One of my favorite projects since 2020 is mentoring a pre-K-6 school in South Africa. They wanted to “Finnish” their school and make it more learner-centered, so we created a plan to modify their curriculum and focus on implementing instructional changes and embed SEL in small steps throughout the schoolyear. The foundation is in Cooperative, Constructive and Cognitive practices to collaborate with families and students, create individual learning plans for all students and focus on documenting learning when it naturally happens (instead of formally assessing every student and their skills), and marking all the developmental milestones and learning achievements in the end of the day – sometimes by sending a picture to the parents, too, to keep them connected and informed.
We all know that children learn a lot on their own, and we want to empower their explorations as much as possible to help build learner resilience – a fundamental aspect of our development, that relates to agency (our cap) and self-efficacy. Agency is our ability to make choices and self-efficacy our belief in our abilities to do thing, like learning.
Fortunately, we are born curious and ready to learn. The only thing we need to do is find a way to cooperate with that curiosity and help students preserve their interest in learning and their sense of wonder – because that is where all true learning starts: wondering if, how, when, why….
As having choices helps children to build stronger learner agency and self-efficacy, I built an infographic about learner-centered education, hoping that it would be easy for Early Childhood Educators to view on mobile phones: https://choosinghowtoteach.blogspot.com/2022/04/empower-students-to-learn.html I think we cannot overemphasize the natural learning process and building on children’s play to help them learn more. Simply put, the EMPOWER stands for Environment, Motivation, Process, Ownership, WHY? Empathy & Emotions and Relationships.
Supporting students’ agency and resilience as learners is easy to do by guiding and supporting students’ natural curiosity and offering help when needed, and figuring out together why things happen. These learning experiences are a tad harder to build, as they don’t fit into pre-structured curricula. But learning cannot be restricted into universal format – learning experiences always have individual flavors and take-aways as we are building on things we have already learned.
This is also the best way for supporting adult learning resilience: offering choices for obtaining the information (reading, listening, watching, discussing…) and demonstrating the competencies (both existing and new ones) by producing a plan or presentation or portfolio, and supporting the self-efficacy of adult learners.
NotesFromNina 
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