Thriving Radford learners

By Louise Wallace-Richards – Assistant Principal, Teaching and Learning

It’s Week 6 of Term 1, 2022 and there has been so much for all of us to learn this year already, both teachers and students alike. The Secondary School teaching staff started the year engaging in our January professional learning program entitled 'Thriving Learners'. From my perspective, the program made us think about how privileged we are to teach at Radford, and how we can help our students to achieve their potential. At the heart of the learning for our teachers was the emphasis on the wellbeing of our students. By knowing them as individuals, including their learning needs, we can help them to achieve their best in the classroom.

The area of the professional learning program that I led, with Assistant Professor Shyam Barr from the University of Canberra, focused on helping our students to learn the skills to self-regulate. During my session, I recapped for all teachers the learning we have undertaken so far as a staff, including the work of the Heads of Department in 2021 in this area of pedagogy.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) includes the cognitive, metacognitive, behavioural, motivational, and emotional/affective aspects of learning. In the most basic sense, it involves controlling one's behaviour, emotions, and thoughts in the pursuit of long-term goals. More specifically, emotional self-regulation refers to the ability to manage disruptive emotions and impulses.

The table below shows:
(1) the key strategies learned by all Radford Secondary School teachers, which we are implementing in our classrooms and teaching to our students
(2) the impact on student self-regulation learning.

Lessons learned by Heads of Department in 2021 self-regulated learning project
The other focus area for my presentation during the 2022 January professional learning program was the lessons Heads of Department (HoDs) and I learned through our involvement in a project led by Shyam Barr in 2021. The main things we learned were that teachers need to:

• explicitly teach strategies to students
  only then will they know the what, the why and be able to use the strategy themselves
  
  
• give time in the lesson to teach the strategy
  unless the students are self-regulating, they are not learning at the level they could or should be
  
  
• revisit strategies
  do not assume the students will remember them or their purpose from lesson to lesson
  
  
• teach cognitive and metacognitive strategies.​

In their own words, some of our Heads of Departments reflect on what they learned:

• Exploring SRL has allowed me to step back and reflect on not only what I'm teaching, but more importantly how I am teaching and engaging with students in my classroom. This process has increased my understanding of SRL and enhanced my teaching practice.
  Justin Wood, Head of Health and Physical Education
  
  
• This has been a real mind shift to move from implicitly to explicitly incorporating SRL into my lessons. I find using the word 'strategies' in my communication with students has helped.
  Jason Golding, Head of English
  
  
• SRL has become a central part of my lesson plan and teaching. Through learning about SRL, I have gained a better understanding of how to teach curriculum whilst supporting students to become self-regulated learners. I have found making two learning intentions per lesson allows for the SRL to never be a last-minute addition, rather, intentionally incorporated into every lesson. It has been great to discuss and reflect on their own learning.
  Jeremy Hawkes, Interdisciplinary Coordinator

Our 2022 SRL Project Phase
We will continue to develop our knowledge and that of our students about how to self-regulate to become thriving learners throughout 2022 through:

• student assessment and parent, student and teacher conversations based on rubrics that focus self-regulation
• our Teacher Communities of Practice (CoP) focusing on observing explicit teaching of SRL strategies in lessons during the year
• more planned SRL learning with Shyam Barr for teachers during CoP sessions each term
• SRL coaching sessions for HoDs with Shyam Barr​
• instructional coaching by HoDs with team members, focusing on teaching SRL.

I am thrilled to announce that Shyam Barr and I have co-written an article, soon to be published in the Association of Heads of Independent Schools (AHISA) Independence magazine, about the Radford SRL learning journey to date, and that the College has been granted $20,000 through the ACT Association of Independent Schools to support our ongoing research into this essential area of pedagogy in 2022.