Tag Archives: pedagogy

The Power of Positive Experiences

26 Mar

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 choose how we perceive students and their actions.

How do I perceive my students? Are they lazy or feeling helpless? Are they acting out? Or dysregulated? Are they angry? Or In fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode? Are they disengaged or overwhelmed? My perception - not reality - defines my action.

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 respond to 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 to support 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 against ACEs (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.

[2] Sege, R. and Browne, C. Responding to ACEs with HOPE: Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences. Academic Pediatrics 2017; 17:S79-S85. https://positiveexperience.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-Four-Building-Blocks-of-HOPE.pdf

[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

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Learning paths

19 Aug

In the beginning of a school year it is important to remember that every student is on their own learning path – with their private history (which can be scary, maybe with harmful elements for learning process,  like neglect and abuse causing serious trauma that messes with their learning process) [1]. We all are in our own learning paths with our previous experiences and hopes/plans for the future learning. As educators, we can design learning experiences that guide students on the path of making responsible decisions (for their learning and lives #sel), but we cannot force people to change or follow a given path. This is why using the power of positive regard is so important! We are helping our students to create hopeful futures – and I have found empathy, curiosity and open-mindedness to become my most valuable tools as an educator!

SEL: Responsible Decisions - Demonstrating curiosity and open-mindedness is an essential metaskill for adults learners. We are all born curious - how do we lose it?!

It is not easy to try to see the positive in a disruptive behavior. Reminding myself to perceive students as complex human beings is often the most helpful first step for me. Students are on different paths, they have lives outside of school, and sometimes just reframing our perception can help us to remember that there might be a reason for a student to act differently. Isolating the behavior from the person helps us to accept our students as they are, not as we wanted them to be. And the younger the student, the more they need our help in managing their emotions and stress, which is why we want to actively design and build emotionally safe learning environments [2] to help every student to get onto a hopeful learnign path. I know this sounds like a lot of extra work but the payback is incredible: deeper learning, better learning outcomes, less disruptions, students helping each other, and so on. Acknowledging the presence of trauma in all our lives allows us to have more compassion for students and help them to see that the hopeful futures can exist! To design these learning experiences, we need to have empathy, work to find our curiosity again, and then just decidedly stay open-minded.

While we are not counselors or mental health professionals, we ARE supporting our students’ personal growth with all our learning design and classroom interactions – and helping students to stay curious is important! We can (and should) actively choose how to teach because our pedagogical choices impact the deep and surface learning strategies our students decide to use. An important role for a teacher is to help students make good choices. Otherwise kids could just learn everything they need from a video feed.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often very visible in the classroom, causing many kinds of disruptions. Students may appear disrespectful or angry, disengaged or lazy, but without knowing what is causing their misbehavior, we are more likely to react to the situation than using a pedagogically sound response. The “disrespectful” student may be scared of something and in the fight-flight- freeze-fawn mode; the “angry” student may be worrying about their family or safety. The “disengaged” student may be simply overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to ask for help. And the “lazy” student may have no idea how to get a task started, or homework completed. Which is why they need our help. Lot’s of help. To get on a better path and to make those responsible decisions about their learning and futures.

Designing opportunities for positive childhood experiences (PCEs) are our best tools for creating those hopeful futures [3]. Their report shows that “Children can succeed in school, even with substantial adversity, when they develop executive functioning skills and use the relational supports that are known to promote resilience.” And while I know that the report talks about childhood experiences, during my 10+ years in Higher Ed, mentoring M.Ed. grad students, I have learned that students of all ages react well to the unconditional positive regard. In addition to the trauma from our personal life situations, adult learners often also carry some serious educational trauma, making it harder to be curious and open-minded in a formal learning situation, like continuing education course or while earning a degree, making positive regard and individual support essential pars of our learning design.

What are your ideas for designing learning paths to hopeful futures? Please comment below!

References:

[1] Perry, B. D. (2006). Fear and learning: Trauma-related factors in the adult education process. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 110, 21.

