There are a lot of skills necessary to succeed in school that aren’t directly about mastering content, including the ability to recognize, name and control ones emotions. The school day often comes with lots of emotion, everything from elation to frustration, which makes it the perfect place to practice self-regulation.
“One of the critical features of learning is modeling,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute in an Edutopia series on the science of learning. “We learn by watching others. In this classroom, we see the teacher modeling her recognition of her emotions and also modeling how she deals with them in productive ways. And that is the first step in helping children learn to manage their own emotions.”
When teachers explicitly recognize and respond to their emotions in class, students learn to engage in these processes themselves.
This type of modeling also helps students recognize that their teachers are people too, and that like students, they get frustrated when no one listens or follows directions. It builds empathy to know that all humans experience a range of emotions across a day and each person is doing their best to manage them productively.
Explicitly modeling the process of prioritizing tasks builds students’ ability to organize and manage their time.
Students must also learn and practice how to prioritize and tackle tasks for academic and life success. Executive function often develops in middle school when the skills become even more important as students juggle work from multiple classes with many deadlines. Learning how to prioritize work not only makes it feel more manageable, it also helps students use work time efficiently.
Excerpted from “Concrete Ways To Help Students Self-Regulate And Prioritize Work” in KQED’s MindShift. Read the full article. See How Learning Happens on Edutopia for more videos.
Source: MindShift | Concrete Ways To Help Students Self-Regulate And Prioritize Work, https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53132/concrete-ways-to-help-students-self-regulate-and-prioritize-work | Copyright © 2019 KQED INC
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