About co-regulation, misconceptions and pitfalls in education
Self-regulated learning is a concept that has become firmly established in education in recent years. It appears in vision and mission statements, professional development courses, policy documents and teachers’ lounges. But what does it actually mean? And just as important: what does it not mean?
In an extensive conversation with educator Barend Last – primary school teacher, educationalist and author – one thing quickly became clear: much of what we think about self-regulated learning is not entirely correct.
What is self-regulated learning?
“It is the ability to deliberately guide your own learning process.”
Self-regulated learning is therefore about consciously driving and planning how you learn. Five interconnected building blocks are identified:
- Metacognition: being able to think about your own thinking
- Motivation: turning your drives into action
- Behaviour: being able to choose effective learning strategies
- Resources: know who or what can help you
- Emotions: regulating your affective dimension, like handling feedback
Barend refers to Barry Zimmerman’s model , which sees learning as a repeatedly cycling process of three phases: preparation, execution, and reflection.
However, there’s some nuance to this: in an educational context, these processes are never purely individual but always socially situated; in other words, students do not learn alone, but with active guidance and support, tailored to one’s needs and level.
From ‘self’ to ‘shared’
“The biggest pitfall is seeing self-regulation as do-it-yourself learning.”
One of the greatest misconceptions is that self-regulated learning means students must be able to do everything independently. That would be self-directed learning, where the learner both sets goals and regulates themselves accordingly.
You don’t develop self-regulation by letting students go at it alone. As Barend puts it: “You go from ‘I do it for you’ to ‘you do it yourself. The co-regulator therefore co-regulates the co-regulated.”
In an educational context, there is never only a “self.” There is always a curriculum, a teacher, and a student, also known as a pedagogical triangle. Students have to be guided toward that independence through scaffolding, modeling, guided practice, with a gradual transfer of responsibility from the teacher to the student. The teacher first regulates very strongly and reduces that support step by step, depending on what the student can handle and needs. That is why Barend advocates for the concept of co-regulation: taking joint responsibility for learning tasks, and increasingly transferring that responsibility.
Lifelong learning, lifelong regulation
“Even a professor in their eighties doesn’t do it entirely on their own.”
Self-regulated learning does not start in primary, secondary or higher education. It actually begins at birth. Every child can regulate their own life to a greater or lesser extent. The trick is to get a grip on that and understand who needs more guidance and who needs less.
A simple example of self-regulated learning in kindergarten is the choice board. At the start of the school year, each child is assigned a picture that represents them on the choice board. The teacher first guides the children strongly in the activities offered, placing their pictures at the required activities, and then the children gradually choose activities more independently by placing their picture themselves. Sometimes they work alone, sometimes together, sometimes with teacher instruction. The choice is therefore co-regulated, with the mediation of a technical tool, like the choice board, which Barend calls a ‘co-regulation artifact’.
It is also a misconception to think that students are fully self-regulating at the end of their schooling. Many students moving from secondary to higher education still struggle with planning and studying effectively. That makes sense, as they are beginners in a new discipline without the necessary domain knowledge.
Self-regulation is therefore never ‘finished’ at a certain point; it is something you continue to develop. In fact, research shows that elderly people who learn effectively are often those who are skilled at seeking help from others. It is this network perspective that provides insight into this: when you know how to recognize and use your social capital well, you can learn to regulate your learning much more effectively.
This also means that not only the students are co-regulated by their teachers, but that the teachers can also be regulated by students and their colleagues. This is key to a truly learning-oriented organizational culture: recognizing that everyone is always learning, and therefore always regulating. It fosters connection and reassurance: students and teachers alike are in the same (learning) boat.
The pitfalls of self-regulated learning
In their book on selfregulated learning, Barend and co-author Derk Bransen, who obtained his PhD on co-regulation in medical education, describe 15 pitfalls in self-regulated learning.
Here are three important ones:
1 Putting everything on the student
“In education, we have the tendency to place everything into the lap of the student: you have to be independent, you have to be self-reliant, you have to be self-regulating, self-managing … self, self, self.”
One fundamental mistake made over and over again: is interpreting self-regulated learning as an individual responsibility, as if ‘self-regulating’ means a student must fully manage their process alone. “Now you should be able to do it!”, some people would say. But formal education is by definition not an individual project. Reducing self-regulated learning to what the student must do alone breaks the pedagogical triangle: the teacher and subject matter fade into the background, leaving the student alone with a task that should have been shared. That is the paradox of self-regulation: it requires active guidance.
2 Assessment steers behaviour
“If cramming for three days for a test gives a higher grade than studying for eight weeks, why would a student start early?”
A strong focus on summative assessment can actively undermine students’ self-regulation. As soon as everything revolves around grade averages and performance, students no longer choose the most effective learning strategy, but the one that yields the highest final grade.
Testing steers behaviour. And when the system rewards short-term performance, effective learning strategies have less of a chance.
This tension is very visible in graded reflection reports. Reflection is an important part of self-regulated learning. It is essentially intended as a means to deepen and adjust learning, but as soon as one starts to link a grade to it, the reflection turns into an end in itself. In addition, such reflection reports often give a distorted picture: there is often a lot of time between the task or test and reflection, it requires a certain writing skill from the student, so those who are less proficient in language are thus at a disadvantage. Reflection is a very useful tool, but it is when it is used sparingly, immediately following a task, and with opportunities to connect it to new actions.
3 Lack of shared language
“We actually have no idea what we mean and we all have our own definition.”
School teams often use concepts such as ownership, self-regulation and agency over learning interchangeably, without being clear what each means. This lack of clarity creates educational practices that confuse the means with the end: programmes are “crammed with reflection reports, personal learning goals and portfolios”, even though these tools were intended to support learning, not replace it. According to Barend, this lack of conceptual clarity is an important cause of misunderstandings. Teacher professionalization helps, but only if there is agreement on what concepts really mean.
“The moment you know what something entails, you also know what you don’t know; and the moment you know what you don’t know, you begin to professionalize.”
Shared language does not emerge in one day. It grows through structured dialogue with each other: questioning concepts, reflecting, and continually making meaning explicit.
Schools and programmes that effectively design and implement self-regulated learning share one important characteristic: they consciously regulate their own learning as a team and organization. They continuously reflect on their approach, ask themselves questions, monitor their progress and then make adjustments.
Actually, this is a bit paradoxical: we set high expectations for students, but lower for ourselves. But true learning does not happen during workshops: it happens between workshops, driven by questions and needs.
The role of edtech: from support to co-regulation
“AI can function as a kind of co-regulator “in your pocket”
Many digital platforms already support students with what we might better call co-regulation. They help not only in completing tasks, but also in directing the learning process itself: planning tools, goal-setting apps, progress monitoring and feedback. Even a digital calendar tool is essentially a regulation tool.
With the rise of AI, the possibilities expand further. AI can provide explanations, generate examples, offer feedback, model, or provide extra practice. From a broad perspective, almost every scaffolded support falls under the umbrella of co-regulation, provided you know how to apply tools and methods as a lever for effective learning principles.
Post photo by Zimmerman