[2] Burstein, D., Yang, C., Johnson, K., Linkenbach, J., & Sege, R. (2021). Transforming practice with hope (healthy outcomes from positive experiences). Maternal and Child Health Journal, 25(7), 1019-1024.

[3] Sege, R., Bethell, C., Linkenbach, J., Jones, J., Klika, B. & Pecora, P.J. (2017). Balancing adverse childhood experiences with HOPE: New insights into the role of positive experience on child and family development. Boston: The Medical Foundation.

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Learning theories for deeper learning

27 Jul

Understanding learning theories is crucially important for anyone who wants to teach. Without purposefully designing the learning experience by choosing the learning theory and instructional strategy for the lesson, there is a great change that we are just teaching the same way we were taught – and that might not help our students to learn! It might make them to use surface learning strategies to just pass, not to learn! 

 Are you (and/or your students) engaging in deep learning or surface learning?

 

There is a big difference between instructor/instruction centered vs. learner-centered education.  When learning is perceived to be a product (product, grade, task, test score, etc.) created according the instruction, it makes great sense to group students by their academic ability. That’s what we would do in other industries, right? However, learning is so much more than just a product of instruction!

When learning is perceived to be an internal, individual, life-long process, also the instructional practices have to change. I understand teachers’ concerns of limited instructional time (especially when teaching to the test) and external accountability measures that seriously complicate the teaching-learning interactions. We cannot expect the teachers to change a situation that derives from structural demands and administrative practices in education. Which is why we need to focus on our own teaching practices to always, always, always support our students to choose to engage in deeper learning.

The concept of learning as a product often gets reinforced through teacher education and instructional design practices (current ID models were created in business and military settings, but the pervasiveness of learning objects as measurements of successful instruction is today a global practice). University faculty seldom has extensive training in instructional practices, so they may teach the same way they were taught – which is less than ideal, because contemporary educational research acknowledges the benefits of modern learning theories over behaviorism.

Teacher education has to change. If we want to have teachers who know how to engage their students in learner-centered practices, we must provide teachers with the experience of learning in such environment.

Meanwhile, we all as individual educators, can choose to prioritize supporting our own students’ deeper learning process. Because that makes learning more meaningful.

Deeper learning has another dimension in our contemporary world: media literacy, which is crucially important to teach in all K-12 grades and beyond. Please see the excellent suggestions below:

Image from: https://futuremakers.nz/2023/07/24/a-theory-of-stupid/ and the green link for Fact checking tools in the image: https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay/fighting-disinformation/search.html

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Choose your focus – TIP toward SEL

10 Mar

Anything you pay attention to in your educational practice is likely to show an increase in your metrics. It truly is as simple as that. The human perception focuses on things we expect. This is why verbalizing your positive expectations will make a difference.

As a teacher you are externalizing your values and beliefs while you teach, i.e. communicate with your students.  So, if you expect students to hate learning…well…that is what you will get.  Focusing your communication on what you wish to happen creates the expectation for students. I am talking about the subtexts of the classrooms anywhere, on any level of education.  And the decisions we make about them, either knowingly or not.

To truly make responsible decisions in education, we need to have a deep understanding of Trauma-Informed Practices, and how to support learners’ self-regulation. (Here is a video and an infographic)  Unregulated students are not able to learn. But there is actually more to that. Our instructional practices match with our communication. And even if our words (and expressions) are positive but the undertone strongly negative, students will instinctively be following the latter.

Here is the TIP sheet I created to have a one-page document reminder of both SEL and TIP (Social-Emotional Learning and Trauma-Informed Practices), so that I can have it open on my desktop while working with my students:

Having practices that communicate respect, transparency, support, collaboration, empowerment, safety and resilience will strengthen the positive messages in our educational practice. This will also strengthen students’ understanding about their own learning process – which of course makes giving encouraging and positive feedback even easier.

This is a choice every educator has to make. It starts from stating positive expectations and making sure your instructional practices match with your words.

What do you want your focus to be?

