Our learning experiences have a huge impact on our future, and on our learning. The good part of this is that teaching is a relationship between the teacher and students, and we can choose to provide those positive learning experiences for our students. The hard part is that we all bring our past experiences and expectations into the classroom, both teachers and students. For some students the classroom environment is the safest and happiest place they have ever experienced. It is very hard to focus on learning if one is scared or hungry. Recent research suggests that 25% or more of students have experienced trauma or ACEs. [1] We can choosehow we perceive students and their actions.
Understanding the perspectives of other people is an important part of #SEL social awareness, and as teachers we have great opportunities to be examples of this for our students. Learning to respondto the (undesirable) behaviors of others instead of reacting to them is a life skill we all need. By responding instead of reacting we can engage in tSEL – transformative SEL – supporting students identity, agency, belonging, collaborative problem-solving and curiosity!
When we choose tosupport all students and build safe learning environments, our students can learn to trust teachers and other students and people in general. This is the important first step. The positive experience of knowing the rules and how to ask for help are important building blocks for students’ self-awareness and self-management – two fundamental #SEL skills for understanding and managing our emotions, thoughts and behaviors. We cannot thrive in the society without these skills, but they are equally important for building relationships with other students.
Collaborating successfully with peers is an extremely powerful positive experience in the classroom – we should never underestimate it! Often students can understand a new concept more easily if a classmate explains it, just because they are close to the same level of language development. For us, as professional educators, some concepts are so “clear” that we don’t even consider having to explain its meaning. Peer collaboration helps students to learn the important #SEL relationship and life skills like seeking and offering help and resolving conflicts constructively.
Purposefully designing healthy learning environments by designing these Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) can protect our students againstACEs(Adverse Childhood Experiences), because they build HOPE – Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences [2]. And when we design and provide positive learning experiences, we also help our students to learn to enjoy learning. This has a huge impact for their futures. Learning enjoyment increases the chances for students to engage in transformative life-long learning[3]. How awesome is this?!?
This is exactly WHY education is my chosen life-long career! 🙂
[1] Scott, J., Jaber, L. S., & Rinaldi, C. M. (2021). Trauma-informed school strategies for SEL and ACE concerns during COVID-19. Education Sciences, 11(12), 796.
[3] Jagers, R. J., Skoog-Hoffman, A., Barthelus, B., & Schlund, J. (2021). Transformative social emotional learning: In pursuit of educational equity and excellence. American Educator, 45(2), 12. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1304336.pdf
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.
For online learners, engaging in Self-Regulated Learning is a vital skill today. Often the content to be learned is simply placed into a learning management system – think about MOOCs – rather than spending time to explicitly design it for a great learning experience. And, as learners are individuals with their own preferences, it also makes sense, IF both video and transcript are provided. (My confession: I like to read. And nobody can talk as fast as I can read.)
But learning, especially deep learning, takes much more work than just simply watching the videos and following the discussion prompts. When we learn one of these processes takes place: accumulation, assimilation, accommodation, or (the BEST ever!!) transformation. You know, the amazing A-HA!!! moment when the new information literally shakes our world and makes us think about things in a new way. And then adjust what we already knew to fit in with this new revelation. That’s deep learning at its best. 🙂 The moment when we see the lightbulb lit in our students’ brains. This is the very reason why I am in education.
Now, how do we assess this new, deep learning? Just giving a grade would not cover it, because assigning a grade is an evaluation, not an assessment. Evaluations don’t support our learning processes, they just put an approval (or denial) stamp onto our final product – worksheet, test score, essay, or portfolio. It is just a professional judgment of the output, the product of learning, but doesn’t tell how we got there. It doesn’t address the learning process, which is where learner agency lives.
Assessment and evaluation are two different processes for two different purposes. Student-centered assessmentfor learning and assessment as learning are to support students’ #deeperlearning process, evaluation is to determine the level of their performance. Assessment is for students and teachers, evaluation is for stakeholders.
