Part 3: Teaching Students to Plan

Learning Target: Students can identify specific outcomes that they want to accomplish and create detailed plans for doing so.

So far, you have learned the definition of self-regulation, the four components, and how to support students in determining their strengths and challenges related to self-regulation. Next, you will learn how to support students in learning and practice of the first component, planning. A good plan addresses the following questions:

• What do I need to accomplish by when?
• How will I accomplish it? In other words, what strategies will I need to use, and what steps/actions will I need to take to succeed?
• What could go wrong? How will I keep on track if things do go wrong? What adjustments could I make?

Teach Students: 3a. Reflecting on My Academic Planning

Have students spend a few minutes individually answering the following prompts. Then, ask them to write a few sentences about how they approach new assignments/goals (in school, sports, extracurricular activities, work, etc.) on the “Teach Students: 3a. Reflecting on My Academic Planning” handout (Handout 3a. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook).

• Do you make a plan? Do you wait for someone else (teacher, parent, friend, etc.) to tell you how to proceed? Do you dive straight in and immediately start working?
• If you make plans, how do they generally look? For example, do your current plans include many details, or are they broad?
• Do you think about what you can realistically get done in the allotted time, or do you decide you’ll figure it out as you go? Do you write down your plan or just think about the steps?

Explain to students that a good plan should address the following four questions:

1. How will I know I’ve successfully reached my goal? How does success look?
2. What steps, strategies, and actions are necessary to accomplish my goal? When, where, and how will I work toward my goal?
3. What could go wrong? How will I avoid or overcome these challenges?
4. How will I track my progress?

3a. Reflect and Apply: Think about something you need to accomplish in the next few weeks. Jot your ideas down on page 5 of the Educator Workbook:

• What is your current approach to making plans? (Are they broad or specific? For example, do you write down your plan or share it with others? Do you determine how you’ll monitor your progress?)

Extend your learning by writing a plan for accomplishing your task. To guide you, consider the four numbered questions above.

We all have different methods and actions that we use to self-regulate. Your students do as well. Each student may create a very different plan using personal and unique actions to address each component. Although we can help students generate ideas for actions to incorporate into their plan, they must take ownership of the plan by determining their own actions rather than just following actions we may impose on them.

Teach Students: 3b. Izzy Makes a Plan

Show the video of Izzy making a plan.

After the video, ask students to take a few minutes to write answers to the following questions individually, found on the “Teach Students: 3b. Izzy Makes a Plan” handout (Handout 3b. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook), and then facilitate a class discussion, providing guidance as necessary:

• How did Izzy plan?
• How did she monitor?
• How did she adjust her plan? Did she ask others for help as necessary?
• How did she reflect?

3b. Reflect and Apply: Listen to Dr. Amy Gaumer Erickson explain the importance of allowing students to develop their unique plans.

After watching the video, consider how the actions in a plan we create for students might be different than the actions your students might choose. Then, identify a time when you can distinctly remember directing a student’s actions.

• How did you regulate for the student?
• In the future, how can you coach students to self-regulate instead of regulating for them?

Write your ideas on page 5 of the Educator Workbook.

Teach Students: 3c. Common Planning Elements

Students need support to create personalized, detailed, and realistic plans. These plans should include ways to overcome potential obstacles. Detailed plans are more likely to help students progress toward their goals than vague or unrealistic plans. The self part of self-regulation means that the students are the ones who must regulate their behaviors/actions. We can provide support and help with the learning process, but, ultimately, self-regulation is a personal ability. When we support students in planning, we need to switch from doing it for them to coaching through questioning.

Watch students discuss six elements to consider while planning. Print out the “Teach Students: 3c. Common Planning Elements” handout to share with students (Handout 3c. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook).

Teach Students: 3d. Ava Wants More Energy—Planning for Healthy Eating

Provide a review of the four components for self-regulation. Include examples of how each component could be addressed in a plan. Explain to students that a good plan should address the following four questions:

1. How will I know I’ve successfully reached my goal? How does success look?
2. What steps, strategies, and actions are necessary to accomplish my goal? When, where, and how will I work toward my goal?
3. What could go wrong? How will I avoid or overcome these challenges?
4. How will I track my progress?

Share an example (use the one below or create your own) of a student creating a plan, encountering a challenge, and using self-regulation to address the challenge. Next, have students individually answer the reflection questions that follow the scenario. Then facilitate a class discussion about how all four components were addressed and why each is necessary for this specific scenario.

