Abstract:

This presentation describes an exploratory study that focuses on the educational practices related to self-regulation carried out by teachers and parents and aimed to help preadolescents in regulating their emotions and behavior.

The aim of this study is primarily, to identify and describe the best-practices that are currently being implemented in order to try to elaborate a self-regulation teaching model through a bottom-up process and secondarily, to point out any considerable differences between the ways in which school and family teach preadolescents self-regulation.

Self-regulation is a term often used as a synonym of “self-management” and “self-discipline” and, as international literature states, it defines the ability to manage one’s emotions, thoughts and behavior in ways that allow the individual to act proactively and appropriately in different contexts and situations. Few researches address self-regulation within the age group considered in this study and some of them underline a gap in this field of inquiry. In addition to that, according to my research, is utterly rare to find qualitative pedagogical studies concerning this subject.

From a methodological point of view, this study follows a qualitative approach that crossbreeds phenomenological-eidetic and grounded theory methods, using semi-structured interviews as data-gathering instrument. The participants are parents and middle-school teachers from a North-Eastern region of Italy (Trentino).

The paper presents the research design and the progress accomplished up to now with data from some interviews conducted to test and fine-tune the instrument of data-gathering, determine whether it addresses the research topic in a proper manner and find out if there were other potential subjects of interest emerging from the interactions.

Keywords:

behavior self-regulation; emotion regulation; educational practices; preadolescence