In the second half of this course, I have again been working to improve my self-regulated learning by improving my practice of help-seeking behaviors. While–as I noted in my last post–I did not make quite as much progress in the first half of the course as I would have liked, I have had much more success in the second half of this course. In my last blog post, I identified two potential sources of help for the screencasting project–a friend familiar with storyboarding, and a friend who works as a professional editor.
I’m glad to be able to say that I was able to make significantly greater use of their skills for this project than in the first half of the course. I think this is largely because their skills better matched up with the work I was doing, so I felt much more comfortable turning to them for help as experts in these tasks. While I still don’t enjoy asking for this kind of help on individual tasks, I did find that it made me much more confident in the finished project knowing that I had sought expert advice on it.
The biggest challenge of improving my self-regulated learning for me in improving my practice of help-seeking behaviors was learning to let myself need the help. I have high expectations about the quality of work I can do without outside assistance, and have long held the belief that I should be able to keep top-quality work all on my own. However, in learning to seek out help more often, I’ve seen that it helps out my confidence in my work and grants me a bit more credibility–at least in my own eyes–when I’m working with tools or skills that I’m not entirely proficient in.
I think that over the last two months I’ve spent in this course, I’ve learned a lot about self-regulated learning that I can continue to apply as I move towards my professional career. The first is that it’s much like building any other skill; highly dependent on practice to master the tools one is working on. I’ve also learned that, overall, the process of self-regulated learning requires constant self-assessment and moderating of my own behavior. As I was working consciously on help-seeking, I found that I began to notice more and more opportunities where I could seek out help.
Joseph L Meyers 