Pedagogy beyond compliance: teachers providing opportunities for students to self-regulate their learning in the primary-secondary transition years of schooling

This study explored how teachers provided opportunities for young adolescent students to be empowered as learners. Despite the crucial role that self-regulated learning plays in enhancing students’ achievement at school and beyond, few studies have created a practice-based pedagogy aimed at enabling students to rationalise their goals, to accept responsibility for their learning and to develop their capabilities as resourceful learners in social learning environments. The research was conducted as dual case studies within a primary school and a secondary school as transitionally connected settings in Queensland, Australia. The middle years of schooling, Years 5 to 9, have been identified as being a critical stage of development in young adolescents’ lives for effective lifelong learning. How schools and teachers can contribute to fostering these learning qualities was highlighted as a topic relevant to current Australian and international educational policy and debate. Rich qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and classroom observations from eight teacher participants in the middle years of schooling. Thematic analysis methods were used in inductive intra-case and cross-case processes of generating codes, categories and themes. The findings were reported as interpretations that were intertwined with snapshots of data that represented the voices of the teacher participants. The data foregrounded teachers’ practices to identify that in striving to foster students’ effective learning they implemented pedagogical approaches aimed beyond the management of students’ behaviour for compliance and they sought to empower students as resourceful learners. As an original contribution to knowledge, the findings were synthesised to construct a practice-based pedagogical model for self-regulated learning. The study found that the teachers endeavoured to provide opportunities for the students to regulate their own learning through pedagogical approaches that connect the learning, facilitate the learning, diversify the learning, socialise the learning and reflect on teaching. Extending this model, the transition pedagogy framework for self-regulated learning presents key elements that attend to the distinctive needs of young adolescent students in the primary–secondary transition years of schooling. This study’s findings offer a proactive pedagogical approach to behaviour management within classroom environments that focuses on potentiating students’ self-regulation of their learning