Unlocking self-regulation

‘Alongside asking, “What do students need to know and be able to do?”, we might ask, “Where will students need to stop an immediate response in order to learn successfully, and how can we help them get better at doing that?”’ In his latest Teacher column, Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of the South Australian Department for Education, argues self-regulation is a powerful yet underused contributor to successful learning.

If we ask what has to be true for a student to learn successfully, our answers usually turn quickly to curriculum, knowledge, instruction and practice.

Quite right too. Whatever else matters, the quality of teaching remains at the heart of successful learning.

But there is another condition hiding in plain sight.

A learner needs to keep attending when something else is more immediately interesting. To resist blurting out the first answer that comes to mind. To stop rushing ahead before understanding the question. To persist when something feels difficult rather than abandoning effort. To manage frustration well enough to stay with the learning.

None of these things are literacy, numeracy or subject knowledge, but all help make learning possible.

Collectively, they are aspects of self-regulation, and I suspect self-regulation remains one of the more important, and underused, contributors to successful learning.

There is a terminology problem here. In schools, we increasingly hear ‘regulation’ used to describe a student’s ability to manage emotions and ‘dysregulation’ to recover to a state in which they can participate successfully.

Self-regulation in the research literature

That matters enormously. But self-regulation has a broader meaning in the research literature.

In a meta-analysis of existing research, a team from Australia’s University of Wollongong (Robson et al., 2020) define it in terms of the ‘ability to inhibit dominant impulses to modify thought, feeling and behaviour’. In everyday language, it is our capacity to stop ourselves doing what comes most immediately or automatically in order to do something else that would serve us better.

That can involve emotions, but also attention, behaviour and thinking. A quiet student is not necessarily a self-regulating student. Self-regulation is not compliance.

The Australian Curriculum is not silent on this. Personal and Social capability includes regulation, perseverance and the management of behaviour and emotions (ACARA, n.d). But self-regulation is not strongly foregrounded as a condition through which students benefit from teaching and succeed in learning.

That feels like a missed opportunity.

Those Australian researchers brought together 150 studies involving more than 215,000 children and the pattern is striking. Children with stronger self-regulation in preschool tended subsequently to perform better academically and engage better with school. The associations also extended beyond school to later mental health, social behaviour, health and employment outcomes.

These are correlations, not proof that self-regulation causes those outcomes. The authors are explicit that their meta-analysis cannot establish cause and effect.

But the consistency of the pattern should make us curious, particularly as self-regulation is malleable rather than something children either possess or do not possess.

One of the most fascinating demonstrations comes from Richard Tremblay’s research in Montreal (Algan et al., 2022).

In the 1980s, researchers identified 250 young boys from disadvantaged communities at elevated risk of later behavioural difficulties. Some were randomly assigned to a 2-year intervention between the ages of 7 and 9.

The training was concrete. Children practised what to do when they were teased, angry or excluded. They learned to recognise when they were about to lose control, pause and choose a response rather than act immediately.

Initially, there was no improvement in IQ or academic performance. But by adolescence, students who received the intervention had better grades and were less likely to repeat a grade or be placed in special education. By adulthood, they had higher educational attainment and employment, lower criminality and substantially higher employment income.

There are important qualifications. This was a particular group of boys, and the intervention developed social skills as well as self-control. We cannot attribute every later benefit specifically to self-regulation.

But random allocation means we can say something stronger than ‘successful children tend to have better self-control’.

Something was changed.

And the consequences unfolded over decades. 

In fact, the impact of the intervention did not fade out. If anything, it amplified over time.

Self-regulation in the classroom

So, what might this look like in learning? The important question is not whether students should become more compliant or simply ‘behave themselves’. It is where the capacity to inhibit an immediate response enables better learning.

In mathematics, students may need to inhibit the impulse to apply the operation used in the previous question before considering what this problem requires.

In writing, they may need to resist settling for the first word or sentence that comes to mind and produce something more precise.

Across learning, students constantly have to resist distractions, impulses to rush, the avoidance of difficulty and the temptation to abandon effort when success is not immediate.

This does not mean self-regulation can substitute for knowledge. Quite the opposite. A student cannot regulate their way to knowledge they have never been taught.

But self-regulation can influence whether they are able to bring that knowledge to bear.

Early in learning, much of this regulation quite properly belongs to the teacher, and educators in preschools and junior primary are often adept at this.

They reduce distractions, direct attention to what matters and prompt children to slow down, wait, listen or have another go. We structure tasks so learners are not continually required to exercise capacities they have not yet developed.

Good explicit teaching does not compete with self-regulation. It can provide the conditions in which it develops.

Perhaps one way of thinking about teaching is that, initially, we lend students our regulation.

A teacher saying, ‘Stop. Read the whole question again,’ is doing some of the regulating for the learner. So is ‘Don’t answer yet, look at all the possibilities first,’ or ‘I know this is frustrating; stay with it for another minute’.

Over time, those prompts increasingly need to come from students themselves.

The power of teacher wait time

A kindergarten director recently told me how she is helping staff not to step in too quickly when children might practise regulating themselves. At their site, particular music signals a transition. Staff have to inhibit their own impulse to tell children what to do and allow them time to respond to the cue on their own.

Teacher wait time – whether in primary school, high school or university – can be a powerful tool too.

We might make the moments that require self-regulation more visible. Where are students likely to rush? What distraction must they ignore? What immediate response must they suppress? When will persistence matter?

Our feedback can notice it too: ‘You wanted to answer straight away, but you waited until you had heard the whole question.’ ‘You wanted to move on, but you stayed with it.’

The wrong conclusion from this research would be that every school now needs to buy a self-regulation program.

The more interesting possibility is that self-regulation becomes part of the way we think about everyday teaching.

Alongside asking, ‘What do students need to know and be able to do?’, we might ask, ‘Where will students need to stop an immediate response in order to learn successfully, and how can we help them get better at doing that?’

If we can answer that question more deliberately, we may unlock something that has been sitting in our classrooms all along.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (n.d.). Understand this general capability – Personal and Social capability. Australian Curriculum. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/curriculum-information/understand-this-general-capability/personal-and-social-capability 

Algan, Y., Beasley, E., Côté, S., Park, J., Tremblay, R. E., & Vitaro, F. (2022). The Impact of Childhood Social Skills and Self-Control Training on Economic and Noneconomic Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment Using Administrative Data. American Economic Review, 112(8), 2553-2579. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20200224 

Robson, D. A., Allen, M. S., & Howard, S. J. (2020). Self-regulation in childhood as a predictor of future outcomes: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 146(4), 324-354. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000227