Here is the link to the PDF TIP for Teaching

References:

Báez, J.C., Marquart, M., Garay, K., & Chung, R.Y. (2020). Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning Online: Principles & Practices During a Global Health Crisis;

Carello, J. (2019). Examples of Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning in College Classrooms;

Carello, J. (2022). A3 Self-Assessment Tools for Creating Trauma-Informed Learning and Work Environments.

Images: https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework and   https://gtlcenter.org/sites/default/files/SelfAssessmentSEL.pdf

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Meaningful Learning Experiences

18 Jan

What makes a learning experience a great one?

(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 real question 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.

Metacognition: The awareness and perceptions we have about ourselves as learners, understanding of the requirements and processes for completing learning tasks, and knowledge of strategies that can be used for learning.

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

 

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Emotionally Safe Learning Environments

5 Nov

This blog post was originally published in December 2011. Occasionally I revisit my old posts to see if I still agree with them. 🙂

Student-centered and emotionally safe pedagogy is an attitude.  It is not a handbook of tips and tricks, to help us survive our days.  It is being physically and emotionally present when the student needs us. It is also thinking more about the process than the product. And in these classrooms the focus is in creating, not copying, no matter what the task is – this applies to art as well as note taking!

I think today, in 2022, the learner-centeredness and focusing on supporting students’ emotional safety is more important than ever! But this may require a perspective change for educators and administrators. A big one. Shifting from perceiving students as disobedient, uncontrollable, mean, or acting out, to understanding that these behaviors are indicators of trauma in students’ lives.

We cannot deny the effects of trauma in our classrooms!

Students need our help, so that they can learn how to self-regulate, or to use better ways to get their needs met. SEL is important and necessary in education, but it may not be enough. I think in 2022 we all need to learn how to use Trauma Informed Practices to create emotionally safe learning environments. Emotionally safe classrooms are flexible by their nature and they have rules that are consistent and justified. Ordering other people arbitrarily around is only a way to show your power over them.  Being considerate is generally understood as a virtue, and showing the same politeness to children does not go without rewards. Treating students as individual human beings feels like basic courtesy to me.

The central values of safety, co-operation, individuality, and responsibility help students to build a realistic self-image together with the teacher and classmates – and these all are central SEL skills we all need to be successful in the society. These values also create the foundation for an emotionally safe learning environment. Most often these values are expressed in the classrooms and discussed with the students. Ideally the wording of the rules is created in cooperation with students, and confirmed with the signatures of the teacher and students, before posting them on the wall for further reference.

Stress-free atmosphere is the first principle for creating an emotionally safe growing and learning environment. Focusing on learning process instead of the product helps to create the feeling of having enough time, which enables students to focus on their own learning instead of external factors that might disturb their concentration. This also supports learner agency. Knowing that their thoughts and ideas are valued helps students to think and express their thoughts more freely.

More thinking equals more learning.

The one situation when most of us feel threatened or unsafe is while we are receiving feedback. In an emotionally safe classroom feedback becomes a natural part of the learning process, and thus stops being scary.  While utilizing students’ daily self-evaluation and teacher’s verbal comments, the feedback system actually becomes a tool for the students to control their own learning. This automatically holds students accountable for their own learning and helps them realize how much they already have learned. Ungrading is a growing movement among teachers!

I mentor students pursuing their M.Ed. degrees In Learning Experience Design and Curriculum & Instruction, and try to follow my own advice. Therefore the most important question I ask every day is: How can I support your learning today?

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What Learner-Centered Education Really Means

16 May

Learner-centered and emotionally safe pedagogy is an attitude or disposition. It is not a handbook of tips and tricks. It is being physically and emotionally present when a student needs us. It is also about focusing on the learning process instead of the product (worksheet, assessment, test score, etc.). It means  engaging in a dialogue, offering help and support, and answering the question every student asks: What’s in it for me? 

