, and and this is their metacognitive knowledge about their own skills and and uh limitations in this sense.
Now, when they've established that they um they there is a challenge, they might have to do something about this. They might want to do something about it, which means that they will perhaps, which we would say, control their own behavior or learning. So, they might say, "Okay, well, I am struggling with pronunciation. Maybe I should find um a native speaker who might be able to help me to practice my pronunciation." Now, that is very much controlling uh behavior. So, it's self-control. It's and in this particular instance, of their own cognitive processes.
Now, after that um that student might find a learning partner who their practice their pronunciation. However, it doesn't go as they anticipated. They might feel quite frustrated, and um, and that is then where there is an opportunity window for them to regulate those emotions. Now, a student might decide to continue being frustrated, just give up, which we would say they failed to regulate their emotion, or they might decide to say, "Well, you know what? I know that this is going to take me some time. I can't do it over a month, over overnight or over a month. I need to practice more." So, in that instance, we can see successful regulation or control, in particular, of their emotional states.
The same with motivation. The same at the end of the session. Let's say maybe after six months of practicing, the student might want to reflect on how they did. They might compare the recordings of their pronunciations from the beginning at the end of that of these six months. Now, you can see how in a very simple task that I just told you, like, "Oh, I want to improve my pronunciation," you can see all these aspects coming together: students monitoring, controlling, evaluating all sorts of uh aspects of learning, cognitive, emotional, motivational, etc.
So, this is how it looks like. It's quite messy practice. However, despite that, there is so much, you know, hopefully, this framework will help you to think about it and to observe these behaviors in the classroom and to kind of just try and think about them um and at least at the beginning, try to identify them.
Now, despite them being very messy, there are a lot of things you could be practically doing. You could be doing in your classrooms. I will um talk to you about some explicit and some implicit pedagogic approaches that you might decide to take in order to encourage self-regulated learning in the classroom. This is not an ex, this is not a final list of things. Now, I've worked in schools. I myself am a trained uh speech and language therapist, and I have observed the most creative people working in schools, which means that this is not um a list that you should be strictly um uh holding on to. This is just some examples, and a lot of these things you are already doing in your classrooms.
I will take you through some of them, explaining why they matter to to to to teach for teaching self-regulated learning, and again, be as creative as you as you want, really. After the session, hopefully, you can come up with some um approaches yourself. I'll start with explicit instructions because these explicit instructions, they can be actually um uh so these are, as the title says, they're quite explicit um instructions on how to use certain tools uh uh that will help students to to become more self-regulated. They can come from you directly, or you can encourage a discussion in your classrooms, and it can come from learners, or both, even better.
So, this is a very simple example. You might ask learners, "What do they do when they are stuck or when they are facing a challenge?" If you ask that question, you will get a lot of very useful uh perhaps strategies, even, or just suggestions on how to um how to overcome this problem or how to, you know, what self-regulatory behaviors they would be uh engaged in. And you can give even your own examples from your experience. Now, they might say, "Whisper positive thoughts, drink some water, a complete feeling sheet if you're feeling quite frustrated, that might help you to think about how you feel about certain things, share your thinking with the classroom, with the teacher," or just very simple ones like, "Take a deep breath." So, you can see these are all very simple strategies that students can use when they are facing a challenge.
And as as I said earlier, I'm sure you're already doing that in your classroom, but being quite explicit about these skills is also quite good, especially with older students. You can talk to them why it's good to be more reflective or self-regulated, why it's good to monitor and control their own learning, and how will that help them? So, this is really, really um simple, very explicit, but it might give you some, you know, it might also be a fun activity for your learners. Don't think that I know some of you will be working with young learners. Don't think that this is, you know, an activity only for older learners. Um, research shows that actually, these kind of skills and generally self-regulated learning actually occurs much earlier than we used to think before. So, don't uh don't uh be discouraged. Try and try and engage in conversations with young learners as well, in their, you know, own appropriate way.
