Hello, everyone,

I hope your last face-to-face meeting on April 13 went well. I’m sorry I couldn’t join you, but my heart was with you.

 

How might we better develop and strengthen self-regulation in our students so that they can better manage and invest themselves in their own learning and thus demonstrate better self-control, autonomy, initiative and collaboration?

Work on autonomy continues in my two Grade 6 classes. After having explicitly taught the four steps of autonomy and I remind you briefly of them.

When I work alone and have a problem, I consult:

Me

I wonder if you’d like to know

what I know about

and what I have learned

that could help me

My toolbox

My notes, the repositories,

My reference tools, the dictionary…

A working partner

He makes sure I’ve gone through all the resources available

And that I know how to use them

The expert (optional)

He helps me to solve my problem

by following the trail of the

solution

My teacher

He helps me to solve my problem

by following the trail of the

solution

At this point, students are still too likely to go directly to the teacher for support without going through the previous steps. This requires a lot of investment on my part by making them aware of the steps to follow and for them to become automatic. I believe that after this awareness, the students will achieve better autonomy. As I have already said, I will be working on autonomy at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the next school year. For now, in order to check the students’ progress, I will record my observations on grids. In addition, students will self-assess by the end of the year. I hope that I will meet some of my students again next year, in Grade 7, and continue this experiment over two years to measure more continuous and real effects. In addition, next year I would like to collaborate with one or two other teachers in different subjects or the same one and thus be able to exchange and share our observations, our results and how to improve our practices in this field and extend it to our school, the TFS.

This experience with Cohort 21 was rewarding and allowed me to try new things that I probably wouldn’t have done, at least not now or even later. Like our students, we are also learners and like them we take risks. Cohort 21 is the lever that gives us the necessary springboard so that we can try, experiment, question, reflect, learn, fail to get up and do something else, all these thanks to a vast network of educators passionate about what they do, motivated and committed, discussing their experiences and sharing their expertise. I hope that I still will have the opportunity to continue the discussion and collaboration with some members of Cohort 21 and to continue what I started this year and hoping to work on the same thing and more with some of my colleagues at the Toronto French School.

A big thank you to the organizers of Cohort 21 for their excellent work and unwavering commitment.

Corinne:)