If you haven't met Deb Butler, make sure you do. This woman along with her colleague Nancy Perry, both professors from the University of British Columbia, have worked really closely with us around self-regulated learning because sometimes kids are struggling with reading because self-regulation is an issue. Same as tomorrow, you'll hear from Kim Shulna Rayco. Sometimes it's the social-emotional piece that gets in the way. So they are integrated, they are interconnected, they are not separate entities. Yes, our focus is reading, but we're paying attention to the intellectual underpinnings that we know makes a difference for kids' ability developmentally to move forward. Deb Butler has done so much research in this field, presented all over North America and the world, and we are so deeply grateful that she is one of our resource people acting as our critical friend and our friendly critic and definitely leading the way with her colleagues actually in the world around self-regulation. Please join me in welcoming Deb Butler. I will say maybe to start that so many of the themes that have been brought up already today really resonated with the way I'm thinking about things and what I hope to say today. One thing Sharon talked about and Maureen talked about is how everything is so interconnected and I know in the work that I've done I started myself working with struggling learners. I was trying to make sense of why they weren't being successful in academic environments and what struck me right away is how much it's how students think about themselves, how they feel about themselves, and then how they know how to strategically engage in learning. They're all so interconnected and so I hope that will be a bit of a theme and what I talk about today, I'm going to look at how students think about themselves, how they feel about themselves, and how they engage in learning and how we then can set up environments that make learners feel safe, have those relationships people have been talking about but help to empower learners to feel ownership and take control over their learning. So the first thing I want to do then is I want to talk about self-regulation and self-regulated learning in a reading context. The other thing that was fun about planning today's presentation is I know many people here were here last year and have heard me talk before and other people are new so I'm going, okay, how can I say something that will be interesting to people who have heard me before and sort of extend thinking along that but also bring other people into the kind of conversation about what is self-regulation. So I've tried to create a bit of a balance between those things. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk though about so what is self-regulation in a reading context and how does it look at the whole child. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about just some of the areas where I think learners get derailed and they're being successful in relation to that but then I want to focus on so what can we do in classrooms and then finally I'll close out with I'm going to through this I'll intersperse just a little bit of what I saw in some of the case studies that people are already doing so to recognize there are people working on self-regulation that have been all through last year and the second year the question will be so what next. So I'll sort of say look here's what we're already seeing about those kind of gains in self-regulation but where might teams take their inquiry this year if they want to extend from what they're doing. So that will be kind of where I hope I'll bring this to. So what is self-regulated learning in a reading context how can we support self-regulated learning in reading and then what questions might learning teams take up this year. So what is self-regulated learning in a reading context and this is challenging for a person like me so that's too little and okay so I'm going to start with a classic definition of self-regulation there's been work on self-regulated learning in classrooms going on for well over 20 years and I hate to admit that I've been doing it for about that long myself. I'm getting older and older. But a classic definition is the idea that self-regulation is the ability to control thoughts and actions to achieve personal goals and respond to environmental demands kind of a technical sounding definition but it's really the sense of you're able to kind of take control of and navigate activities and your own thoughts, your own actions, your own feelings in order to successfully engage in activities like reading. I think of it often as kind of a hook for me to think about it is it's kind of active strategic engagement. I understand what my environment is asking of me I understand myself in this environment and what is good for me and hard for me and I'm able to kind of make choices about how I'm going to engage and how I can successfully manage what's being asked of me. That's kind of the way I think about it. A key theme is that learners can take and feel in control over activities by deliberately and reflectively self-regulating their performance, their reading. And for me I think that's going to be one of my themes because I look at this the way I'll approach this is a lot from the learner's perspective. I think that's where I started. I started by saying well how are the learners to do this? How are they engaging? What do they need to be able to do to navigate this? But then I also want to know what can we do as educators to create wonderful environments where learners could do this but I'm really interested in this piece of the puzzle like what do learners need to be able to do to take and feel confidence, feel in control over their learning and I think a model of self-regulation is very helpful in understanding that. Now I know in British Columbia now and Kim will talk about this too there's a real understanding that learning isn't just coldly cognitive it involves emotions it involves motivation, it involves behavior. Learners who seem disengaged maybe because they don't have the skill or they're stressed out so we know that part of learning is definitely understanding one's own emotions and being able to manage one's own focus and activities and that's a really important part. So successful performance if we're talking about self-regulation it's a piece of the puzzle and what I want to do is I want to foreground that as a piece of the puzzle but then put it in the hole where and how does that connect in with reading and reading performance but let's start by looking at this as something that we know we're focusing on it's a big important piece of the puzzle. So successful performance involves understanding and managing one's emotions and behavior so as to successfully navigate activities with others. It's a part of the piece of the puzzle if we are as whole people kind of understanding environments what they're demanding of us who we are in those environments then this is one part of it and when we're thinking about navigating or self-regulating it often involves these three things it involves cognition and metacognition emotions and motivation are kind of part of everything and strategic action so if we think about what someone has to do to self-regulate emotions and behavior we know that when we're put into a situation we experience emotions or challenges to focus and motivation so think about a reader maybe who's struggled a lot with reading you walk in and you know everybody's reading and they're looking they're given a book to read and they might say this is very stressful for me I don't know how to do this or it might be pretty challenging for a young child to sit down and focus and read a book so we know that there are sometimes challenges to emotions and behavior in order to be able to kind of take control of that and manage that one thing that's very useful is to kind of have an understanding so when we talk about supporting self-regulation of motivation and behavior versus somebody can navigate things it includes an awareness of expectations own strengths and challenges one's emotions other's emotions when that comes up and the ability to use strategies this is the strategic action piece to manage that so what do I do if I get stressed out? what do I do if I get frustrated? what do I do if I'm anxious about something or I'm really excited? so what kind of strategies what if I know that if people are talking over there and there's all these adults coming in and out of the room and I'm supposed to be reading how do I know what do I do to manage that kind of distraction what I want to so I'm going to introduce this piece of the puzzle but the key thing for me is that we can help learners there's lots of things and I saw in the case studies and I know in BC people are doing a lot of work to help learners especially young children understand their own emotions other people's emotions to think about strategies but if we're going to move towards supporting and empowering learners this strategic action piece is critical but they learn how to say okay these are my emotions what do I do about it that they have that ability to say if I'm getting frustrated what do I do right and so that's the self-regulation piece related to emotions and behavior so let me just anchor this one thing I'm going to say too though is emotions and behavior are part of the story and especially for young learners they're just learning that they're learning how to navigate their activities but emotions and behaviors arise what I think it's in the context of an activity what we're interested in here is around reading so how is it that learners emotions and behavior are implicated in the way learners are engaging in reading now you yourself like I want to anchor this in your own experience you may have activities like maybe reading maybe presenting in public maybe having to give a big presentation to colleagues or some other activity but when you have activities