Teaching and Learning Hand in Hand: Adaptive Teaching and Self-Regulated Learning

Abstract

This article presents case studies of two novice teachers and their mentors who, without formal knowledge of self-regulation theory, established a classroom environment that promoted self-regulated learning. This case was drawn from a larger descriptive study of novice teachers learning to integrate a student-centered visual literacy instructional approach into their literacy curriculum. This visual literacy approach requires teachers to adapt their teaching to students by building on students’ responses to works of art and to generate moment-to-moment instructional sequences and interactions during instruction. The two cases reported here were selected as exemplars because these teachers created opportunities for students to adapt themselves to instruction and to draw upon self-regulated learning strategies. These cases provided the context in which to examine the dynamic relationship between teaching and learning, and explore how teachers develop students’ capacity to adapt to the learning environment and how students’ own self-regulated learning, in turn, contributes to and enables adaptive teaching. Through classroom observations, teaching artifacts, and teachers’ own explanations of their instructional decisions and dynamic teaching practices, this study explored how teachers developed adaptive teaching strategies as well as students’ self-regulated learning within the constraints and affordances of an instructional approach that required teachers to follow their students’ lead rather than their own lesson plans or scripts. Using examples from these case studies, this article builds theory about how students’ self-regulation facilitates teaching.