Good old modeling. You as a teacher can actually display and quite openly articulate um what are your strategies, what do you do, how do you self-regulate when you are faced with a challenge? So, for example, you might say to the class that actually when they are um, for example, talking when you're giving instructions, it can feel quite frustrating for you, and this is what you do. You you take a deep breath, you catch yourself, and say, "It's okay, I'll try again." Now, here you're not just displaying that you're comfortable with your emotions, you are um, you're frustrated, and it's okay. It's okay to be frustrated. So, that's one message for students. It's it's okay to experience all these emotions. However, how we deal with them, it's entirely in our control. So, you are displaying what is a helpful and healthy approach, and what is a, I'll talk about self-efficacy later, but what is a healthy self-efficacy? You are not going to give up. You are going to actually keep going and and try again and try to soothe yourself. And as you do that regularly, at least some of your students are going to take that on board and maybe implicitly, you're giving these instructions, kind of implicitly, but they might take them on board and try and use them.
You as teachers would know lots about scaffolding. So, it's this temporary support that you as teachers provide to your learners that helps your learners reach these higher levels of knowledge, comprehension, skills that they would not be able to achieve otherwise without assistance. Now, why scaffolding is important for promoting self-regulated learning? Well, because remember when I explained about the internalization of all these strategies, your learners are actually reached a point at at some point, they will be in in a place where they will be able to internalize those hints that you provided while scaffolding them, those um questions that you're asking them, they might be able to ask themselves then. So, this is why this is quite important.
Now, the scaffolding is extremely useful in this zone of proximal development, and this is very interesting from an educational psychology perspective. It's a very interesting um concept proposed by Lev Vygotsky to say that there is this area of of knowledge or skills where where learners can do tasks or or overcome these challenges um just, you know, without your assistance, and this is that kind of bottom smaller circle um in that area of zone. In that zone of proximal development, they can do a lot of things with your assistance, which otherwise they wouldn't be able to do. And this is from that perspective, from from a self-regulatory perspective, quite an interesting area where a lot of learning and internalization happens.
Now, the other outer circle is um, you know, refers to those um skills and and knowledge that uh learners cannot access even with your assistance. It's way beyond their zone of proximal development. And this is why it really matters to engage in those behaviors so that so that learners can actually eventually try and push themselves and and try and solve their own problems and challenges when they face them.
A very related uh to scaffolding is this concept and an approach of dynamic assessment. So, in scaffolding, you are asking questions, you're providing very gentle guidance on how to solve a problem and how to deal with a challenge. Here, you are actually recording that in a way or observing that learning in a way. So, you are capturing learners' potential as opposed to that static kind of um uh knowledge or the, you know, remember the lower, the lowest bubble. You're actually capturing what learners can potentially be doing and where they are going. So, um, you can do that during the scaffolding, which is probably a little bit more difficult, but you can also do after the scaffolding has taken place. You can see then a big difference between, you know, what learners can do without assistance on their own, and what if you push them a little bit, what can they display then?
I really like this quote from Carol Dweck, who is also a psychologist actually looking into mindset and self-efficacy. She says that, "Test scores and measures of achievement will tell you where a student is." So, this is, you know, that part where they can do on their own, but they don't tell you where a student could end up and where they're going. And so, you know, you're effectively with this type of assessment or observation, you are capturing uh what they can do after that breakthrough, in a sense.
Self-assessment is another approach, pedagogical approach. You might, you probably a lot of you are already using that in your teaching and assessing learners. It's it's a very, it's quite implicit, and what it does, it encourages metacognitive thinking and reflection in your learners. So, not only is it is it good for you to see um where students are at and how they understand, it's it's truly, it's a very nice kind of sweet way of of seeing of capturing your learner's metacognitive uh thinking, and you know, how do they perceive their achievement, how do they perceive perceive their learning, which might not always be accurate. And I'll talk about that in a minute.