these kind of activities can raise emotions or challenges to motivation or raise challenges to your focus and sustained attention what is it that you anchor that in your own experience when and why might you experience these problems and if you do why and if so what kind of things do you do about it because the point that I want to bring up is the idea that one piece of the puzzle in self-regulating our engagement in activities like reading is knowing about our emotions and how to deal with them in that context so take a moment think about an example from your own experience and something that you've done and how you might strategically self-regulate your emotions or motivation and behavior share with a colleague is there one brave soul one brave soul who might share a moment or a time when you might have felt stressed or had emotions and done something to deal with it one brave soul in this entire room yes emotional trip to do that and it was a fraught with fear and anxiety and stress and I did a lot of self-talk around it and then I was in the gym and I talked to a colleague and I talked to her partly because I knew she would support me and I knew I could gain encouragement from her so from my experience there were two things that came out of that it was a lot of self-talk and it was the support of somebody else to help overcome that fear I had yeah thank you great so this is a common experience we have and our learners have this too and it helps us to understand you know when I first worked with those struggling readers a lot of times or struggling learners I had one example I was working with a student who had been through the system who had K to 12 who was trying to go back to university who was so afraid of going back and trying and failing that literally we'd sit down and the first reaction was total stress and total like literally taking a book and just throwing it down you know and I just thought wow look at that anxiety right look at that and so the question for me is so how do we deal with that and I think helping people understand this is part of life it's part of new experiences it's part of learning it's a stressful thing so how do we manage that how do we manage that in our activities but one thing that came through in the story of Duwath and that came through in the stories all the time for me is that part of it is to learning is learning to navigate you know understand your emotions and be paid behavior and part of it is really building confidence and comfort through engagement and activity we can't kind of wait till our stress is all gone sometimes like we got to go engage with that personal trainer and it's going to be a little nerve wracking at the beginning until we start to build confidence right and so I think sometimes I think well you know I can't up front preload people to feel confident in their reading right and I think what we can do though and I'm going to make this point through a talking about a model of self-regulation what we can do is we can help learners engage in reading in a comfortable safe environment build skills like Duwath was building build skills build a sense of competence and control over outcomes and with that comes a sense of more peacefulness and common focus so it's often that we have to work on this from two fronts we have to work at it you know in terms of helping learners especially young learners who are just understanding their emotions in themselves helping them surface that but also making sure we're embedding that support as they're engaging in activity it's part of a whole process of learning which can be stressful and exciting all at the same time so in some what I want to say about this piece of the puzzle is that to support learners to understand their own and others emotions and behaviors this is what we need to do we need to support them to have that kind of metacognitive awareness and understanding about themselves and others and their own emotions and we have to help them learn how to strategically manage their emotions that's that self-control piece of the puzzle now when I went through some of the case studies Sharon kindly shared some of them with me so I could just kind of take a look at what people were doing because I wanted to build on the year one what people have already been doing and I really saw people describing them work on this part of self-regulation for young learners so that was really great to see so for example and these are just kind of pulled as examples in terms of one case study the description was that the teacher was really working on building those trusting, caring relationships and in terms of the student this is a really good example of building self-regulation in this sense for a learner he's removing himself from a situation where he's feeling frustrated or has had enough so really an example of something that teachers are describing in a case study so this is a very snippet snapshot but I thought wow look educators are already working on this aspect of things another example was a teacher described using this mind-up approach and breathing and then actually teaching a child to stop take three long breaths and tell another student rather than punching them maybe no thank you or you know I feel this when you like really getting the student to understand their own emotions and as an outcome at the end of the year the observation was it took the majority of the year to get the student to finally be able to say the sentence on his own without my support I'm starting to hear the I feel he's using his words more than his hands now and saying the sentence clearly so I just thought okay that's great I see that focus in the case studies so but what I'd like to do then is to say great I think there's a lot of attention to emotion and behavior self-regulation inviting a next kind of step or building on what many people are doing what I'd like to do is say okay great so we're starting to have a sense of our emotions and stress and anxiety and focus but what's self-regulation in reading what about the reading part of it what about the reading and learning aspect so I want to add that layer so it's complimentary but it's adding a layer so what are we doing then as readers and what does it mean to have self-regulation in reading this is my favorite little diagram I think a model of self-regulation allows us to think about the whole child how they think about themselves how they feel about themselves and then how they strategically engage so in this I think what we can do is think about where is it these pieces all fit together and how do they work together in the context of reading so imagine reading imagine a child coming into the place where you're working a classroom for fun reading a just right book reading a book to learn about animals or BMX bicycles or or some kind of activity to do a research project so imagine an actual functional reading task a learner walks into that classroom and is faced with that expectation what is involved in the way in which that learner self-regulates their performance so the first piece of the puzzle I love all my little effects see my arrow the first piece of the puzzle is we know that individual brings quite a bit into that environment they bring their history with war in the sedan maybe their experiences are not with learning to read prior to coming to school they bring their strengths interests challenges that people have asked about what are their passions what are they interested in they bring in metacognition and I'm going to blow that up a little bit that brings in thinking about themselves as readers about reading and what reading is about about what when you ask them to read is it reading for meaning is it decoding words what is that so they bring that knowledge and that knowledge shapes the way they engage in reading or any kind of task they also bring different kinds of beliefs about you know perceptions about themselves other kinds of beliefs about learning and how learning works that shapes the way they engage so I'm going to blow up those a little bit but those I'm going to make a case it's really important for us to understand the kind of beliefs and knowledge that learners bring in first of all because it will shape how they respond when they get into that environment but second because the great thing about supporting self-regulation is if we do that we can actually have a big impact on students development of knowledge and beliefs we can help them understand what is reading who am I as a reader we can help them develop productive beliefs like confidence I can do this so we have to be aware of what learners bring how that shapes things but my case is going to be by supporting self-regulation it's a very powerful way for us to build and shape the kind of metacognitive knowledge and beliefs that sustain and energize future reading so that's the first important piece of the puzzle second important piece of the puzzle you see motivations and emotion and I've already talked about that it's really important but what I'm trying to do in this visual is just show well you know what that's always a part of activity we have to always be aware and it's not like you just bring in whatever emotions you have at the start they can come and go as you go through like you might come and you start and then all of a sudden you panic because you realize it's not going so well so emotions and motivation are something we have to always be aware of and kind of keep track of and monitor while we're learning but also I bring this up here because the kind of knowledge beliefs history the students bring will shape the emotions they have or the motivation if they've struggled a lot some of our most vulnerable readers have struggled a lot and so they may be quicker to have kind of challenges with emotion or feel stressed out or so you know how is it that we can support those learners to feel calmer by maybe helping them feel more confident it's all intertwined it's all interconnected