Formative assessments that inform (the educator and student about learning process) and summative assessments that sum up the competence are both important and useful, however they require different approaches and interpretations. Both can be designed by the teacher to meet learning objectives. At best assessment is a meaningful and a positive learning experience for students, increasing their interest in learning and boosting growth mindset. Summative assessment is usually a cumulative examination, and can be done as a final project or portfolio. My personal-professional preference is portfolios because they can visualize the learning process and accumulation of ideas and knowledge, as well as the choices where to dig deeper.
Evaluation is making a judgment about an artifact (essay, test score, behavior, teaching practice) against a relevant evaluation criteria, usually a predetermined goal or standard. Evaluation is also interpreting and making decisions about program effectiveness, for example for accreditation purposes and to build capacity. The OECD report is clear: “The point of evaluation and assessment is to improve classroom practice and student learning.”
References:
American Psychological Association (2020). The APA Guide to College Teaching: Essential Tools and Techniques Based on Psychological Science. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad
OECD (2013), Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment, OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264190658-en.
This is the time of the year when I am talking with my teachers who are in a survival mode with all of the end-of-schoolyear-expectations and work. And because they are my students, they are also trying to handle their M.Ed. studies – you can imagine what full-time teaching and full-time studying looks like during these extremely busy times.
How are you managing your time and stress? How do YOU find time for self-care when work is too busy? And what is your secret for being a resilient teacher to cultivate your students’ learning process, so that it supports the increase of their resilience, too?
I imagine that this might sound like yet another demand for already busy teachers – but, please, hear me out:
Learning is much more successful when we help our students to become resilient, like the tree in the picture. It doesn’t have much soil, and it has lost some of it’s needles, too. But it bends with the winds and tolerates the salty seawater. And grows. Not as fast as the other trees growing more inland with better soil. It grows on its own pace – like we all do, actually. For growth cannot be hurried
When we discuss learning and metacognition with students, it is important to remember and remind that resilience can be practiced (it is the real growth mindset). Learning to be resilient helps them to rebuild their confidence and learning skills. Because this is exactly what learner agency is: our capacity to make choices about ourselves and our learning.
The more we understand the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and use Trauma-Informed Practices, the better we can support our students’ resilience. To me, that is an essential part of being an educator, which is why I want to remind all teachers about engaging in self-care. The easiest ones for me are going outside to enjoy the nature and laughing with friends and colleagues!
(It is not the visually appealing design or charisma of the teacher/instructor, even though both of these can make learning experiences nicer.)
The answer lies in the “a-ha!!” moment when we realize something new and connect the dots. This is the magical ingredient that makes learning meaningful by combining the cognitive understanding with an emotional awareness (SEL – identifying personal assets and emotions).
Now, how to lead more students into these a-ha!! moments – this is the realquestion we need to ask. And part of the answer is that one size can never fit all. To me, this makes teaching such a wonderful profession! Every day is a discovery day to understand how to support an individual student. We are trusted with great responsibility! However, being a teacher is not easy. Especially when mandated to “teach to the test” or “cover so and so much of curricula” – because these expectations have very little to do with learning. They are only focusing on teaching – and every teacher knows that what is taught is not necessarily learned!
Learning and teaching are two different things. They are two different processes that are often put into the same frame of reference (education) and sometimes even happen in the same physical or virtual space (classroom). Sometime we think that students are not motivated to learn new things, but this is a huge misconception! Children are natural born learners; it is our ultimate survival skill. But – for a variety of different reasons – we may not enjoy the experience of being taught.
When learning is seen as an in-built force within your students, the teaching job became easier. By becoming a facilitator for learning and guiding students to build their own knowledge, the teacher has taken a huge step towards supporting learners’ agency and autonomy. Starting with learning outcomes (what students will be able to know or do) we choose the information needed and plan for a selection of activities and assessments to help our students to learn what is needed. Then we add support for metacognition and a selection of recommended learning strategies.
