Reconceptualizing student experience in terms of regulatory needs

This post is an excerpt from my book "Ready to Learn: A crash course in child development, and how children experience school."

In this section, we explore aspects of student experience to envision how instructional planning might be improved. We first consider how student experience does and does not change as children develop.

We will begin with what we know. Children experience unprecedented levels of self-regulatory demands during the transition to kindergarten. Even a 4- or 5-year-old who has benefited from time in an early education setting is bound to enter kindergarten and face firmer expectations to persist in the face of difficulty, ignore once-welcome distractions, and meet more demanding task criteria. There are more frequent requests to upregulate (e.g., elevate arousal and focus to complete a task) and downregulate (e.g., settle and wait at a designated spot). For most children, there are more frequent feelings of duty that you must be doing what others are doing, maintaining someone else’s pace, or considering another’s needs while working to meet your own. Not every child is ready to meet these new challenges in stride, as Rimm-Kaufman et al. (2000) and other large-scale survey results strongly suggest.

It will come as no surprise to readers that student issues arising during kindergarten tend to be perceived through a mostly behavioural lens. As recounted in the previous chapter, present-day educators have come to view adjustment to school entry in terms of a child’s capacity to factor emotional and motivational states for the purpose of behaviour regulation. It also happens that the various responsibilities of kindergarten teachers include supporting, evaluating, and reporting on each student’s adjustment and progress, as well as recognizing when issues arise and deciding what must be done about them. Observing students through a behavioural lens is far and away the most direct means of managing these responsibilities. Again, the focus of adjustment and progress for kindergarten-aged students is self-regulatory skill, which is naturally expressed in externalized behaviour. Paraphrasing, educators now tend to recognize and address student issues in kindergarten through a behaviour-regulation lens. The move away from the traditional focus on academic readiness allows children entering school to enjoy a grace period of sorts during which academics are temporarily downplayed. This shift, in turn, enables kindergarten teachers to help all students transition to school and receive a better-rounded preparation for academic achievement.

But then something else interesting occurs during those first few years of school. The behavioural lens through which we view and manage student adjustment issues gradually fades into the background as students move through and beyond kindergarten. More precisely, when students leave kindergarten and enter the primary grades, they come into the care of teachers who have some justification for viewing adjustment issues and school progress through a more academic lens. The reason? Rapid development of the prefrontal

cortex between 3 and 6 years of age results in the appearance and expansion of new cognitive skills (Jones & Bailey, 2016). Boosted by the rigour and sophistication of school experience, executive functions mature and functionally distinguish themselves while also learning to coordinate with purpose.

As a result—and as we have detailed in recent chapters—children improve their ability to manage prepotent behaviour during the first few years of school. They learn to “stop and think” to plan, self-monitor, problem solve, and work with others. Goal behaviour assumes a growing cognitive aspect. Students plan pathways to coordinate goal behaviour in increasingly sophisticated ways. They not only listen to directions but elaborate them to assist recall; they assume another’s perspective to not only decide what to say but how and when to say it; and they improve their ability to notice the most relevant tacit cues to anticipate transitions and organize themselves. Fine motor skills such as printing, drawing, colouring, and using scissors are more likely mediated by language/thinking/planning and less likely coupled with movements of the jaw or tongue for attentional support. Broadly speaking, educators, policymakers, and curriculum writers appreciate these developments and understand that the underlying cognitive gains allow for greater emphasis on academic expectations.

As children continue to grow and develop, the lens used by adults to identify and

address adjustment issues must shift away from its early focus on externalized behaviour. To be sure, behaviour continues to offer educators high-quality cues for assessing student adjustment, progress, and responses to interventions. However, the priorities that factor into those outcomes have shuffled, hinging more and more on whether students are achieving knowledge and values expectations identified in the state curricula. Through the primary grades, educators need to adopt less direct ways of inferring progress because students are more often asked to coordinate cognitive unobservables when learning. Increasingly, evaluating student progress requires an accumulation of evidence and professional judgment. After all, what can a teacher reasonably conclude when a 6-year-old sees 1 + 2 = ◻︎ and writes 3 in the box? Before long, students will be in the third and fourth grades and writing tests. How we define and measure progress in school undergoes a shift to become more cognitively/academically framed.

Let us now turn our attention to whether and how students feel an experiential shift

as their teachers are lens-shifting from behaviour to academics. Does first-person school experience change for students as academic expectations ramp up during the early years? The short answer is yes, it certainly can. Students moving out of kindergarten and into the primary grades are more likely tasked with activities that venture away from concrete experience. Learning products are more often required to involve altogether new or abstract

information. Some but not all students will feel growing pressures to engage with difficulty, ascertain how the teacher thinks a task should be accomplished, factor in a teacher’s or classmate’s perspective when making a task-related choice, or independently work through frustration or anxiety.

In another sense, however, there is little that changes for students. Simply put, they continue doing their best to undertake goal-oriented tasks and wrestle with any challenges. In other words, they continue to self-regulate. Each youngster applies a growing repertoire of capacities to manage the new responsibilities and challenges each school year brings. That is how they have always conducted purposeful behaviour, and that is what they will continue to do for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t matter which adult lens is active or that the role of cognition is growing. At all times, students of all ages naturally respond to classroom demands by regulating to the best of their abilities. During a learning activity, each student—as is the case for any of us during any kind of goal behaviour—will exercise choices and preferences reflecting how acquired valuations and memories and available resources suggest task demands can be best managed.

Let us summarize. From the educator’s point of view, a student’s adjustment at school entry is framed primarily in behavioural terms but becomes increasingly defined by academic performance. However, from a student-centred and experiential point of view, adjustment at school can always be reduced to the student’s ability to self-regulate classroom experience. These are self-evident ideas, and there is nothing new about them, but they have straightforward implications for general instruction. First and foremost, it stands to reason that if student experience beyond kindergarten continues to hinge on self-regulation, then designing instructional programs that can support how students meet their personal regulatory needs will yield benefits. Building the capacity of students to self-regulate encountered needs during a whole-class learning activity would, for example, promote task completion, student success, and classroom flow, not to mention support teacher wherewithal. But how can program design support on-the-fly needs regulation for twenty-five students?