if we can support confidence we can support less you know emotional stress while reading then we can support more active engagement and kind of create really positive cycles and the most another piece of the puzzle is strategic action so see just in case you see so self-regulation self-regulation involves strategic action and that's really core to me and a take away point for me when I think about like this is my simple go to model whenever I think about supporting self-regulation I think I got to support you know knowledge and beliefs I've got to make sure they're kind of engaging positively but what I really need to do is support learners to be able to engage really cyclically through this cycle of activities the first thing that a learner has to do is they have to interpret the task or understand what's being asked of them or understand the criteria or understand the goals they have to understand reading is for meaning and purpose and meaning making so that they can write a report so that they can talk about it so that they can enjoy it they have to have a purpose driven kind of engagement by having a clear sense of your goals you can be really engaged in learning I always say the other side if you don't know what you're trying to do how can you possibly take control of your learning how can you possibly choose strategies how can you possibly self-direct your performance so that's really critical then ideally if you're self-regulating and you say gee that's what I'm supposed to be doing I'm supposed to be writing this report on animals what do I need I better get some books or maybe I need to ask some help or maybe I'll pick a good helper so you have to kind of do some planning using good strategies strategies for reading strategies for kind of what do you do when you hit a word you don't know so it's that strategic performance self-monitoring and I really want to pick up that piece of the puzzle to self-regulate learning it's a kind of strategic goal-directed activity I have a goal I try something did it work if yes bonus I'm on the right track if not oh okay what do I do differently you make some kind of adjustment to empower learners learners have to be able to walk through that cycle of activity they have to say okay I'm trying to read this book oops I don't get that word okay that's not working so well for me what do I do what strategy do I use oh great I got the word now I can move on so that's empowering strategic learning so so what I think is really powerful about this model as I said then is I'm going to blow up different pieces of this puzzle but the idea is that to support self-regulated learning means supporting learners to develop productive knowledge and beliefs manage their emotions and behavior and engage in this kind of activity this cycle of activities related to reading so let me blow up a little bit of these ideas for you and then we'll talk and I've already alluded to these quickly so one of the things that students bring to reading are the metacognitive knowledge so that as I talked about is knowledge about when you're reading what I do and don't know about myself as a reader about reading and reading strategies and in some of the early work that I did I found with struggling readers this is one of the areas where they had some challenges and when I did my early work I did case studies like you're doing which gives you this rich information with about a hundred readers and these are older readers after they've been engaged in reading through the school years and what they think reading is about so reading is about decoding words learning key terms or vaguely about learning and understanding so if you're trying to be a reader and this is your understanding of the purpose of reading writing is about spelling grammatical sentences rigid structures now how does that contrast with what we're talking about about creating a purposeful reading and meaning so you can imagine I'm going so why are these readers struggling why are these learners struggling I'm going well gee this is what they think this is even about how do they self direct their learning if that's their challenges and in fact what I also found related to I said okay where are their challenges and strategic action what are they doing that's not effective and you could link it you could say well gee you know these these folks who think reading is about decoding words why are they being derailed you know at the time I did this everybody thought it was they didn't have strategies they didn't have reading strategies let's teach them reading strategies what I found over three quarters of the time the students didn't have a clue what they were being asked to do they didn't understand what the tasks were requiring or they would be given some kind of task and they didn't know how to kind of interpret what was being asked and then use that to guide their performance so a lot of times that's where I ended up helping them was around those kinds of issues that was a big surprise to me in my early work now of course students also needed support to develop strategies and a lot of times they needed support to monitor how is it going and if it doesn't if it's not going well what do I do about it and that's the hallmark of being able to be an adaptive learner who doesn't give up if you struggle and you hit a problem and you don't know what to do about it what happens right you just kind of give up so again what I realized early on is well gee what I need to do is help them understand the goal a lot of the time if I started there like unleashed these learners who could be much more effective in their learning so that was point one but point again if we engage them in these cycles help them understand what reading is what criteria we're after empower them to have strategies and use them empower them to monitor ooh what's working they build metacognitive knowledge that then fuels further reading so another thing I just want to before I give you a little thought break another thing that's really key are their beliefs and there's different kind of beliefs they're all interconnected so I'm just going to highlight a few I saw them in the case studies already and I've heard them this morning one key type of belief is self-efficacy I can do this confidence it either supports or derails I was sharing I think who said you know if you're not confident why are you gonna you know I can't do this oh no but I'll dive in right a growth mindset and success comes from the effort full use of strategies let me just let me just tease out those ideas really quickly and give you a sense of those but again my point is going to be these are beliefs we have to understand how learners think about themselves and think about reading and their engagement in reading but if we support self-regulation we can shape all of these things if we create supportive caring environments we can nurture growth of productive beliefs and knowledge so self-efficacy and motivation so students who have struggled particularly how many of the learners in the case studies lack confidence that was an issue that raised as such a priority they have a little sense of control so that's where a lot of times that frustration boredom anxiety can come from and so what happens one of my one of my disfavorite descriptions of struggling learners was by Lee Swanson he called them actively inefficient you know like they are trying so hard but they don't really know what to do or how to do it or what even sometimes the goal is so if we can help them engage in those cycles what am I trying to do I used a strategy at work today right then we can give them that sense of self-confidence and control or they give up or they rebel or we get the avoidant behavior right like I'm just not engaged in this so I'm going to do something else right because I don't know how to participate but again one of my messages is we can we can help learners understand the motivation and emotion but we have to help them feel successful we have to help them feel like they can be in control over their learning and see I can do it through my effort and strategic activity I can do this which helps them kind of build those perceptions of confidence and control self-efficacy shapes learning but builds out of learning so if we support self-regulation we can support that another similar idea but again a belief students bring in that's really important and I bring this here because all of this is about I think self-regulation is about continual progressive learning understanding learning is something that's not necessarily easy it's sometimes challenging it takes time it can be stressful but it's really rewarding and that we need to help learners see learning and think about learning that way and by like you in your professional learning communities you have that sense I'm taking up something challenging I'm trying I'm trying something amazing but learners some learners come in and think no no you know actually ability is fixed I'm good at it or not if I try hard and I have to do this and try hard it means I'm done right it's like there's this ability effort trade off my nephew came to see me and he said all my friends are smarter than me because they did better on this test and they didn't even have to try right it's that thing you hear from learners so and it means that I have low ability but what so in those beliefs will undermine those learners who have those beliefs their confidence will be undermined easily and they won't persevere what we're after is what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset and I love that she this is the her title of her article even geniuses work hard right this sense of ability develops learning is what we're after efforts needed to learn success comes through hard work challenging work supports growth if you create environments that foster self-regulation we can foster and nurture the development of that sense of a growth mindset which fuels engagement which fuels people's willingness