With current technology this can be very easy to do! Lecturing is unnecessary as we have countless (better) ways for providing the information and concepts for students (books, videos, podcasts, walkthroughs, glossaries, wikis, etc.). The most important part of instruction is to share useful frameworks with learners to help them understand the context and connections (within the topic and its’ relations to other learning). These connections are vitally important, because learning process starts with external interactions and is completed with internal elaboration. [1] Learning facilitation means exactly this: supporting each student’s individual learning process and providing choices (within pedagogically/andragogically appropriate boundaries) for constructing their own understanding. Metacognitive skills are crucial tools for everyone because:
it really is about reflecting higher order learning (often described as critical thinking and problem solving)
we need the ability to monitor and regulate our own learning
in information societies learning cannot stop in graduation
Another important part of experiencing a meaningful learning experience comes from getting support when needed – not for finding the correct answers, but for strengthening our individual learning processes. While we all learn in the similar way by interacting with environment and then internally elaborating to make sense of the new information and fit into our own existing knowledge structures, we also have individual differences like the quality and amount of our previous knowledge. Understanding and supporting these personal processes [2] is the key to fostering lifle-long learning, which is why teachers need to be proficient with both SEL and Trauma-Informed Practices.
Making sure that we focus on learning as an individual process makes it possible to keep on supporting students throughout k12 education and beyond. To take this one step further, remember: Truly learner-centered experiences are designed with students, acknowledging their previous knowledge, and providing different learning modalities and assessments to choose from. Here is more about learner-centered design, which obviously makes learning engagement much more meaningful for participants. APA (American Psychological Association) has this great resource about creating meaningful learning experiences!
After SO many years in education, my favorite question still is: “How can I support your learning today?”
[1] Illeris, K. (2003). Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning. International journal of lifelong education, 22(4), 396-406.
[2] Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press
What is one thing your can change today? You can choose to reframe your perception!
My work gets so much easier when I remember to assume that others have much better intentions than what their actions of behavior seems to suggest. I have blogged about Positive Regard before, and I often discuss it with people. Learning more about resilience and trauma-informed practices is great, and I hope that more teachers would get training or professional development about it, as soon as possible. The easiest way (for me) to start practicing the positive regard is to detach the behavior from the person and do my best to support the person as they are – because then I can respond, instead of reacting to the behavior or situation.
Sometimes we are told – or taught – how to perceive certain things like behaviors. It is important to remember that these perceptions are tightly related to the learning theories we use (behaviorism, constructivism, humanism, etc.). The learner-centered philosophy builds on the humanist worldview emphasizing construction of meaning and knowledge from individual experiences. It also requires showing genuine interest towards learners and practicing unconditional positive regard in teaching-learning interactions, which means that our perception of students’ behavior must stay in the right hand column of the image. Here is more about Learner-centered practices: What learner-centered really means.
Using SEL strategies helps us to reframe our perception. All SEL skills (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship skills and Responsible Decision-Making) are necessary for successful learning, but too often they are not taught throughout formal education. As children arrive to school with different skillsets of SEL, some will need more help than others.
By embedding the SEL skills to our instruction and classroom management we are helping students to better engage in their own, individual learning process. And this is why embedding SEL is so crucially important! They should not be an additional curriculum, but learned within every school subject and project. Here is another great resource for using SEL in Trauma-Informed Practices.
I was re-re-reading one of my very favorite education books: Contemporary Theories of Learning (Illeris, 2018) and thinking about how to support all different learners. Obviously, we must provide experiences that meet the needs of our learners and helps them to learn. But how do we actually learn? What does the learning process look like? How do we make sense of all the data and information surrounding us? For clarity, I like to use the definition of learning as a two-step progression containing the processes of external interaction and internal elaboration. [1] Interacting with data is just the first step in the learning process, gathering the information. The second step, elaboration, transforms the information to become a part of our personal knowledge structure.
