SRL - Assignment 2 - Solo Task

My Task is to write about 6 different concepts, two from each of the three articles we were assigned to read. My goal is to complete this highly complex task before deadline which is Tuesday 17.11.2015. I believe that I will be able to meet this deadline because of my high level of dedication and determination to this course and to the whole LET program in general. The concepts I would like to tackle in this task are; Collaborative Emotional Regulation vs. Individual Emotional Regulation, Environmental Structuring, Self-Handicapping.   

Collaborative vs. Individual Emotion Regulation

The research by Järvenoja, H., & Järvelä, S. (2009) has concluded that students can regulate their emotions collaboratively as well as individually during the learning process, conditionally if they were made conscious of their personal differences which could lead to potential conflicts under certain circumstances.

To support this conclusion from my own experience in teaching for several years I can emphasize that a lot of students do their best in academic life to fit within the group dynamics whenever there is a situation that requires collaborative work. The peer pressure and other factors such as self-esteem during collaborative work encourages students’ positive reactions hence emotion regulation among adults, both at the individual as well as collaborative level. That is the reason why I design several collaborative activities in my classroom delivery knowing its effectiveness. 

An interesting question raised by Järvenoja, H., & Järvelä, S (2009) “Do students regulate emotions evoked by social challenges?” this question brings to light another question in mind, a question that has to do with distinguishing the emotionally intelligent and self-disciplined from the other students. Having had the experience of teaching thousands of students, it was evident to me that each one of them had a different level of emotional intelligence and self-discipline. Hence, I can answer the question by saying, I saw some students were able to regulate their emotions and some others were not and the ones who were able to do that were emotionally intelligent. As for the students who failed to regulate their emotions were trapped inside and I had to give a hand of encouragement as a facilitator to bring them out of it.

Goal Orientation

As defined by Marcou, A. (2005) 'Goal Orientation' refers to the students’ perception of the reasons why to engage in a learning task. In his study, Marcou A. made two distinctions to study the concept; intrinsic and extrinsic goal orientation. The definition seems inclusive to any reason that could be inside the learners head or outside the learner's environment.   

Intrinsic goal orientation, 

Marcou explains that concerns the degree to which a student perceives himself to be participating in a task for reasons such as challenge, curiosity and mastery, using self-set standards and self-improvement. 

To give an example, I would say that any interest from the learner's side in the task itself for the task is considered an intrinsic goal orientation. Anything that has nothing to do with the external environment of a learner. The decisive factor here is that learner is driven by his or her own inside world.

Extrinsic goal orientation 

He explains that it denotes that a student participates in a task for reasons such as grades, rewards, performance, evaluations by others and competition. 

That means anything that has to do with the external environment of a learner, anything that motivates him/her for obtaining certain rewards is considered an extrinsic goal orientation according to this definition. The decisive factor here is that learner is driven NOT by his or her own inside world but by the outside world.

Environmental Structuring

This strategy is defined as decreasing the possibility of off-task behavior by reducing the probability of encountering a distraction or by reducing the intensity of distractions that do occur. Wolters, C. A. (2003). Managing and controlling our current environment while studying or to facilitate the process of learning is essential for successful learning experience. Self-regulated learners use different ways to influence their learning environment in order to increase their motivation for achieving their goals. I remember when I was young at high school, I used to buy my younger brother a lot of chocolates and sweets so that he becomes quite in order for me to be able to study in a calm environment.  

Even though this concept is great, yet I am against using a very technical terminology related to engineering such as ‘Environmental Structuring’ to describe very primitive actions learners take to make their study place quite. Having read a lot of literature over the past three years about ‘Learning Strategies’ It seems to me that everything a learner does can be classified as a ‘Strategy’ in the literature which makes no sense as there are thousands of very simple activities and little actions than can be classified as ‘Strategies’ if we follow this approach. To me a strategy is more than simple activities or actions, it’s about goals, actions and sequence.  

Self-Handicapping

Another strategy for regulating motivation involves the manufacture of obstructions before or during a task that make performing that task more difficult. Wolters, C. A. (2003). This somewhat counter-intuitive regulation of motivation activity has been labeled “self-handicapping” (Riggs, 1992; Urdan & Midgley, 2001).  

It is interesting to get to know that putting off doing work until the last minute is classified as examples of motivation regulation strategies. To me the issue is black and white, meaning you either have a strategy or you do not. But in theory, not having a strategy is treated as a strategy in itself. What is even more interesting is to know that students gain some sort of benefits from these strategies as Wolters, C. A. claims; “The motivational benefits of using this strategy are somewhat equivocal…” 

Reflection     

This is an inspiring article that added a different aspect to my teaching experience based on which I am planning to develop a set of ‘Inductive Techniques’ as part of classroom instructional design in order to support collaborative emotion regulation. By inductive technique, I mean getting students involved in consciously regulating their own emotions during the learning process by means of ‘noticing’ instead of explaining to them what they should and should not do during collaborative work.   

“Other people can shape an individual’s engagement and regulation processes by other- or co-regulating their learning (Higgins, 2000)”, this is something that I have experienced a lot in several classroom practices and I tend to use it to support my classroom delivery through assignments of challenging tasks to the super-active students in order to support the less active ones, which in turn adds pressure on the latter to respond to the former ‘super-active’. 

The planning for this task went well, except that when I had a physical problem in my right hand and arm where I couldn't continue typing, all my motivation went really down. Another thing that killed my motivation for completing the task is the complexity and ineffective instructional design of the task. . 

Main Challenge

The main challenge I had during this task is regulating my own motivation as the expectations from these SOLO tasks seems unrealistic and exaggerated in away that seems not a 'normal' learning environment. It seems that there are academic researchers behind who are manipulating the environment this way in order to obtain certain data. So the feeling of being a subject of research during these tasks is very stressful.