Today I'm going to discuss self-regulated learning, the educational psychology theory that forms the base of all of our work with graduate students.
I didn't know what self-regulated learning was when I started my PhD.
The way things worked out, I actually was learning about self-regulating my learning while I was researching it!
Self-regulated learning (sometimes shortened to SRL) helped me be a more reflective, adaptive, flexible, and efficient graduate student.
This is why I want to share SRL with more grad students just like you because I know both from research and from my own lived experiences that it can be an absolute game-changer for grad students.
Academia defines self-regulated learning as when "learners systematically activate and sustain their cognitions, motivations, behaviours, and affect toward the attainment of their goals" (Schunk & Greene, 2018, p.1).
But what does self-regulating your learning look like in grad school?
When graduate students regulate their actions, thoughts, feelings, motivation, and well-being in reaching goals in grad school, they are self-regulating their learning.
Importantly, using the word "self" can be a bit misleading. Self-regulating your learning doesn't mean working by yourself and independently. It actually means that you work with other people, know when to seek help, and know when to do work on your own. This is a really important distinction.
Here are the four parts of SRL that are crucial for grad students to know:
Step #1 - Ask about the tasks
If there's one thing I want to share with grad students is that at least 90% of the time you are struggling getting something done, it is because of task understanding. Often, in grad school we don't spend enough time thinking about and breaking down tasks in the beginning.
If you ever feel unmotivated, procrastinate, dread working on certain projects, or just can't seem to get anything done, this could be because of task understanding.
Still to this day when I am working on projects, I often realize that I wasn't able to get sometime done because I didn't have good enough task understanding of what I needed to do!
In grad school, make sure you ask about the tasks -- for example, even the five Ws and one H can be a good place to start:
What do I need do to?
Who can help me?
When do I want to have it done by?
Where should I get this work done?
Why am I doing this?
How will this help me in my program?
Step #2 - Go toward your goals
Goals, schmoals, right? There's so much talk out there about goals -- SMART goals, smaller
goals, etc.
But, the difference when you are self-regulating your learning is that you realize that goals provide the fuel for your motivation. This doesn't mean you need to set a goal for each thing you ever have to do. In fact, it's quite the opposite -- try setting concrete, practical goals for the things you are struggling to get done.
If you're still having trouble then...well, you guessed it -- go back to step 1 and revisit your task understanding because you may not have spent enough time in that step to move forward!
There are a few other types of goals that we teach students, namely MAST and CAST goals, so watch this space for mention of those, or get a head start and sign up for The Club (starting in September 2023) to learn more.
Step #3 - Start with strategies you already use
There's this thing I noticed myself doing and many of the grad students I've worked with since do.
We are all on the lookout for that one magical strategy that will solve all our problems!
Honestly, for me it's usually eating a pain au chocolat, but in terms o
f real strategies that actually make a difference, just start with what you know works.
By this point in your academic career -- working on your Master's degree or PhD -- you've accumulated a wealth of strategies that you've used before.
So, start with those. Then, through the fourth step (keep reading), that will help you reflect on those strategies and what changes you need to make, or what you need to keep the same to continue making progress.
Bonus tip: If the strategies you're choosing are still not working, revisit step 1 -- remember, it's always about task understanding!
Step #4 - Step back and reflect on what you've done (or haven't done) to self-regulate your learning
The image to the right is my reworking on several well-known models of SRL in the aims of making it more applicable and easier-to-use for grad students.
Step four is actually going on at each of the previous steps -- every time you check in with yourself about if you're on track -- you're monitoring what you are doing.
Every time you judge whether or not what you are doing is the quality of the work you want to produce -- you're evaluating what you are doing.
Every time you make a small change to make something work better -- you're adapting what you are doing.
These three processes are metacognition -- thinking about your thinking, including the quality of your thoughts -- in action and are crucial to success and making progress in grad school. However, sometimes we get stuck in this step as well. We think that if we just rehash what we did, reread the reviewers' or our advisor's comments one more time, or reread the seminal articles for our writing, that we'll somehow get there.
This is the thing about self-regulating your learning -- you need to know when to step back and when to step forward and work on getting something done so you have something to examine.
So now what?
This will be the first of many blog posts about self-regulating your learning as a grad student. Keep in mind, that SRL is not something you can do overnight or (usually) implement right away. It does take some time, but once you learn how to do it then you can implement it on your own and in different situations.
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