Scenario: Ava lacks energy and spends too much money on energy drinks and cookies (her daily lunch). She falls asleep every afternoon in algebra and doesn’t feel well in general. Ava wants to eat healthier. She decides to change her diet to low-sugar, minimally processed food and shift to eating more protein, fruits, and vegetables. Ava gives away all her energy drinks and writes out a menu of what she will eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks (using a nutritional guidance website to ensure that her menus will help her meet her goals). She discusses the plan with her family and asks her mom to stop buying cookies. She then records her food intake using an app. She gets off track at a weekend party, eating chips and cookies. The next day, she decides to keep granola bars and dried fruit in her purse to have an alternative to chips and cookies when at parties. Each day she reviews the data in the app, tracking nutrients consumed compared to recommended daily allowances, and thinks about whether she ate a balanced diet that followed her menu. Using a printed calendar, Ava gives herself one to five stars for her effort that day and writes one personal success or challenge she experienced. Weekly, she thinks about what is working and what isn’t, then revises her plan accordingly. She now has much more energy, stays awake in algebra, and feels healthier overall.

Ask students to take a few minutes to individually write answers to the following questions (also provided as a handout), found on the “Teach Students: 3d. Ava Wants More Energy—Planning for Healthy Eating” handout (Handout 3d. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook) and then facilitate a class discussion while providing guidance as necessary:

• How did Ava plan?
• How did she monitor?
• How did she adjust her plan? Did she ask others for help as necessary?
• How did she reflect?

The following two activities allow for students to practice making a plan based on the given scenarios.

Teach Students: 3e. Olivia Needs a Homework Plan—Planning for Academic Success

Although we might think our goal/task is pretty simple (and therefore only needs a simple and straightforward plan for accomplishing it), things are almost always more complicated than we initially imagined. We might do steps automatically without thinking while working on specific tasks we often do (like completing our homework). When we’re succeeding at accomplishing the task, that’s not necessarily a problem. But if we’re having trouble completing the task successfully, it’s crucial to think about the steps and details that we may be overlooking. To illustrate this point, we will read a scenario and then work as a class to create a detailed plan for homework completion.

Scenario: Your younger sister, Olivia, has trouble finishing her homework. She knows that you’ve been doing a lot better at turning things in on time lately, so she asks you to help her figure out how she can improve. You’ve been using self-regulation to increase your success, and you know that, in general, students who use self-regulation are more likely to complete their homework on time. Therefore, you decide that the best way to support your sister is by helping her brainstorm a self-regulation plan for her homework completion.

After giving students time to read the scenario, have them work as a class or in small groups, using the “Teach Students: 3e. Olivia Needs a Homework Plan–Planning for Academic Success” handout (Handout 3e. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook) handout to develop the steps they would need to include in the plan for homework completion.

As part of the discussion, remind students that, to ensure a thorough plan and address all the necessary pieces, they should use targeted questions when helping someone else create a plan (and when developing their plans).

To demonstrate this, use the guiding questions below as necessary:

• What homework do you have?
• What materials do you need to complete your homework?
• How long do you think it will take to finish your homework?
• What else do you have planned for today?
• When will you start working on your homework?
• Where will you work on it?
• What distractions are likely to get in your way?
• How will you reduce or eliminate these distractions?
• Will you need breaks? When will you take these breaks; how long will they last?
• Will you need help? If yes, how will you get help?
• When will you have the homework done?
• How will you determine if you are on track to get the homework done when you planned to? Conversely, what will you do if you aren’t on track?
• How will you ensure that you get your homework turned in to your teacher (instead of leaving it where you worked on it)?

To wrap up the discussion, emphasize that things that initially seem simple often require more detail than we think. Tell students that their self-regulation plans should have a large amount of detail. When you are working on tasks that you do regularly but are currently struggling with, it’s essential to include this much detail for several reasons:

• It helps ensure that you do not forget an essential part of the process that’s become so routine that you don’t even think about it.
• It makes it less likely that you’ll get off track when you are surprised by something you could have planned for in advance.
• It might help you identify unexpected areas contributing to your current struggles with this task.

3e. Reflect and Apply: Consider the scenarios featuring Ava and Olivia. How would you use the scenarios as written? How could you modify the scenarios to better meet the needs of your students? Jot down your thoughts on page 6 of your Educator Workbook.

