Calm, Alert and Learning: Classroom Strategies for Self-Regulation

Recent research tells us that one of the keys to student success is self-regulation – the ability to monitor and modify emotions, to focus or shift attention, to control impulses, to tolerate frustration or delay gratification. But can a child’s ability to self-regulate be improved?

Canada’s leading expert on self-regulation, Dr. Stuart Shanker, knows it can and that, as educators, we have an important role to play in helping students’ develop this crucial ability. Distinguished Research Professor at York University and Past President of the Council for Early Child Development, Dr. Shanker leads us through an exploration of the five major domains—what they are, how they work, what they look like in the classroom, and what we can do to help students strengthen in that domain.

Stuart Shanker is a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at York University. Dr. Shanker is currently serving as Director of the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative (MEHRI) at York University, a privately funded initiative whose goal is to build on new knowledge of the brain’s development, and help set children (including those with developmental disorders) on the path towards emotional and intellectual health.

Dr. Shanker has just been appointed the Director of EPIC: an international initiative created to promote the educational potential in children by enhancing their self-regulation. He has served as the Director of the Council of Human Development for the past ten years; Director of the Canada-Cuba Research Alliance for the past six years; and he was the first President of the Council of Early Child Development in Canada. Over the past decade he has served as an advisor on early child development to government organizations across Canada and the US and countries around the world, among them Australia, Colombia, England, Ireland, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Peru, Romania and Serbia. Most notable among these is his involvement in the creation of the new early learning program in Ontario (viz. "The Pascal Report," for which he also wrote the preface).