3-minute Dissertation Presentation: What do you think?

Good afternoon. My name is Meagan Arrastia-Lloyd. I am a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and I teach teachers how to teach. Did you know that a students’ teacher actually explains the most variance in student scores compared to other predictors? Unfortunately, how teachers learn is often overlooked. That’s why I study teacher self-regulation. What is self-regulation? Well it's three things: preparation, actualization, and reevaluation.

In other words, it's a three-phase model, which has been validated with all kinds of students. Basically we go from having foresight to controlling our performance (or attempting to) to self-reflection. Learning on your own takes planning, figuring out what you need to know, and what strategies work best for you. While studying or practicing you need to monitor your progress, as well as control your emotional reaction in order to focus on the task at hand. Then you have to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, and pat yourself on the back for your success. This type of learning has been found to significantly improve and predict student achievement across contexts.

But students are not born with these skills. It is the responsibility of teachers to model the process and give students feedback so that they can regulate their own learning over time and ultimately become lifelong learners. We call this the gradual release of responsibility which is when “I do, we do, you do.”

But what if teachers don’t regulate their own learning? This is referred to as the Peter Effect which simply posits “one cannot give what one does not possess.” In my synthesis of the research, I have found that as education majors they don’t use these strategies and this translates to professional development.

Imagine a classroom full of students, even college students. If the teacher is unprepared and doesn’t have clear objectives, you can tell. You can also tell when the teacher gets off topic and the worst is when they don’t give you feedback and don’t adjust the content and instructional strategies based on that student data. That’s when reevaluation comes in. Using the resources available, effective teachers seek out more training, and get help from others to help students. Basically they prioritize student learning over all else.

With the United States lagging behind other first-world countries in reading, math, and science, improving education is a top priority. For my dissertation, I am developing a measure of teacher self-regulation. With this measure we could select the best teacher candidates, evaluate practicing teachers, and identify areas for them to improve faster. Every year that a student falls behind their peers, it makes it that less likely that they will graduate from high school so every moment counts. And when it comes down to it, it’s not the neighborhood, funding or public policy that makes a difference, it’s teaching.