Options for Self-Regulation
Educators can foster learners’ ability to strategically modulate emotional reactions or states in order to be more effective at coping and engaging with the learning environment.
Facing Anxiety (Runtime: 7:23 min).
Below are three “checkpoints” or strategies for the guideline of options for Self-Regulation guideline. If you click on each of these checkpoints, you will find examples of how these strategies can be implemented into practice.
Promote expectations and beliefs that optimize motivation
Foster positive beliefs that learners’ goals can be met by providing prompts, reminders, guides, rubrics, and checklists that focus on:
- support activities that encourage self-reflection and identification of personal goals
- increasing orientation when faced with distractions
- providing access to coaches and mentors that model the process of setting personal goals that take into account both strengths and challenges
Facilitate personal coping skills and strategies
Provide differentiated models, scaffolds, and feedback for:
- self-regulatory goals like managing stress through self-care and self-reflective exercises
- seeking external emotional support
- appropriately handling subject-specific judgements of “natural” aptitude (e.g., “I have not mastered quadratic equations, yet.” versus “I am not good at math”)
- using real-life examples or simulations to demonstrate strategies for managing adverse situations
Develop self-reflection and assessment
For many learners, merely recognizing that they are making progress towards greater independence is highly motivating. Alternatively, one of the key factors in learners losing motivation is their inability to recognize their own progress. It is optimal if learners have multiple models and scaffolds of different self-assessment techniques so that they can identify, and choose, ones that fit for them:
- Offer devices, aids, or charts to assist individuals in learning to collect, chart, and display data from their own skill building for the purpose of monitoring changes in those behaviours.
- Use activities that include a means by which learners get feedback and have access to alternative scaffolds (e.g., charts, templates, feedback displays) that support understanding progress in a manner that is clear and timely.
For more strategies on providing feedback that help learners monitor their own progress, see Module 3.
In what ways can I support learners in setting goals to help themselves stay motivated? How am I providing strategies for learners to develop the skills necessary to deal with adversity? Am I facilitating a learning environment where learners can critically reflect on what and how they learn? If not, what opportunities can I create to support this?
In this video, college counsellor Zeba Luxmore shares tips and strategies for educators on how to support students managing stress or mental health concerns.
Strategies for Supporting Students With Mental Health Issues - Zeba Luxmore
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>> Hi I'm Zeba Luxmore and I work as a college counsellor.
As we all know, many of our students can experience mental health challenges that are brought on by their academics or life in general. When I see a student in a counselling session who shares with me that they're feeling stressed or anxious or low, I always do my best to listen to their story, validate their feelings and let them know that they’re not alone. Because the reality is, they’re not alone. We all have mental health and many of us will experience challenges related to our mental health at least some point in our lives. Just like other aspects of our health can change over our lives, our mental health can too.
Mental health is not a fixed thing. It's a process. It's fluid and it changes. One helpful way of looking at our mental health is using this dual axis model that was created by Dr. Corey Keyes in 2002. Often when we hear the term mental health, we tend to focus on the negative, where we think of it as good or bad. This model breaks it down a little and we get a better sense of how nuanced our mental health can be. The horizontal axis refers to having or not having symptoms that weren’t a diagnosis of a mental illness, like depression or an eating disorder, for example. And the vertical axis refers more to our mental wellbeing, so our ability to take part in daily life, work tasks, school tasks, keeping up relationships, the coping strategies we use and how we feel about our life in general.
So for instance, it's possible for a person to have a diagnosis of anxiety which would put them closer to the left side of the model. But maybe they also have a supportive group of friends, a therapist that they see regularly and a daily routine that includes exercise, good sleep and writing in a journal. In this case we could see that their mental health would be flourishing. Alternatively, another person might not have a diagnosis and they might be going through a difficult time. Like exam week. They might be living on their own and have very little supports or strategies in place. In this case, during this part of their life, they might be closer to the bottom right quadrant.
So we can see that mental health and mental illness are related but distinct dimensions that can be viewed independently. So it's possible for a person to flourish and have a positive sense of mental health with a diagnosed mental illness and the opposite is true too. Mental health and mental illness are not fixed and so individuals might find themselves at different points on this model throughout their lives. When we think about the different factors affecting the mental health of our students, [indiscernible], finances, living situation, social and family impacts, and the world at large, it's clear that we can all move around on this model. You may want to notice where you're on this model today. So just like we all have physical health, we all have mental health.
Understanding how fluid our mental health can be is really important because stigma still exists around this topic, especially for those living with mental health challenges, regardless of where they might find themselves on this model. Some harmful stereotypes include assuming individuals experiencing symptoms related to their mental health are lazy, incompetent or weak. And while we know this is untrue, for the person it can feel very hurtful and invalidating. You know, considering the context of your students is always really helpful too. Mental health is intersectional. So when you think about your students, keep in mind that their mental health is impacted by their identity of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation and other social constructs.
So for instance, an international student from India who identifies as female, queer, and lives on her own with no family supports in Canada, will likely face different barriers than a student who was born and raised in Canada, lives with family and identifies as female, white and heterosexual.
Educators hold an important role with students; one that carries trust and respect and by virtue of this power, I’ve had students in counselling sessions share with me that they feel apprehensive to ask teachers for help because they worry that they'll be judged or that their needs won’t be deemed worthy enough. For some students, just reaching out and asking for help can feel very daunting and scary. There are many things that we can all do to support the mental health of our students. In the classroom, here are a few ideas. Scheduling regular class check-ins; collecting and encouraging feedback; assuring students that experiencing stress related to academic tasks is normal and explain what that may look or feel like to them. Providing options for completing academic tasks; letting students know about the different supports and services available to them. As a counsellor, I've made many class visits and sometimes just having a face to a name can encourage students to reach out and use the service.
Other service professionals around your institutions such as librarians, tutoring supports, accessibility consultants, learning strategists, adaptive technologists. They’re often very willing to meet with your students in class. Just reach out and demystify who they are and how to access their help. We know that there's no one means of engagement that's going to work for all, all our learners. And educators can help by being open, accessible and responsive. When learners express concerns around their mental health. Sometimes this is listening to their concerns and being flexible in your expectations. Other times it's helping learners connect to the right supports available. What we might think of as an accommodation for a few students may very well be helpful for most students.
And this speaks to the multiple means of engagement that UDL is all about. Many of our students do register with and utilize Accessible Learning Services as a way to, you know, support them and meet-- in meeting the demands of their program. However, we also have many students in post-secondary who may have symptoms but that don't warrant a diagnosis or for another reason may not register with the accessibility department. Educators can also be really proactive when considering course design. So having a structured course with clear guidelines around expectations with flexible and alternative ways to submit can provide an open- an open and welcoming space for students to grow and learn.
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Supporting Students with Mental Health Issues - Runtime 6:51 min
https://youtu.be/SUjvKms9QLY
Here are great resources for promoting self-regulation skills such as stress management, self-care, and resilience.
Some people think of self-regulation as mind vs emotion. However, cognition and emotions are in constant interaction with each other. Various stimuli in our environment result in automatic reactions in our brain. A sense of equilibrium and the ability to exert voluntary control is the result of our thinking and feeling responses working together. Increased options for finding one's way back to equilibrium increases the ability to do it more often in the future.
There are several reasons why it is so difficult to manage stress. One is that we don’t recognize the signs of “stress-behavior” and confuse it with "weakness.”