Self Regulated Learning

One of the things that I want my students to do was to write well. Most of the students in my class write a simple story that needs detail, dialogue and other conventions of a good writer. If they focus on one aspect they tend to forget the other and so it has till now been a tedious task of proof reading, checking and reminding of what good writers do. I wanted them to be more self regulated when learning and producing their writing.

So today I started by asking them to brainstorm ideas about everything that makes a good writer. We needed a lot of reminding and talking before we could remember all the things that we had learnt to be good at writing. This is what they said in their first attempt of brainstorm.

Sharing ideas

During sharing time I realised that some students did not understand the aspects very clearly. They needed to be shown how to achieve each of the goals, e.g. - If the aspect was - 'Good writers plan their stories before writing' - I asked them questions like - What does this look like? What do we do when we plan our stories? Do we use planning/graphic organisers? Do we write specific words that we will use in our stories...etc. can you remember when you planned for your writing? What did you do when you were planning?

It was a great to see students discuss each task in their groups and clarify their understanding with each other.

Create

At the end of our discussion I asked students to create something that would remind them and their peers about their goals. This is what they came up with...