Examining How Self-Regulated Learning Professional Development Affects Teacher SRL Knowledge, Beliefs, and Practices

Self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies promote valuable student learning outcomes including academic achievement and lifelong learning (EU Council, 2002). Teachers have an opportunity to cultivate student SRL development within their classrooms (Azevedo et al., 2008). While teachers believe in the benefits associated with SRL promotion (Spruce & Bol, 2014), their positive attitudes are not often supported by adequate knowledge of SRL strategies. This leads to a lack of self-efficacy for developing SRL instruction in classrooms (Dignath & Büttner, 2018; Zimmerman et al., 1996). SRL-based professional development (PD) interventions have demonstrated their effectiveness for increasing teacher SRL instruction and implementation (Cleary et al., 2022). A mixed-method research design with a qualitative emphasis was employed to understand the influence of SRL PDs on teacher beliefs, knowledge, and practice of SRL. Ten in-service teachers from an elementary school in Southern California participated in an SRL workshop and rated their SRL beliefs. From the initial group, teachers with the lowest and highest scores on the questionnaire were selected for an 8-week in-class SRL training intervention. During this period, they implemented SRL strategies specifically tailored to their individualized classroom needs to develop student SRL. Pre- and post-intervention interviews, weekly classroom observations, artifacts, and questionnaire data were analyzed to understand how teacher attitudes, understanding, and implementation of SRL changed over the course of the intervention. The findings showed that positive beliefs regarding student agency of learning processes increased noticeably from pre- to post-treatment. Teacher SRL knowledge expanded considerably, and teachers were able to successfully incorporate sixteen implicit and explicit SRL strategies from all three phases of Zimmerman and Moylan’s (2009) model into their instruction. Emerging themes suggest a close link between SRL and autonomy, and connections between SRL and socioemotional learning. The findings further indicate that SRL is contextual, and instruction of SRL may differ depending on varying influencing factors at teacher, student, and school levels. Longitudinal studies that follow teacher participants over the course of several school years could reveal how teachers independently apply SRL without constant expert presence, or with sustained expert support.