Exactly how do we react to the bits of data in our environment and change it to become information that can be stored in our minds? In early learning this is easy to observe – young children actively try to make sense of the surrounding world. They are accumulating new words and concepts with a remarkable pace! Their intrinsic motivation to learn is a continuous source of inspiration, and I often wish we as adults could approach new things with the same amazing curiosity. When we organize the information, we are constructing our own knowledge – which sometimes is accurate, but most often needs some fine-tuning. This elaboration part is exactly why we need educators to provide some structural support. Otherwise, we might still call every four-legged animal a dog. A very important part of instruction (in any level of education) is helping students to understand the connections for new information and showing how to build concept hierarchies and categorize information in a meaningful way.
So, when we consider how learning happens, there appears to be 4 different learning processes to keep in mind while designing learning experiences: cumulative, assimilative, accommodative and transformative. These all are natural processes, and the first one we use is the cumulative process where we learn something that is not connected to anything else that we already know. This mostly happens during the first years of our lives because everything is new, and we just mechanically observe the world and add the data as information to our minds. In addition to early learning, we sometimes use cumulative learning process when we need to memorize something without a context. This is why passwords are sometimes hard to remember: without personal meaning the information is easily discarded especially if it isn’t used often.
The most common type of learning is termed assimilative or learning by addition. [2] When we assimilate data, we add new information into something we have previously learned. This is very common type of classroom learning, but may still lead to quite shallow or strategic learning approaches, especially if the application is only for the test or quiz, instead of extending the new knowledge beyond classroom context [3]. Some examples are new words and concepts, like learning a new language and just memorizing the words or rote learning the multiplication tables or important dates of history. Hence the common (and very valid) question heard from students: “When will we ever use this?” However, we don’t have to stay within the plain behaviorist learning paradigm with assimilative learning. To design better learning experiences for students in any levels of education, we will want to use learner-centered practices and provide learning strategies like mindmap templates to support students’ individual meaning-making activities during assimilative learning. This also leads to the deeper level of learning – accommodating new information.
Accommodative learning process takes us to a place where we must challenge and change our existing thinking patterns. This problem can lead to a productive struggle: when new information doesn’t fit into our existing scheme, we need to figure out why. This deeper learning can be hard, and it can be extremely rewarding. Alas, without Growth Mindset it may lead learners to a dead end of believing they cannot learn, which is why anyone who wants to teach, must know how to offer support for productive learning struggles. Designing learning experiences with expansive framing in mind (ways to support learning reflection, encouraging collaborative learning, discussing self-explaining strategies, etc.) instead of assuming that students already know how to do this is a great starting point. Here is a link to learning strategies at NinasNotes. Accommodative learning process happens within ZPD–the Zone of Proximal Development–where learners need support and scaffolding to successfully acquire new information and skills. Accommodating new information is a prerequisite for Transformational Learning, which requires a great deal of learner agency. Agency as a concept refers to self-awareness and degree of freedom. [4]
When learning experience is transformational it means that our thinking or even personality changes–transforms–into something new, requiring the previous schemes, structures and categories to change. This change in our frame of reference challenges both our habits of mind and viewpoints that are constructed from our beliefs, values, attitudes and feelings. [5] Designing transformative learning experiences therefore requires creating a safe space for learners to explore their beliefs and take risks of trying something different, something new. Excellent ways to facilitate the transformational learning process is to explicitly teach about metacognitive strategies, embed Social-Emotional Learning into instructional practice, engage in a dialogue with students and use a coaching approach in the classroom.
To sum it up: We need to be very mindful when designing learning experiences for our students, keeping in mind that the same instructional content will most likely evoke 2-4 different learning processes among the learner population, depending on their previous knowledge and exposure to the content. We should never assume our learners know how to choose successful learning strategies; and we must always be ready to offer metacognitive support.
References:
[1] Illeris, K. (2018). Contemporary theories of learning: Learning theorists … in their own words. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
[2] Illeris, K. (2009). Contemporary theories of learning: learning theorists—in their own words. London: Routledge / edited by Knud Illeris
[3] Huberman, M., Bitter, C., Anthony, J., & O’Day, J. (2014). The shape of deeper learning: strategies, structures, and cultures in deeper learning network high schools. Findings from the study of deeper learning opportunities and outcomes: Report 1. American Institutes for Research. Retrieved from: http://www.air.org/resource/spotlight-deeper-learning
[4] Smith, N.C. (2017). Students’ perceptions of learner agency: A phenomenographic inquiry into the lived learning experiences of high school students. (Doctoral Dissertation). Northeastern Repository
[5] Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New directions for adult and continuing education, 1997(74), 5-12.
