At Currambena, we include the children’s ideas and enthusiasms in our planning and we design programs of work around their expressed interests as well as our knowledge of the Key Learning Areas.

Our small class sizes and high teacher to student ratios enable us to work with each student to develop a challenging and inspiring program while providing freedom of choice that builds a deep and lasting love of learning.

Self-regulated learning

Models of self-regulated learning emphasize that students are more effective when they take a purposeful role in their own learning. Research in this area has emphasized that self-regulated learners are autonomous, reflective, and efficient learners who have the cognitive and metacognitive abilities as well as the motivational beliefs and attitudes needed to understand, monitor, and direct their own learning.

The specific characteristics most often attributed to self-regulated learners concern their motivational beliefs or attitudes, their cognitive strategy use, and their metacognitive abilities. Regarding motivation, self-regulated learners are thought to hold a collection of adaptive beliefs and attitudes that drive their willingness to engage in and persist at academic tasks. Specifically, these students tend to be highly self-efficacious individuals who are focused on increasing their level of mastery and who view the material they are learning in school as valuable, interesting, and useful to know. At the same time, self-regulated learners are viewed as having a large arsenal of cognitive strategies that they can readily and skillfully deploy to accomplish different academic tasks. For instance, these students are proficient with a variety of rehearsal, organizational, and elaboration strategies. Self-regulated learners also are perceived as metacognitively skilled regarding their awareness and use of cognitive. These students have a large store of metacognitive knowledge about learning strategies specifically, and about the learning process more generally. They are capable of monitoring their learning and generating internal feedback about their cognitive processing. They also are adept at modifying their learning behaviors in response to shifting situational demands or conditions.

In short, self-regulated learners have high levels of knowledge about different cognitive learning strategies and have the ability to select, monitor, and regulate their use of those strategies when engaged in academic tasks.

Excerpt from 'Regulation of Motivation: Evaluating an Underemphasized Aspect of Self-Regulated Learning', by Christopher A. Wolters, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Houston