The Operationalization of Integrated Internal Action Frameworks for Classroom Identity Development and Self-regulating Learners

Abstract

In the current 21st century landscape, Higher Education (HE) faculty are challenged to concomitantly create, plan, implement, and evaluate curricula that promote and develop self-regulating lifelong learning skillsets within student populations. This means developing learners who have the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to identify, acquire, process, synthesize, analyse, interpret, and operationalize information. This is compounded as global societies challenge each citizen to negotiate ever-changing contexts, differing paces of information flow, and increasing levels of technological sophistication. Despite these challenges, meeting the lifelong learning needs of current HE learners is possible through classroom operationalization of competency-based learning frameworks that focus on holistic self-regulating learning cycles. The concept of Integrated Internal Action Frameworks (IIAF) is one such framework model. IIAF allow students to maximize their learning potential by actively integrating frames of mind and should serve as a launching pad to cognitive and meta-cognitive mobility as a learner. Operationalized from this vantage point through mentorship will allow learning to take shape in an organic way with outcome-supported curriculum learning cycles. The IIAF conflate four main building blocks in the classroom through mentorship and release cycles: (1) “I” Orientation Learner Development (IOLD), (2) Time Released Micro-cycles of Learning (TRML) (3) Integration, Continuity, and Engagement (ICE), and (4) Integrated Student Response (ISR). This article draws together these theoretical underpinnings for effective classroom learning, introduces an IIAF-based curriculum, and shows the implementation curriculum models structure and the initial learning cycle that has been streamed over a 15-week semester of senior Japanese university students within their capstone Advanced Seminar course. This study presents only the first phase of a three-phase curriculum structure.