Learner agency (students’ voice and choice in their own learning) has gained wonderfully much interest in education around the world during the past few years.
Alas, sometimes I see learner agency being expressed as something students either have or don’t have – yet, agency is truly the capacity to choose our responses to problematic situations [1]. It is not up to us as educators to start scoring learner agency, or dividing students based of whether they have agency or not. And, according to my research, learner agency may sometimes appear negative, especially when students choose to disengage – often to object the structure of instruction.
Students can perceive their learner agency as Detachment, Belonging, Synergy or Unbound.
Detachment can happen more easily when students perceive that their learning has no real-life connections, or when they are just going through the motions to earn a grade. There is very little or no learning going on, and students may engage in surface learning strategies.
The good news is that we CAN support learner agency with our instruction and classroom management and help students to belong, find synergy and become unbound learners. Choosing to teach with respect towards students and support students’ ownership of their own learning is a good start! Social- emotional learning (SEL) provides great tools for supporting learner agency. CASEL framework has identified 5 areas in SEL:
self-awareness
self-management
social awareness
relationship skills
responsible decision making
These are not something new and surprising, teachers throughout the time have focused on supporting these areas in their classrooms. And we know from decades of research how successful students already use all these skills – I am thinking all the research about self-regulation and co-regulation, engagement and participation, executive functions, metacognitive skills, and so forth. All SEL skills are necessary for successful learning, but too often they are not taught throughout formal education. And children arrive to school with different skillsets of SEL, some will need more help than others.
By embedding the SEL skills to our instruction and classroom management we are helping students to better engage in their own, individual learning process. And this is why embedding SEL is so crucially important! They should not be an additional curriculum, but learned within every school subject and project. The classroom applications for embedding SEL are quite self-evident:
Supporting students’ self-awareness means that we address their thoughts, beliefs, emotions and motivations regarding the learning experiences students have.
Providing information is just one part of the teaching-learning exchange
Addressing students’ questions and validating their thoughts immediately deepens the learning experience
Helping students to deal with their emotions during learning process further improves the learning experience – getting new or contradicting information is hard for all of us!
Supporting students’ self-management means that we help students to take initiative and cope with their emotions and thoughts, and we also provide guidance for stressful situations.
We have all had students with advanced self-management skills, and also students who haven’t really been exposed what self-management means. Balancing different student needs is always challenging, and it will always be challenging because we are individuals with different personal histories. Supporting students’ self-regulation is just a part of being an educator!
Some students need more support in taking initiative than others, it may be a part of their personality. Too often I see extroversion being rewarded over introversion – even though one is not a better personality trait than the other!
Supporting students’ social awareness means that we model empathy and compassion, recognize (and verbalize) situational demands and opportunities, and help all students to take perspective
Understanding the perspective of another person is a fundamental skill in the society, and we can choose to teach this with all classroom interactions. Think-pair-share is a great start!
Discussing why some things are harder to learn than others is important, because it relates directly to the mindsets we have. And verbalizing that we all struggle with something builds better communication and learning skills for the future.
Supporting students’ relationship skills means that we emphasize cooperation, communication and proactively teach students to seek help and offer help to others
Engaging in dialogue is important. And dialogue is VERY different from discussion, because in dialogue we are actively trying to understand what the other person is trying to express (not focusing on building our own argument).
Cooperative education is learning-centered, meaning that everything we do is focused on supporting students’ learning process and understanding the big picture – instead of cramming tons of details to be forgotten after the test or engaging in busywork.
Learning happens in interactions – so providing more opportunities for meaningful interactions is important!
Supporting students’ responsible decision making means that we teach students how to make good decisions, first with smaller things and about personal behaviors and social interactions, but also increasingly more complex decisions.