Now let’s shift our focus to regulating emotional reactions. When we experience intense or stressful emotions, we can use coping mechanisms or calming strategies to help regulate those emotions and the physiological responses they inspire. You may notice that your students experience various emotions related to academic content. When students understand that they can manage their emotions, such as stress and anxiety, by using coping strategies, they can manage their physiological reactions and perform better academically.

Teach Students: 3f. Levi’s Anxiety Over Public Speaking—Strategies for Physiological Reactions

Facilitate a discussion about emotional regulation by emphasizing that it’s normal to have a wide range of emotions and that emotions can often cause physiological reactions. Remind students that when we experience intense or stressful emotions, we can use coping mechanisms or calming strategies to help regulate those emotions and the physiological responses they inspire.

Have the class read the scenario below, and then ask students to work in small groups to create a detailed plan for regulating emotional reactions using the “Teach Students: 3f. Levi’s Anxiety Over Public Speaking—Strategies for Physiological Reactions” handout (Handout 3f. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook). Watch this video for an example of this activity in the classroom.

Scenario: Your friend Levi is taking a public speaking class. He knows that he will be expected to speak in front of groups in the career he plans to pursue. The only problem is that Levi gets very anxious when speaking in front of a group. His palms sweat, and his mouth gets very dry. As a result, he ends up talking too fast and without emotion. Help Levi make a plan to reduce his anxiety and effectively convey his ideas to a group.

As the small groups develop plans, provide some guiding questions:

• What emotions might Levi be feeling?
• What physiological reactions do you think Levi may be experiencing?
• What could Levi do in advance of the speech to feel more confident?
• What calming strategies might he use before the speech?

In wrapping up the activity and discussion, explain that planning takes time when done well, but it saves time by putting us on track to accomplish our goals.

3f. Reflect and Apply: Watch this video on math anxiety. The video explains what happens in the brain when we experience physiological feedback, such as an increased heart rate. Then, the video mentions four specific strategies students can use to manage their anxiety about math or any other subject area. Listen for those strategies and jot them down on page 6 of the Educator Workbook.

After watching the video, determine how you will introduce the strategies to your students. Then, write your plan on page 6 of the Educator Workbook.

Now that you understand how to support students in making plans that contain details about specific actions they will need to do to accomplish a task. It is time to think about how to support them in practicing the entire process of self-regulation within your classroom setting. Remember that students need ongoing opportunities to practice the whole process of self-regulation across multiple environments.

Teach Students: 3g. Developing Your Self-Regulation Plan

Tell students that they’re going to make a plan to accomplish a goal of their own. Have students choose something important to them (e.g., learning to drive, getting to school or work on time, writing better essays, achieving fitness goals, handling stress) and under their control (e.g., applying for jobs rather than getting a job).

Tell students that they will put this plan into practice, and across the next few weeks, they will work on how to monitor their plan, adjust as needed when things are not going as planned, and reflect on their efforts and progress toward accomplishing their plan. Just like the plans that they wrote in class for the practice scenarios, their personal plans should be detailed, include a realistic timeline, the steps that they will need to do along the way, and a list of potential barriers/obstacles the students might encounter (along with the strategies they will use to overcome those barriers/obstacles). Print the “Teach Students: 3g. Developing Your Self-Regulation Plan” handout (Handout 3g. linked to on page 11 of your Educator Workbook).

Remind students that a good plan will address each of the following four questions in detail:

1. How will I know I’ve successfully reached my goal? How does success look? 
2. What steps, strategies, and actions are necessary to accomplish my goal? When, where, and how will I work toward my goal?
3. What could go wrong? How will I avoid or overcome these challenges?
4. How will I track my progress?

After students have had time to write a detailed plan, ask them to work with a partner and provide each other feedback on their plans. Remind your students to record any updates to their plans.

3g. Reflect and Apply: Identify a time of year, place within your curriculum, or expectation within your school in which your students experience setbacks due to their lack of self-regulation. Are there units, long-term assignments, or behaviors that typically challenge your students and derail them from being successful? For the specific behavior, project, or time of year that you identified, use page 7 of your Educator Workbook to create a plan for using the activities and resources you have just explored to begin teaching and providing practice of self-regulation for your students.

You have now explored a few instructional activities discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of Teaching Self-Regulation. Extend your instruction by incorporating additional activities that focus on monitoring (Chapter 3), adjusting (Chapter 4), and reflecting (Chapter 5).