This takes us to dialogic feedback because if a student doesn't have um accurate metacognitive knowledge about their own achievement and potential, and um, and generally learning process, you might have to intervene and actually provide feedback. And this is a lovely way to actually update their metacognitive knowledge. You will have students who are very, very, they're in fact underestimating their their abilities, and that is their metacognitive knowledge about their their abilities, and you might notice that that's actually not quite accurate, and you might then decide to correct that by giving feedback to your learners. The the same goes with learners who might overestimate their their skills and their abilities. You might then, this is a wonderful opportunity for you to update those, to correct those um uh that knowledge about themselves.
Now, why dialogic feedback? Because here you are providing an actionable feedback where a learner actually has a chance to respond to and agree on actions. Now, remember, self-regulated learning is all about autonomy and independent learning. So, students really need to feel in charge. They really need to feel that they are that they have this agency in in in directing and kind of driving their own learning. So, um, this is, you see how throughout this talk, we have this kind of almost, you know, this we want them to be um autonomous, we want them to be independent, but how do the way they they reach that point is only through social interaction? So, it's it's through you, through their peers. So, this is why again, you you have a really important role in this, to actually provide that and to encourage learners to take charge of their own uh learning and become more uh self-regulated.
Now, I will give you some example tools that um that actually was published um by Cambridge University Press, and you can find it on on their website. And so, this is one example for primary school learners, and how, you know, this is just one of the ways we talked about these approaches. Now, so, it can be a very simple um task to ask your learners to think about their progress. So, you can see that this is a self-assessment tool where we're asking students to assess their whatever they did, and we're encouraging this metacognitive thinking by doing this that we talked about.
Now, what I would like you to do, and you can use the chat box again for that, think about what areas of learning um are learners actually reflecting on here? So, they are actually evaluating um something, and in terms of areas, I mean, whether it's a cognitive, emotional, motivational, or contextual, social, environmental. So, just put it like a like a very simple, like, you know, what you think um comes to mind, what areas are actually being reflected on here, what areas of learning?
So, exactly, as I said, this is evaluation. So, we're asking students to evaluate, you know, remember that we had planning, monitoring, control, evaluation, and areas of regulation are cognitive because, for example, "I followed the instructions." It's a very cognitive activity. Emotional, as well, because it says, "I agreed and disagreed with my classmates politely," which means that, you know, presumably if it wasn't polite, that means that not so much um emotional regulation happened, emotional self-regulation happened. So, we're thinking about that as well. And we're asking about the social or contextual because it also talks about others. So, "I asked my classmates for their opinions," so that means I'm regulating for the moment my own opinion, and I'm asking others as well. So, this kind of contextual regulation has also been addressed in this one. So, this is a very simple one for, as I said, for for younger learners, but it's it's still quite effective, and your your learners will actually give you something uh if you ask them explicitly to do that.
Or, for example, for older learners, for higher education learners, this is a type of a diary where students are reflecting on a situation, what happened, how do they think, feel, or act, why might things have happened the way they did, and what am I, what might have they done differently, and what should they try doing uh differently next time? So, again, this is a self-assessment. We are asking students to self-reflect, to assess the situation, you know, their thinking, feelings, and acting. So, again, encouraging metacognitive thinking.
Now, again, in the box, I would in a in a chat box, I would encourage you to just uh write one line, what areas of learning do you think um you could be assessing? You sorry, you could be uh encouraging by asking students to do these things, and you can look at their answers as well, and that will help you as well. So, again, we had, unlike previously, we had only evaluation here. We actually have some planning because the student actually in the third box, you can see that they not only reflected, evaluated, they actually also set up some some steps for how to improve things in the future. So, there are two stages, and areas of learning would be cognitive, they're telling us what happened, you know, what they did, um, how they thought about things. Also, quite a bit of emotional, so they're talking about how worried they were about the tutor would not see the improvements they made. It's also about a little bit about procrastination, which is a motivational aspect. So, in the first box, you can see that they were saying, "Well, I kept finding other things to do," right? So, that is quite um, you know, nice, like, you know, quite quite reflective of their motivational states. And, you know, finally, at the end, they also um made some plans, you know, saying that they they're going to be more determined to use their study time, which is again, very motivational um statement, or very motivational um aspect of learning.