Only through making choices we can train our own executive functions [2] – EF doesn’t develop if we are always told what we need to do.
Too many (and too big) choices can be detrimental – knowing students’ personal preferences will help us to support them learning to choose.
Adding choices also communicates to our students that we believe they can learn, and that we are there to help, if needed.
All the five SEL elements are organically present in our lives, in our societies. Classroom learning shouldn’t be an exception of this. Choosing to teach with the focus of supporting students’ learning process also helps us empower our students to learn more on their own.
Helping students to learn how to make responsible choices is a crucially important life skill. Let’s not waste our opportunity to support their agency by embedding SEL strategies to our instruction and adding more students’ voice and choice to every learning interaction!
Biesta, G., & Tedder, M. (2007). Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults, 39(2), 132-149.
[2] Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. C. (2008). The effects of choice on intrinsic motivation and related outcomes: a meta-analysis of research findings. Psychological bulletin, 134(2), 270.
Smith, N.C. (2017). Students’ perceptions of learner agency: A phenomenographic inquiry into the lived learning experiences of high school students. (Doctoral Dissertation). Northeastern Repository
In any given situation where we need to learn something new – whether formal (at school) or informal (anywhere) – we have a choice to make about our own approach to learning it. This approach can be either engaging in deep learning (immersing ourselves to learning for life) or surface learning (memorizing disconnected pieces of information). When we are in formal education (school, college, university) there is also a third approach: strategic learning, which means that we are aiming for a good grade without caring about the content, and forgetting the information as soon as we pass the assessment.
Deep and deeper learning both refer to acquiring transferable knowledge through classroom experiences. The emphasis is in supporting students’ lifelong learning process. The term “deep learning” resulted from the original phenomenograhpic research where researchers found out students having different approaches to learning [1]. These approaches describe how learners perceive tasks – either as disconnected pieces of information to be memorized in order to pass the exam (surface learning), or as knowledge to be constructed and understood in order to create new meanings (deep learning).
Deeper learning has been defined by American Institutes for Research as “a set of competencies students must master in order to develop a keen understanding of academic content and apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job” [2]
We all use the deep and surface learning approaches in different situations. When presented with a learning task, we appraise the value of it, and then decide about our approach. This usually happens very quickly and automatically. What worries me, is that I have met students whose only learning approach seems to be the strategic learning – meaning that they want high grades, but don’t want to really learn the content. These can be very “good” students – always submitting their assignments and assessments in time, often doing extra work to ensure a good grade. But what about the quality of their learning?
Most grading systems appear to reward the strategic approach, which is very problematic because it focuses on extrinsic motivation and external rewards. Students are taught to complete their worksheets and other tasks and pass their tests so that they can get good grades. But why don’t we talk about learning? And being able to use what they learned?
After moving overseas from Finland, I was so surprised to see that my children had homework that was graded. That made no sense to me! As a teacher, how would I know who actually completed that homework assignment, or how much help the student received in completing it? While teaching in Finland the rule for homework was that it must be something that allows students to revisit what they learned at school. Because the idea of homework is to support students’ learning. Not to have them demonstrate their competency.
Making learning more meaningful for students and decreasing the obsession with grading is more important in 2020 than ever before.
Learner-centered instructional strategies will help. Providing choices for students – they can learn same competencies with different tasks, and getting to choose increases intrinsic motivation (game builders know this, btw, and have mastered the ACR – autonomy, competence, and relatedness). TeachThought also has a collection of more learning-centered strategies for instruction.
To make a leap further into learner-centered practices, ask students’ input for planning their learning experiences. Express positive regard. Try competency-based education. Change the assessment to be student-centered and non-punitive!
[1] Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On Qualitative Differences in Learning: I—Outcome and
process. British journal of educational psychology, 46(1), 4-11.