to take on challenges and to learn actively and the final thing I just want to highlight and I link it again to my point I have like one point really through all of this detail just to take control of these cycles of self-regulation all sorts of good things happen they develop knowledge and beliefs that are very effective and support future learning but one thing that's really interesting that another belief that comes that influences and comes out of empowering learning is what why are you successful or not students who think that they're successful because they're smart or because a teacher help them with action but students who think okay this can get tough but I'm successful when I try in ways that are strategic and use good strategies those learners actually are fueled to engage and continue to engage and work past challenges and try new things that are risky or challenging and in fact I just in one study for example when grade one students attributed their success on a task to their use of 90% of those learners went on the next time they were given that task to use that strategy again when they didn't only 30 something 32% of the students use that strategy so their beliefs about these things are really critical so just take a minute then and so my question to you now is so have you seen these knowledge and beliefs these kinds of knowledge beliefs and students that you've worked with and if so how do they support or derail these participation and then just start thinking about what can we do to support their construction so I'm giving you my I've pre-loaded my message on that friend like what are some things we can do but what in your experience what are you seeing some of the things maybe you're trying or you've tried that can support people to develop metacognitive knowledge positive beliefs about learning in themselves as learners so I'm going to give you just like maybe three minutes all I can do in this introduction an hour today is just give some big ideas so I hope that's I'm trying to illustrate as I said my one big idea from different angles that you might be interested in or you might take up and in this presentation which will be on the website you'll be able to get some references at the end that will allow you to kind of pick up on and take any of the ideas in more depth if you'd like to but I do want to just say okay we've introduced this groundwork and I always spend a lot of time talking about self-regulation and what are some of the things that influence it and what's really key about it because I think it gives a guiding light to teachers because there's lots of ways a Sharon's message you know there are a lot of different things you can do to support self-regulation if you have a clear vision of your goals just like students have to know what they're trying to do and then they can really engage in well how can I do that best in beliefs that are supportive but also support their engagement in self-regulation so one thing I did want to put in here and I'm not going to go through all of these in depth Nancy Perry and I have presented this a few times but I want to highlight a few big ideas from Nancy's work and this is a really great reference as well as some of the ones in the presentation because she gives really good examples of teachers doing these things and one thing that she says that's really key is the first thing is that students really can't learn to self-regulate if they don't have opportunities to do that if they don't have choices if they don't have opportunities to make decisions if they don't have kind of tasks that invite them to you know say what am I trying to do and how do I manage my activities then they have opportunities to make choice to control challenged and self-assessment I'm going to pick that up a little bit just to briefly today but that notion of actually being part of the process of learning having to make those judgments and re-jig their learning based on those that's all really critical to learning so I'm going to just give a quick a couple of examples of that those are really big ideas that are very important for supporting self-regulation I'm going to pick up the notion of support and the kind of things teachers can do to provide support because her ideas and she emphasizes this it's great we have to create environments that support and afford opportunities for self-regulation we have to make sure students have choices even very young learners can have choices but we have to support them to know how to self-regulate to make what criteria how do you make good choices what are you looking for how do you decide she says opportunities for all of this without support can create chaos we're not after that we're after is helping learners develop those abilities to self-manage and self-regulate their own activity and another piece of the puzzle that's really key big idea again I'm just going to speak to a little bit and give you some big ideas related to it is assessment and feedback what you can be doing in terms of that really promotes self-regulation and development of knowledge and beliefs so these so here are two examples and I'm going to throw these up really quickly and this I wanted to especially after knowing that Sharon is looking at choice and choice is such an issue and the case studies and what people are taking up and these are just two examples of actual tasks and Nancy Perry's work one grade two three one grade one kindergarten one where in classrooms students are being given tons of different choices in ways that enable them to learn how to self-regulate and this one we've presented before a kind of an extended case example it's in one of her in this paper where I give their reference at the end but it's where kids if you think about it a kindergarten grade one classroom they're reading the three little pigs sequencing events in the story writing sentences to describe each event considering the social and moral dimensions of the story and then choosing and writing and the kind of choices these little kids are being given are in when they're reading together what strategy did they use do they track or don't they track who are they going to work with where are they going to work to be productive what ending to the story you know so they're being given tons of meaningful choices within the context so I think just that notion and think about how these really rich tasks invite and create opportunities for students to self-regulate the learning but the descriptions Nancy give how teachers really create and sequence the tasks in ways that scaffold learners to be successful and meet the needs of all the learners in those classrooms so I really invite you to kind of look at these as really rich examples of those tasks and activities that invite and support self-regulation but for me today in my short time I'm going to focus on three themes one and all of these again I have one big idea which is empowering learners to take control over their learning so the first one something that you can do that teachers can do and again what our goal is to support students to any activity guiding light for me whatever it is the learners ask to do my first thing is okay I got to get them to engage in that cycle of activities what are you supposed to be doing what's your goal how are you going to do it how's it going what do you do if it's not working really kind of a powerful cycle so the first thing is you can support use strategic questioning embedded in any activity you give and by doing that how that helps support learners to work through that cycle and think about their own learning and develop knowledge metacognitive knowledge about tasks the next thing I'm going to talk about is just very briefly bridging from just helping students learn strategies to taking ownership over strategies so that they actually see them as their own kind of goal directed activity and the third very briefly about feedback and self-assessment in supporting self-regulated learning so those are my three quick, quick themes so all of them again ways you can use embed into classroom practices daily easily that can support self-regulation so strategic questioning one thing that teachers have done and this is from examples of teachers work and actual work with students either one on one small groups large groups class discussions you can just embed questions that ask students to think about and focus on their learning so when you give them a task for example when the first time they're engaged language that students young students can get is like so what's your job here what is this assignment asking you to do how will you know if you've done a good job all those are kind of questions that you can just ask of learners and one example I have as a teacher she found that when she gave her classes was a grade 8 class every time she started to explain what the assignment was about it was the time when the students all started talking to each other oh that's irrelevant it's just instructions right and then when they were off to do the activity what she found is they'd all go what are we supposed to be doing right and so she found herself putting out fires re-explaining right so what she did her big shift was her check in let's make sure everybody's on the same page okay and all of a sudden all that gone but what it also does is it gets learners to focus on what's the goal they can use that as a guiding light right in terms of choosing and using strategies we want to empower learners and engage them in that questions like so how are you going to approach this given what you're trying to do you want them always to have that goal as the guiding light always making decisions what you're trying to do how is that can help you achieve your goal how are you doing how do you know in relation to your goal what will you do next why is that a good choice given what you're trying to do so questions what strategies have worked for you before why don't you show me what you can try I