So, you can see how these things, although, you know, um when I when I showed you the framework, might have been, you know, it looked very neat, and and I and I gave you some examples, and, you know, it might look very messy in reality, but if you want to encourage and introduce these tools in your learning, as part of the lesson, it doesn't have to be a specific lesson dedicated to self-regulated learning, but you might have like five minutes of your of your of your uh lesson to actually um ask learners to to reflect a little bit more and to try and plan for things, and to even monitor and control while they're doing the task, explicitly and implicitly, as we saw.
Another concept I would like to cover because it's it's very, very, it's part of self-regulated learning, absolutely, um, and it refers to actually a set of beliefs and the set of attitudes that students have about their own learning, and it's something, it's a huge area of research that shows that actually uh high self-efficacy really helps learners to to face the challenge and really determines how far they're actually going to go and what they're going to achieve. It's that set of beliefs. So, self-efficacy is a set of beliefs and attitudes that um students um about the stu about uh whether students can achieve their goals and succeed um in a given, sorry, this is a typo, in a given situation.
So, for example, in your classroom, you will recognize low self-efficacy in students who would say things like, "I will never be able to master this," or "I was born this way, and there's no way I can improve this, no matter how I tried. I was just unlucky. I failed." And, you know, and that's it. And and there there's no other way. You can actually, again, by providing feedback, you can you can correct those um attitudes, and you can prompt your students, and you can actually ask questions, why do they feel that way? And perhaps provide answers when you know, provide examples when this wasn't quite the case. You can give them, you know, your own example for when they actually did work hard and actually succeeded and improved.
Your learners with high self-efficacy will have very positive attitudes towards learning and towards, in fact, even towards failure. So, they will say things like, "I'll try harder next time" when they fail. If they get a very bad grade, they can say, "I will achieve this if I put an effort, and I know I can do this. I'm in charge of this. I am an active agent. I am I'm actively driving my learning." And you will see all sorts of, you know, you won't just have learners who just have low self-efficacy and learners who have just highs up. Sometimes, of course, we would display uh both of these sets of behaviors, but again, you as a teacher, you who are the person who knows your students, can actually um nicely intervene here and try and and get them to a point where they will have high self-efficacy and this kind of healthy attitude towards learning and failure and success.
In both, really, a lot of teachers when I talk to them say, "This is really difficult to implement, not just because of time, but also it's just really challenging. It doesn't come to my students naturally." And that's true. It's not something that comes to any of us very naturally. Like people, you know, you would probably be able to um to say that even from, you know, your your social circles. You know, reflection is not something that comes, you know, very easily to people. It's, you know, so, so I think it we really need to work towards that. And the same with your students.
There are certain things to remember while you're trying to implement, and you can, as I said, be as creative as you want, really. Metacognitive knowledge might not always be accurate, and this is something I've already mentioned earlier, and this is why your feedback is extremely important to to correct that because, you know, all research is talking constantly about, you know, it's good to think about thinking, it's good to think about and reflect on learning, but what happens when that learning, actually, that that knowledge is actually not quite accurate? You have the power, I think, here.
Thinking about thinking is not always useful. [Music] Think about it. If if you were now asked to do very simple math and you know some calculations, you don't want to like sit for five minutes after that thinking whether what you did was wrong or right. Too much, you can, you know, when things are quite automated for us, we actually don't need to sit on it for too long. However, when the situation is challenging, then that's maybe when we need others' help. And I forgot to say that that's actually asking for help is a quite healthy way of asking for support, and it shows a quite high level of self-regulatory skills because the student can clearly identify they need help, and then they ask for help. So, yeah, so coming back to this point, thinking about thinking, it's not always terribly useful, and you again have the power here because you can teach your learners uh when it is useful, when they are faced with a challenge, when they're faced with a challenge with the task of intermediate difficulty, then maybe you scaffolding them, and next time they're kind of internalizing um those scaffolds um might help them to to achieve their goals.
