No abstract

The term “self-regulated” is used to describe learners who have highly effective learning and work habits. They are successful in and beyond school. This investigation examines whether and how teachers, who are masters at supporting young students’ development of self-regulated learning (SRL), can mentor student teachers to design tasks and develop practices that promote elementary school students’ SRL. Nineteen student teachers were paired with 19 mentor teachers in a cohort that emphasized SRL theory and practice. In general, student teachers remained with the same mentors throughout their teacher education program and were supported by faculty associates and researchers who also had expertise in promoting SRL. Researchers observed mentor and student teachers teaching, videotaped professional seminars, and collected samples of student teachers’ reflections, lesson plans and unit plans. Data indicate some student teachers designed tasks and implemented practices that promote SRL and that mentors’ practices accounted for 20% of the variance observed in the student teachers’ practices. Finally, the complexity of the tasks that mentors and student teachers designed was strongly predictive of opportunities for students to develop and engage in SRL.

The term “self-regulated” is used to describe learners who have highly effective learning and work habits. They are successful in and beyond school. This investigation examines whether and how teachers, who are masters at supporting young students’ development of self-regulated learning (SRL), can mentor student teachers to design tasks and develop practices that promote elementary school students’ SRL. Nineteen student teachers were paired with 19 mentor teachers in a cohort that emphasized SRL theory and practice. In general, student teachers remained with the same mentors throughout their teacher education program and were supported by faculty associates and researchers who also had expertise in promoting SRL. Researchers observed mentor and student teachers teaching, videotaped professional seminars, and collected samples of student teachers’ reflections, lesson plans and unit plans. Data indicate some student teachers designed tasks and implemented practices that promote SRL and that mentors’ practices accounted for 20% of the variance observed in the student teachers’ practices. Finally, the complexity of the tasks that mentors and student teachers designed was strongly predictive of opportunities for students to develop and engage in SRL.

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Visual methods are increasingly being developed and used in early childhood research. The literature strongly suggests the affordances of visual methods; still, such methods are not unproblematic. Through a critical reading of literature pertinent to visual methods in early childhood research (i.e., involving children from birth to age 8), including multimodal </span><span>literacy literature, this paper offers six discussion points to </span><span>promote critical conversations among educational researchers </span><span>about visual methods. The points pertain to the de nition of </span><span>visual methods, their potentialities in early childhood research, children’s rights and participation in research, authenticity and </span><span>children’s voices, methods for interpretations of visual texts </span><span>elicited from children, and ethics and assent. Aggregated, the points suggest the need for the enactment of critical, dialogic relationships between methods and methodologies, adults and children, and researchers and research participants. </span></p></div></div></div></div>

Capturing lived childhoods without decontextualizing their meaning and still providing information needed by policy-makers and practitioners is a pressing challenge for contemporary researchers. In this paper we provide information to open up such a dialogue via a range of tools we have utilized when investigating well-being. We interrogate bio-socio-ecological approaches to human development to provide relatively holistic pictures of the lived experience of childhood. We utilize various methodologies within this approach to determine what they transactionally facilitate at each level. At the bio-psychological level, for example, controlled, psychologically valid, psychosocial stress procedures expose hormonal responses, yielding valuable information about individual differences in physiological stress reactivity. At the level of the psychological self within a social ecology, we systematically observe children and youth in naturalistic, environmental transactions with the aid of visual methodologies such as Day in the Life filming, and invite the children and their parents and youth to share their reflections on their lived context via focused discussions and interviews. In this paper we discuss new ways of integrating research findings by suggesting Sameroff's (2010) unified theory as an interpretive framework for research within the field of child and youth care.