noticed you did that is it that a strategy that you're using what are you doing here you can do again and again and again they do a task and they're about to go to a break and you say oh no wait record your strategy often students kind of go not so interested but if you get them right when they're doing something that's working for them right in the middle of the task and say what are you doing that's working for you that you can do next time you're asked to do this students when they have that forward looking are often much more engaged but that's a way that you can support strategic and for monitoring how do you know what criteria are you using here to judge your work what can you do differently to solve that problem you know what it's like ongoing self-assessment in a way giving themselves kind of always thinking this piece of the puzzle right it's kind of going how is it going so that they can do that in a way so this is just one strategy you can use to support self-regulation it's very powerful in two fronts it supports strategic action it supports strategies about tasks and their own learning it supports them to understand themselves as learners it supports them to see that if they use a strategy it actually worked and they can build perceptions of confidence and control so it's kind of like not really difficult difficult strategies to implement that have multifaceted payoffs this is an example from a classroom that Nancy Perry had pulled out where a teacher of students and where the teacher wanted to say well how can we talk about self-regulation in my classroom in terms that the kids will understand and these are this is the language that the students came up with what's my job what tools where to do the job when to do the job or their skills where students are actually thinking about their own activities and how to manage them okay so that was theme one theme two very in my time that I have with you from learning strategies to strategic learning so we're talking there about strategic questioning one of the things that I found and this was one of the the early findings I had when I first started everybody said the problem is strategies students don't have strategies they don't know how to engage and we've come a long way in 20 years we know that strategies are important we know we have to support learners to learn strategies we know about gradual release we know we'll model we'll make explicit we'll know and we'll have students have kind of guided practice independent practice and we know that helps them so that's really excellent but I just want to say what we really need to do is there's a little bit of a danger when we teach strategies that students experience them a little bit more as I'm learning a learning a routine they don't see them as strategies like we need to do that we need to help them see strategies but we need to push it a little extra step so that students take ownership over strategies and I always tell this story anybody who's heard me present will have heard this story I apologize but I have to tell the story and I have to tell this story because it makes a really powerful point on this and then it pushes like to think about well how do we how do we have students take ownership over stories or over strategies so this was a student who wanted to work on writing and her description of her writing was it's an organized choppy would be the best way to describe it she described her strategy is I write down my point and in the end I have a mess and it totally undermined her engagement and you can see this here because she was supposed to write I had to write a researched 500 word essay for a scholarship application I couldn't organize it at all I couldn't get any organization flow going I kept jumping from point to point so I got frustrated with it and didn't apply and so it shows that kind of emotion you know motivation interwoven with skill she didn't know how to do it right so what happened she came to me and she said when I was in high school they taught me outlining outlining outlining is stupid doesn't help me don't get it don't want to use it don't talk to me about it I said fine I said so what are we going to do and so we started working through the cycle of self-regulation what's your goal what does good essay look like what are you trying to do what are your challenges with it and she goes organization I go fine now that you have the goal in mind what are you going to do she goes I think I'll make a plan I said okay what's your plan going to look like she goes well what I'll do is I'll outline I'll take each of my main points she didn't say outline she said take each of my main points and I'll write them down and I said great so she did that I said okay what next she goes I'll take each of my main points and I'll break it into a series of sub points so she did that I said great I go what next she goes well I'll take each of those sub points and I'll translate it into a sentence and I'll have look these paragraphs and that'll make an essay and I'll write it out and I'll turn it in I said great and so she did that so she starts to use this as a strategy she starts getting B's and A's on her essays that she's turning in and so she's all excited and I'll show you some of the outcomes and at the end she looks at me she goes oh she goes outlining outlining is stupid I don't know what I would do without my plans so what's the message for me in that story that I have to tell all the times did she benefit from learning outlining I think so I think at some level she internalized some of that but did she take ownership over outlining did she see it as a strategy she could use for her purposes when she had this goal she hadn't quite taken ownership over it so for me what does it take in order to have students take ownership over strategies we're doing something right but we need to push it that one little extra step so what I found with her that was kind of exciting is that she turned it into a personalized strategy she personalized it and not only that she started to become more strategic it's almost like instead of learning a strategy she had learned to develop strategies to achieve a goal and so she started to say oh when I'm doing this I do this strategy now or when I'm doing that I do this strategy now and I found that in all my studies I called it spontaneous transfer that students were just becoming strategic self perceptions of writing this is that confidence that people are talking about the marks are different like when you're walking around the class we're getting our essays back my marks are average or above average so I feel better about it like I don't feel like I'm such a dunce so this is why I tell this story so what's the message I'm gonna just come back to what teachers in this project I did with the Richmond school district found they were putting in practices to support self regulation and what did they find supported that transition from learning strategies to being strategic so in this project just quickly it was about learning through reading at the secondary level we worked with a lot of grade 8 students teachers were collaborating to kind of define practices to support their learning through reading and overall they found gains for students in both their reading and in their thinking about reading and about themselves as readers but what they found we went through and said when are teachers making the greatest gains in kind of that self regulation and reading and this is what we found when we looked at the practices teachers were trying kind of like what Sharon is doing with the case study data when they sustained attention to the goal over time it's not a one stop we're going to work on self regulation today but it's something that just became part of their practice over the year when they integrated learning goals into the activities the actual activities versus as a stand alone it's my own curriculum you know it's like integrated into reading when they attended explicitly to reading thinking and learning but when they took that little step to fostering student independence and what that looked like was making a goal directed not just you're learning a strategy today but what's your goal oh here let's look at these strategies how could they help us achieve that goal right or when students had to make decisions so what strategy are you using and why it's that putting that student in control of it above and beyond us showing them possibilities and helping them see how they work so those are the kind of things that made that little push okay so last whirlwind topic you don't get to reflect and the last thing I want to do is I was reading all this work on feedback and self assessment and again oh she's introducing this whole other topic at the very end but really I thought wow look at the common theme here there's this common denominator through all of this which is how are we getting learners to work through this cycle how are we as teachers giving information that's supporting them through our assessment through their learning through supporting self assessment to get them to work through the cycle so for example when I read this one description on giving feedback what Susan Brickhart was saying is teacher feedback is input that together with students on internal input will help the students decide where they are in regard to the learning goals and what they will tackle next so my interpretation of that is look they're trying to say okay I have a goal where am I what am I going to do next but what's really interesting about this description is something that my colleague Phil Winnie and I described is that when you're thinking about feedback feedback only has any or assessment for student learning only has an impact if learners actually make something of it and act on it in order to achieve their goals and what's interesting is that so you give assessments and feedback it really is powerful if it's given in a way that fuels students to say okay