A lot of teachers say, "Well, actually, my learners are not quite motivated to do that. They just want to know what they need to study for an exam, for example." They are resistant. They don't want to be doing it, or they over-rely on other regulations. They over-rely on you telling them what to do and how to solve their problems, which of course, it's extremely, you know, you providing that support, and you you are the teacher at the end of the day, so they need that, but they also need to be able to go off and do things on their own and and kind of control and monitor themselves.
I would say that um what is extremely important in this, you know, in in in solving this kind of problem or facing this challenge, is to create a safe space where your learners can actually fail and not feel ashamed of that. It's okay to make mistakes because that's how we learn, and you know, failing is part of learning. And I think in those kind of um environments, in those kind of spaces, you're more likely to have your learners not feeling bad of expressing or maybe even feeling excited about um sharing their experiences. Just a very simple one, a very simple question of asking your learners, "Why did you struggle? What was the problem? What do you think it was the problem?" And when they see that everyone else is sharing, and they're all sharing the same problem in with, you know, different tasks, maybe, but, it's it's really one really important aspect of that is to create that safe space um where failure is actually okay.
It takes time because although it is a teachable and it's modifiable set of skills, it does take time. It doesn't, as I said, come naturally. But because of that, you just have to take time, both for trying to teach it, demonstrate it. You might have to also engage in your own uh self-reflection and and kind of try and demonstrate that to your learners, how what are your useful strategies when you're faced with, you know, frustrating situations, and when you can't do something, or you're not heard of, um, you're not um, you're not heard in the classroom. So, um, be gentle to yourself and to your learners, and try, as I said, to incorporate it in everything you're doing rather than creating a space, you know, a special of the time and day and to dedicate to these uh things. And openly, especially with older learners, like openly talk about, you know, what you're actually trying to achieve, share the goals, tell them what what you would want them to be, and how this is going to help them in life later. So, I know that might not be interesting to all the students, but it almost certainly is going to be interesting to to some.
And I would like you, speaking of challenges and speaking of self-efficacy, I would like to end this talk. I would like to leave you with a quote from a very famous um psychologist, Albert Bandura. And you you feel free um and you're welcome to read more about him. And this is really important for um if you if you embark on that journey to really encourage your learners to be self-regulated learners, is to is to promote that healthy self-efficacy. So, he said that, "People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities." And remind and just to remind you, research does show that ability, ability is not a fixed property. There is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure. They approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong. And I think this is something you really want to see in your learners.
I hope you enjoyed this talk today. Thank you very much, and I hope you will also enjoy the rest of the of the talks of the sessions um as part of Insights on Demand. Thank you for listening to me.
And that brings us to the end of Insights on Demand. If you've joined us just for one session or for all 20, thank you so much. We've loved hosting all of our brilliant speakers, but especially getting to interact with all of you over the last three days as the talks premiered. Heard fantastic new talks on a really wide range of topics from how to do your own DIY research, how to encourage your learners to be autonomous, and how to support learners with additional needs. All of these sessions have had research findings at the heart and have lots of ideas for you to try out with your own learners. It's been fantastic too to see all of you exploring our on-demand library, downloading research papers, and exploring other videos and information. And I've really enjoyed hearing from all of you in the chat box and comment threads. There's been some really interesting discussions and points of view. We hope you've got some useful insights from the event that you'll be able to take away and implement in your lessons. And remember, the on-demand library will remain available so you can revisit the sessions, watch anything you've missed, and share with other teachers. Thanks very much.