[2] Huberman, M., Bitter, C., Anthony, J., & O’Day, J. (2014). The shape of deeper learning: strategies, structures, and cultures in deeper learning network high schools. Findings from the study of deeper learning opportunities and outcomes: Report 1. American Institutes for Research. Retrieved from: http://www.air.org/resource/spotlight-deeper-learning
[3] Bain, K. (2013). Introduction: Growing Deep Learning. Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 1(8), 1.
There are lots and lots of expectations for teachers today, one of them being our teaching dispositions. We are asked to check our own biases, exhibit the belief that everyone can learn and be ready and willing to differentiate to support our students’ individual needs. In addition to everything else.
The singlehandedly easiest way for me to keep my sanity while supporting my students, is to have an Unconditional Positive Regard towards each and every one of them. It simply means isolating the behavior from the person and accepting and supporting people as they are, instead of expecting them to be what I wanted them to be.
The practical way is to always assume that the student had a good intention, whatever the results, or whatever they say or do. It has required practice to start and keep on using it, and withhold my thoughts of judgment. Even today, while engaging in discussion with students, I keep on reminding myself that I do not know what are my students’ lived realities and how they perceive their own learning. My only choice is to ask them to share their thoughts with me, and try my hardest not to assume things. I first learned about the uncoditional positive regard while earning my masters/teaching degree in Finland.
The concept of unconditional positive regard was developed by psychologist Carl Rogers, who emphasized individual choices in his person-centered counseling practice. The learner-centered educational practice carries the same ideas of supporting students’ congruence (self-image being similar to ideal self) by showing genuine interest towards learners and practicing unconditional posive regard in teaching-learning interactions. The learner-centered philosphy builds on the humanist worldview emphasizing construction of meaning and knowledge from individual experiences. I have found following learner-centered approach to be an easy and productive practice in my work as an educator.
The table below displays the three main categories of my learner-centered practice. The categories (following Rogers’ theory) are: striving to be genuine in order to build authentic dialogues, practicing unconditional positive regard to remind students that they do not have to achieve to be accepted, and using empathetic understandingto communicate my attempt in understanding student’s situation. After these basic needs are met, it is easier to discuss the academic questions my students have.
The table is not meant to be a walkthrough of a disussion. It is just a collection of examples from my discussions with my students, and my recent aha!-moments, like the difference between being kind instead of being nice (I learned this from my colleague’s presentation, and my mind was blown!). I had never before considered the difference! 🙂 Here is the short explanation: While being kind I engage in the important (but hard) dialogue about learning, helping my students to understand their own learning process and how they can either help or hinder their own learning. If I were to be just nice, I could say “Good job!” and move on – but that would not help my student to learn more.
The table categories (genuineness, unconditional positive regard and empathetic understanding) are also important parts to my 3C- approach to learning and teaching. The way I do it combines the cognitive and constructive practices in a cooperative learning environment. Cognitive practice includes helping students to learn about learning, but also become more knowledgeable of their own worldview, thinking and metacognitive skills. Constructive learning and teaching focus on collaborative meaning-making, gaining skills and understanding concepts. Cooperative teaching and learning build the emotionally safe learning environment, where interactions are held in high value, students can ask questions and engage in non-punitive assessments that support the learning process
Engaging in dialogue is essential for learning because dialogue is collaborative meaning-making by nature. It is about equal participants engaging in an attempt to understand the viewpoint of other(s) and defining the meaning in the social setting. Such dialogue is about creating new understanding together, and in that sense it denotes very constructive ideas of learning. The essential condition for dialogue to happen is equality. My truth cannot be better than your truth. In a safe learning environment, where students dare to ask questions and challenge their own beliefs, dialogue can be a very powerful tool for deep learning.
The power of positive regard lies in building trust between teachers and students, which then enables the dialogue to happen. If I don’t listen what my student is saying, I am just lecturing to a captive audience, wasting my opportunity to make a difference.
Rogers, C. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework. In (ed.) S. Koch, Psychology: A study of a science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the person and the social context. New York: McGraw Hill.
Passionate about learner agency. Firm believer in the best teacher being the one who makes herself unnecessary by empowering students to become autonomous learners.
NotesFromNina 