how am I doing and how do I make a decision based on that but they're also generating their own feedback all the time and you can support that through that kind of questioning right through so you're trying to encourage that for students to be not just self assessing as a formalized activity at some point but always saying how's it going as they're learning so Judy and Linda in their book spirals of inquiry talk about the purpose of feedback is to increase the extent to which learners are the owners of their own learning same theme right and Helen Tipperly says this because I know people are interested she has this this is a presentation that she gave but she talks about well feedback isn't all that helpful if it just says hey you're good at this or you're clever I mean praise is okay and I'll show that praise can be good but only if it informs learners on how to work through that cycle right and so there are great descriptions of feedback and when it doesn't work but this is when it works so and John Hattie and Helen Tipperly describe this in the power of feedback they say feedback they're again same idea feedback self assessment it's to reduce the discrepancy between I'm trying to do this goal where am I what do I do next what did they describe as powerful feedback feedback and assessment can answer the goals make sure it answers these questions what are my goals what am I trying to do how am I doing what's my progress where to next what do I do next again think about it it's supporting learners to take control over their strategic action and to surface it for them explicitly so learners are brought into it it's not teachers as assessors we're often kind of gathering information what does my student know the trick it's bringing the student into the cycle having them say okay based on my assessment and your own self assessment what do you know what do you need to do next how does that empower you to be a more strategic learner research shows that feedback that has these qualities is actually related to improvements and performance there's a nice little study by Judy Parr and Helen Timperley that shows that again you can if you want more on that there's a reference to that for you this is an example of a teacher that it's in the package where you can see her actually getting students to do that kind of cycle where she said students sort of said they had a goal here's what I'm going to do how did it go what will I do next time embedded into her practice quick description quick example and the last point on this I just want to make is it's all interconnected I mentioned the growth mindset creating environments that get people to think of challenges and working well Carol Dweck when she talks about this is a great article in the educational leadership that I commend to you that's the one that I even geniuses work hard here's what she says about praise praising students for the process they've engaged in the effort they applied the strategies they use the choices they made the persistence yields more long-term benefits than telling them they are smart when they succeed right she says emphasize challenge not success give a sense of progress grade for growth like a pretest and then a post test where they can learner see growth and she says oh this is my favorite point add yet what she said is when learners say to you I can't do this you say not yet right so she said just get used to saying yeah I just love that point so I'm going to close with a summary and then I want to show you some of what I heard in the case studies that's really encouraging about seeing this happen already in BC so what I'm saying is if students are to take control over learning they need to be supported to build and apply productive metacognitive knowledge and beliefs I'm suggesting if you support them to engage in cycles of self-regulation be successful and monitor it you can do that you make learning explicit and you have those outcomes they need to actively and reflectively self-direct learning with goals and criteria in mind not just talk about the criteria I'm done I'm on to the next thing but actually have those that they're using to make choices about strategies to monitor how they're doing about what next their progress in self-assess but that constant self-monitoring and then to adjust the performance during if they can do cycles where they have to write and revise a poem read and then re-read and improve their strategies and they need to manage their engagement but that's part of the puzzle it's part of the activity it's not I'm going to do that it's like you've got to learn how to manage as you're engaged in activities and supportive practices you can see they connect and surface learner strengths interests and experiences they make discussions explicit they integrate discussions with reading learning and writing with content instruction they put responsibility on students to make decisions and manage their learning to push from learning strategies to being a strategic learner and this one I think is really powerful and the Jennifer story shows this she needed to articulate her understandings about that strategy in her own words take ownership over it and when they do that that's when they build that knowledge they become active constructors active interpreters and that really is powerful so this is what I heard really encouraging and the case study examples I started at the beginning to show you some of the outcomes that were related to emotion and behavior regulation well here are things that I heard in the case studies and even just at the end of case summaries he's much more aware of his learning and he can express specific details about his learning metacognition the student is more confident in his learning self-efficacy that was a strong theme as Sharon said she recalls and uses reading strategies we've been practicing and has favorites personalizing she's making choices about strategies I see the student now corrects himself in oral language that's self-monitoring and self-correction she doesn't give up even if something is hard so that growth mindset and persistence that willingness to engage and challenge so those are just little snippets of what I'm seeing and so the challenge which if we you can talk about over lunch is from all of this then you know there's a lot happening already it's really exciting to see and I look forward to having being part of Sharon's team and looking at the self-regulation side of it but what next you know what might be some of the questions that learning teams might take up to kind of push from where they are or elaborate or just extend or continue what they're doing so the last thing I'll say you can get the presentation and in it I have kind of descriptions of initiatives that are going on you might be interested in for people interested in this area there's some supports to ongoing professional learning and master's concentrations we have websites in here we have an SRL Canada consortium of researchers across BC we have such strength in this area in BC Nancy Perry, me, Allison Hadwin Phil Winnie, Leighton Schnuller many of you know so all of us are members of this consortium so these are resources to you and Nancy Perry has this website she started I'm connected to seeding success through motivation tools so these are great resources for you this would just appeared in the BC teachers federations magazine too of financing and fill-on self-regulation so in this PowerPoint you can have that and the last thing you'll see I've given you quite a number anything that I've referenced is in here and other resources for you I'm done


Who was Tai Lopez before YouTube? I was always somewhat entrepreneurial, but it got squashed.  I made 25 cents, I think. I had a single mom. Yeah, me too. So there wasn't, the school system now doesn't encourage that at all. And my mom being a single mom, being busy, she couldn't encourage that. I wish. Three biggest regrets that people have. Their education, who they marry in their career. I look back and like, man, what opportunity lost? Because the younger you start, Warren Buffett, I don't know where he got this stabbed. He said, the number one predictor of success is the age you start. So you know, if you're watching this in your 50, I always say 20 years ago, and the next best is today.


السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والسلام علي سيدنا ونبينا محمد وعاله وصحبه وسلم يا ربنا لك الحمد كما ينبغي لجلال وجهك وعظيم سلطانك اللهم يمقلب القلوب والأبصار ثبت قلوبنا على دينك اللهم افتح علينا فتوح العارفين وعلمنا ما ينفعنا يا رحم الرحيمين بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم today إن شاء الله who will go on where we stop last time on is 77 and إن شاء الله we will be finishing Surat Yaseem إن شاء الله بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم we saw last time how Allah سبحانه وتعالى a consult sayidna محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم and he assured him that let not their speech agree with you yeah Prophet Muhammad indeed Allah knows everything what they conceal and what they declare and Allah wants sayidna محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم not to pay attention to their words so then he reminds people الله سبحانه وتعالى and he says so Allah سبحانه وتعالى he says does not man know that we have created him from a mere drop yet he stands forth as a clear opponent so now if we compare this ayah أول ميارة الإنسان with ayah 71 where Allah سبحانه وتعالى says what's the difference there أول ميارة haven't they seen what we have created for them but here Allah سبحانه وتعالى is specifying أول ميارة الإنسان so he is Allah specifying this particular ayah for the human being for man haven't haven't you seen what we have created you from don't you know that so Allah سبحانه وتعالى created everybody and he is the only creator nobody can claim that he created a human being so how would this be if someone comes and say this is my car and he is not so the owner the real owner would say no this is mine and he will show him the deal he will show him the ownership and when Allah سبحانه وتعالى says خلقنا الإنسان أول ميارة الإنسان وأننا خلقنا nobody could say no you did not create man I created man nobody so he is the only creator for man so what did he create man from from المني so for المني is the sperm that the liquid that the sperm lives in and the sperm drop is the one that goes to the egg and get it fertilized then there will be fetus from this fetus will have all organs imagine now that the baby will have muscles what type of muscles different muscles the long the small the he will have bones the long the soft everything nerves so these are the things for the body itself now then there will be things for such as let's say the the mind the mind that thinks the eye that will see the tongue that will speak the tongue that will taste so who created all of this الله سبحانه وتعالى nobody could create anything even nobody could change anything in Allah's creation so what will happen سيدنا إبراهيم عليه السلام was arguing with the one who who thought that he is he can create this so he taught him إن الشمسة تأتي من المشلق يفأتي بها من المغرب so the sun rises from the east just make it rise from the west and that person was started he couldn't of course so he couldn't change the thing that is already created how would men think that they can create anything so when Allah سبحانه وتعالى created men from this despicable drops per drop that person grew up and he had some good characters and some bad characters so we have to think wisely to protect ourselves in the after we have to apply the narration of سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم to when he asked him يا أبا هورير عليك بيحصني الخلق you have to have good learners and سيدنا أبا هوريرا asked him what is حصن الخلق يا رسول الله قل انتعطي من حرمك وتعفو عن من ظلمك تعطي من حرمك وتعفو عن من ظلمك و أفضل الثرد one so you have to forgive people and this would happen specially when you are angry وتعفو عن من ظلمك that's the third one so to forgive people when they oppress you when they mistreat you to give those who deprive you and that's not easy so when do does someone practice حصن الخلق when he is in a bad mood or when he is tested or when he is in a bad situation at that time he should practice حصن الخلق for the good manners not when he is happy when he is relaxed when he is taking it easy when he is chilling no حصن الخلق comes or is a proof of having good relation with الله سبحانه وتعالى because it's not easy to show or not to be angry when you have all the right to be angry so الله سبحانه وتعالى is reminding the man أولم يرى الإنسان وأننا خلقناه من نطفطين this is how he created how Allah created man فإذا هو خصيم المبين so what is man doing man is a clear opponent he is opposing الله سبحانه وتعالى by not following his orders by not thanking him for all the bounties that he has given him and he is an opponent to people when he should be good to them he is not good to them he is an opponent so what does a human being need to do he need to be clear he need to understand what Allah سبحانه وتعالى wants from him if a teacher understands everything in his curriculum that he is going to teach the students then he will do it very easily and those students will be lucky to have him as a good teacher because he is doing a good job he can make things clear for others because those things are clear for him so as humans as people living together we have to understand each other most of the problems that happen between people are resulting from misunderstanding he said this but he didn't mean this but I understood it like this always try to look at things from different point of views why? because if someone really does not mean what you are thinking or what you understood then you are being just to that person we have to have clear understanding for each other we have to understand the inner thoughts of ourselves first so to be able to understand other people we have to have sound heart to be able to receive other people soundly and correctly so Allah سبحانه وتعالى goes on وضرب لنا مثلا ونسي خلق so Allah سبحانه وتعالى is giving us examples but what happened? that man that was created from a sperm that man forgot his origin where he was created from and how he was created so if you want if you want to understand the word داربة in another way the word داربة by itself means to hit something now if you hit something that is stronger than your hand then your hand will be in pain you will feel a lot of pain in your hand so what you create is that what you do what you hit should be lighter than what you are hitting with so you have to give examples for people to understand what's going on so رافع he says I'm going to read two lines of poetry and I will explain them these are very nice lines ايها هازئ من سنو في القدر بنفسك تعنو فولا بالقدر ويا ضاربا صخرة بالعصا ضربت العصا حسنا you who are mocking the different taste that you are having in life you are not mocking them but you are mocking yourself and you who is hitting a big stone with a very light stick did you hit the stone or did you hit your stick so the idea of giving examples is just to make things closer to the minds of people so what we need to be focusing on here وضاربا لنا مثلا ونسية خلق this story this is just a story everything we say our stories everything we read our stories but we have to take the examples we have to take the lessons so the lesson that we can take is we have to understand each others we have to give excuses for people sometimes people will say something to you but that might be not suitable to hear but put yourself in their shoes and think why did they say so what made them say so why this happened they might be having a bad day and suddenly a word slipped give excuses learn from the examples that you have around you وضاربا لنا مثلا there are examples learn from them so we have to show and present so many examples in the Quran one example is وضاربا لنا مثلا ورجلا سلاما هل يستوون مثلا so Allah صبحانه وتعالى gives examples يجب أن يجعل الأشياء أسهل لنا أن نفهم. هناك نظام أنه يقول أنه إذا كان شخص يعمل for several partners but these partners have disputes between them and they quarrel between them. إذا كان يعمل for this person who is working for them is going to please any of the partner then the others will be upset with him. إذا هذا هو أول نظام. أول نظام أن الله يقول أنه يقوم with this person to a person who is working for one good landlord or a good person so he will be relaxed. إذا ما هو أن نفهم من هذا؟ هذا هو نظام أن الله سبحانه وتعالى has given us أن يعمل for so many partners and working for one. يعمل for Allah the One and associating the other partners with him. يجب أن يقوم with the lesson again. لا تقوم with any associate anyone with Allah سبحانه وتعالى. يجب أن نفهم عنك. يجب أن ينظم عنك. يجب أن ينظم عنك. يجب أن ينظم عن كل شيء. يجب أن ينظم عن شيء.  You will be following this and that and this and that. You will be doing this and that and then at the end you will see that all of these things will not lead you to the pleasure of Allah سبحانه وتعالى. We want to please Allah سبحانه وتعالى alone. So follow him alone. Don't associate any partner to him. Make your intentions pure for Allah سبحانه وتعالى. Thank Allah سبحانه وتعالى for everything he has given you. Thank him for the blessings of being the Muslim. Thank him for a blessing that he has chosen you out of millions and billions of people to serve others. Sometimes people will be helping with charities, with food, with doing this and with doing that. That's not something they powerfully did it. No, that's what Allah سبحانه وتعالى has given them, has allowed them, has chosen them to do and what? You have to thank Allah سبحانه وتعالى for this. So he said who will give life to these bones after they are written and they become dust. So Allah created man from sperm. Then he grew up and he is a clear opponent to Allah سبحانه وتعالى. So once أبي بن خلف came to Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم and he had a piece of bone with him. So he smashed it and he made it powder and he said how would? Who would recreate this again? And Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم said to him Allah will recreate it. He will recreate you and then he will throw you in health fire. And this person أبي بن خلف was the only person that Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم killed himself by him. Sayyidina Muhammad killed only one person and it was أبي بن خلف. So what was the answer? قل يحييها الذي أنشأها أول مرتين وهو بكل خلق عليم. Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم He will give life. Allah will give life to them who created them for the first time and he is the all knower of recreation. So Allah سبحانه وتعالى has created these bones. He will recreate them in the day after. It's normally easier if you have something that was deassembled. It needs a screw here and it needs fixing here to put it back together. You didn't make it from the from a scratch. You just put things together. So tell him يا محمد. Tell this person that Allah سبحانه وتعالى is the one who is going to recreate things and creating things from the beginning from a scratch is difficult but recreating you have the material.  So Allah سبحانه وتعالى Allah knows everything. He knows all his creations. He knows what they did.  And he is the one who is going to reward everyone or punish everyone according to their deeds. So what did Allah سبحانه وتعالى هو بكل خلف العليم الذي جعل لكم من الشجر الأخضر من الشجر الأخضر نارا. فإذا أنتم منه تقضن.  And from this fire from these trees you ignite, you have light, you have everything. Now think a little bit. So if we can say what's the fuel that we are in the wood of the trees. But what is in the wood of the trees? It's wet. Trees need water. So Allah سبحانه وتعالى is giving us light out of water. And remember that the purest fuel we can get is from trees. Because it doesn't pollute the environment. And anything any other fuel does pollute the environment. So imagine Allah سبحانه وتعالى the most powerful is creating fire from something that's so wet. That's from something that drinks a lot of water. That needs a lot of water. So Allah سبحانه وتعالى goes on So what is it that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has time? Isn't he who created the heavens and the earth? Isn't he able to create the like of them? Yes indeed. He is the all knowing supreme creator. Allah سبحانه وتعالى created the heavens and they will last till the day of judgment. And the heavens with whatever in them plan planets stars everything orbit everything each and everything in the sky goes in its orbit. Nothing changes. Nothing goes or oppresses another orbit. Allah has created the earth with everything that it contains and he subjugated then he subjugated all he has created for man. And Allah سبحانه وتعالى is able to create the like of them. لخلقوا السماوات والأرضي أكثر من خلق الناس. الله سبحانه وتعالى يقوله خلقوا السماوات والأرض والأرض is way much bigger thing than creating man. خلقوا السماوات والأرض nothing is holding the skies. إذا كنتظروا at the solar system you will see the earth. So the earth is swimming. The earth is in its orbit. With everything on it. This is a proof of Allah's power. The Creator. So whatever Allah سبحانه وتعالى created serves the human. Serves man. So everything that was created is a servant. And man is the one who is served. Now let me ask a question. And I want to ask a question. And I want to ask a question. And I want to ask a question. Now let me ask a question. Have you ever seen a servant who lives longer than the one who is serving?  So the skies, the earth everything on them these are servants for man. And we know that people are born. People die. These skies and the earth never left the laws or the order that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has created them for. The sun rises at a certain time. It sets at a certain time. All the stars in the skies they have certain orbits. So of Allah سبحانه وتعالى is the all knowing the supreme creator but look at man everything Allah created is following the order but look at man you people the strong of you will oppress the weak. You will be unjust to each other what happens Allah created and He knows everything and everyone إلما أمره إذا أراد شيئا أن يقول له كن فيكون So Allah سبحانه وتعالى His command is only when He intends a thing He says to it be and it is Allah will just say be and it will be now you're sitting on your chair your muscles are in a certain position if you want to stand up so your muscles should be in a different position so just intending to stand up you don't know which muscles are moving which are not did you ask did you give an order for your muscles just to wake up I'm going to stand up stand with me no you don't give orders you follow orders but Allah سبحانه وتعالى just if anything He wants He will just say be and it will be but man cannot order I think we can start answering this at our houses Imam will give an order will everybody listen go and a bigger circle the mayor might give an order will everybody listen no on a bigger circle so what happens man is not supposed to order as he will not be obeyed 100% now let me ask you something go back to someone who is paralyzed can he give orders to his muscles and say stand up I want to walk walk away I want to walk but only Allah can give orders يفعل ولا يسأل He would do and nobody can question him He would decree and nobody will say yes or no He would give orders and everyone should obey سبحانه وتعالى يبيده ملكوت كل شيء وإليه ترجعون so exalted and glorify Allah سبحانه وتعالى He is the one in whose hands is the realm of all things and to him everyone will return this is an amazing and I hope the time will be enough just to explain this so let's start سبحانه وتعالى يبيده ملكوت كل شيء in Surah Al-Mulk Allah سبحانه وتعالى says بلس to be honored be glorified be he in whose hand is the dominion what does the word ملك mean we have four stages of the word ملك which starts with ميم has three letters so let's start with ملك ملك is someone who owns anything even if it's so trivial I can say I have only one one dress okay so I am an owner ملك is the owner to what to who owns the owner to who owns so ملك is higher than ملك now the third stage is عالم الملك is whatever people can see now the fourth one is عالم الملكوت عالم الملكوت is to own what people cannot see this is the realm of heavens so الملكوت is stronger than الملك and الملك is stronger than الملك and الملك is stronger than ملك so الملكوت the realm of heavens is to all the things that you cannot see and who owns that الله سبحانه وتعالى فسبحانا الذي بيدي ملكوت كل شيء بلوري الله الله سبحانه وتعالى who owns everything whatever you see and whatever you don't see when الله سبحانه وتعالى sometimes give special secrets to people but which people are the best of his servants good good people for example you can say this person has special there is something special about this person الله سبحانه وتعالى has given this person special secrets that are not given to other people when الله سبحانه وتعالى says وكذلك نوري إبراهيم ملكوت السماء أرض نسأل إبراهيم الشباب على ذلك why why would Allah give something special for some people because they were tested and they succeeded in their tests so why In particular what was it for him على تستد him in everything and he passed so he tested him in his when he was young when he destroyed the idols and his people burnt him put him in a huge fire الله saved him قلنا يانا رقوني بردمه سلاما على إبراهيم فاير بي سيف for إبراهيم الله تستد him when he was old when he ordered him to slaughter his son his own son that he was so long waited for and he accepted Allah's order and he wanted to fulfill Allah's command so he passed the test so a person who is a slave of Allah but a true slave of Allah will be given something special so Allah سبحانه وتعالى would give him some secrets now imagine go to سورة الكهف وان سيدنا موسى wanted to beat الخدر عليه السلام what did Allah سبحانه وتعالى describe him with اعطيناه رحمة من عندنا وعلمناه من لدن علم we had given mercy from us and had told him from the divine knowledge so the point is الله is in the corner of everything and he gives us special secrets for people one of the companions said I know the roads of heaven more than I know the roads on earth these are secrets that Allah سبحانه وتعالى give to certain people so Allah has created man he gave him orders and then the ayah ends with two important words you will be returned to him this is a threat this is a threatening to people so for those who did not believe in the blessings of Allah سبحانه وتعالى now let these words make him shake him to be ready to meet Allah سبحانه وتعالى الله سبحانه وتعالى did not create people just out of pleasure or just for nothing no, people have a mission and people have duties to do to fulfill so they will be punished or rewarded when they go back to him so when in Surah Al-Fatiha we say and we thank Allah سبحانه وتعالى for everything this is the first Surah in the Quran in the order of the Quran الحمد لله رب العالم think of your life think of the good things you have in your life stop thinking of the bad things stop thinking of the tests stop thinking of something that will make your heart not ready, not pure to receive the light so وإليه ترجعون you will go back to him to see ليورا وأعمالا to see the results of your deeds so you can see so you can get the results of your tests each and everyone who takes an exam they will get great for that so if they study well they will be happy they will be rewarded if not then what will happen they will fail and they will be miserable every soul will be compensated for what it earned every soul will be treated justly and Allah سبحانه وتعالى says in Surah Al-Anbiya كل نفسه دائقة الموت ونبلوكم الشر والخير فتنة وإلينا ترجعون every soul will taste death and we test you with evil and good as a trial and to us you will be returned and say it now Omar says من وجد خيرا فليحمد إله ومن وجد غير ذلك فلا يلومن إلا نفسه if you find good then thank Allah سبحانه وتعالى if you find other than that then don't blame anyone except yourself you did not obey you went astray you followed shaitan you followed your nefs whatever got you deviated from the right path اهدنا الصراط المستقيم this is our focus get us connected to the right path get us connected to the one who show us the right path get us connected to سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم now if we have a look an overview look of Surat Yaseen we will see that from the beginning of the Surah Allah سبحانه وتعالى talked about the Habib al-Nashjar when he died and what reward he found and then he ended up with with the frightening towards those two words are frightening for those who disobeyed Allah but they are very very promising for those who obeyed Allah سبحانه وتعالى they know that no matter what tests they had in this life they will go back to Allah سبحانه وتعالى and they will find their result their reward there and always remember that whenever whatever happens few practice patience and reading and being content with what Allah has decreed the result is so high the word is so high it's something that you cannot imagine you cannot think of that will be what Allah سبحانه وتعالى promised his righteous slaves with this we come to the end of Surat Yaseen Insha'Allah the next three weeks we will be talking about Surat Al-Rahman the following about Surat Al-Waqaa and the last about Surat Al-Mulk Insha'Allah we will meet again next week بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم يا ربنا لك الحمد كما ينبغي الجلال وجيك وعظيم سلطانك اللهم إنا نسألك من خير ما سألك منه عبتك ونبيك محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ونعوذ بك من شرما ما سألك منه سيجدنا ونبينا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم نعوذ بك من شرط المستعادك منه سيجدنا ونبينا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم نسألك مين الخير كله عاجل ونعوذ بك من الشرط كله عاجل وصلى الله عليه وسلم و Freddie