Personalization is one of the modern approaches in learning and teaching. However, it is important to remember that designing great learning experiences doesn’t require any special apps, programs or gadgets! We want it to based on Learner-centered pedagogy because it has a long history and it has proven to be very effective. At the simplest form learner-centered means that we are are focusing everything around students needs. (Image below: my starburst mirror in the making)

When I was making my starburst mirror few years back, I was thinking that this is how student-centered learning really works: keeping students in the center and carefully building the individualized support around them. This means purposefully designing the instructional process (teaching methods, lesson planning and classroom management) to meet students’ needs, focusing on supporting students’ individual learning process (learning and development and SEL) and using assessment data to support students’ individual learning processes. Please see TPK for more info about pedagogical knwoledge.

Some students need more support than others. We are not clones and should not be treated like ones, so it is important to abandon the outdated factory model, where learning is seen to be a product (of instruction and testing). To me, one the cringiest examples of the product thinking is seeing 28 pieces of identical “artwork” on classroom walls. Yes, students had learned to follow directions and create a copy of something, but the scary truth is that we will never creat the same competency when following somone else’s thinking. For deep learning to happen we must engage in our own thinking – this is what I learned while working for Head Start. Children were amazingly creative and learned so much every day while playing.

A major problem is that we still talk about learning and teaching like they were just one process. But 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 space (classroom) – but it would be foolish for us to imagine that students only learn at school! The “real” learning often happens after studying has been done, and the newly gained knowledge is used in real-life situations and combined with all the existing knowledge and experiences student have. This is what “deep learning” means: reconstructed personal understanding of the topic.

When we perceive learning as an in-built force within our students, the teaching job became instantly easier! Being a facilitator for learning and guiding  students to build their own knowledge is a huge step towards supporting learner agency. And it is truly learner-centered! 

We want to strive towards the next step in education: schools evolving to places where knowledge is socially constructed and contextually reinvented. We can do this is ANY given classroom  by offering choices for students and making their learning more meaningful. But this also presents the need for mutual intentionality and accountability – students coming to school with the intention to learn, teachers with the intention to support students’ individual learning. Not just meeting the standard of the learning objective of the day. Please understand that I am NOT against standards! But meeting them cannot be the ONLY goal of education.

The one thing that sustains my professional practice after a decade in Higher Ed is that I get to talk and email with my students, one at the time, and ask the most important question:

How can I help and support your learning process today?

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Teachers’ learning process has three dimensions

5 Nov

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

~John Cotton Dana

Our world today is very different from the dawn of the industrial world where school systems were created, so the way we prepare students for their unknown future should be changed. Well-rounded contemporary education aims for students (and teachers) to achieve (and improve) the global competencies that are to:

  • examine the world, including local and intercultural issues
  • understand and appreciate diverse perspectives
  • effectively communicate ideas and interact respectfully with others
  • take responsible action toward sustainability and collective well-being

Today information is available everywhere – hand held devices, computers, books – and in various forms – text, sounds, images, movies, infographs, social media, and more.  This means the teacher cannot be seen as the sole source of information, but we must become the facilitators of students’ individual learning. We will guide their learning process and provide support for making good choices about how to use all the information we have. Changing the teaching profession to support individual learning process instead of just delivering information must also change the way we think about teacher training and professional development.

Just like their students, teachers have diverse needs for their learning and professional development, and are entitled to their own learner-centered training experiences. Only by strengthening teachers’ learning process we can truly improve their professional competence and ultimately the learning experiences pupils will have.  Standards alone are not the solution – there must be room for personalization for all learners regardless their age or educational level. Engaging in the individual learning process enables both teachers and students to build up from standards and achieve the global competencies to thrive in the modern world.

3d teacher competence

All training and professional development (PD) should include the three dimensions of teachers’ professional competency: teaching and instruction, pedagogical knowledge and global reflection.  All three dimensions are important and contribute to the teaching-learning situations. The colour in the thirds deepens with layers of professionalism, produced by the teachers’ ongoing learning process. You probably notice how the third part, global reflection, seems to be drifting apart from the two others? That is unfortunately happening too often in training and PD. But excluding global reflection makes it significantly harder for teachers to achieve excellent learning facilitation skills and thrive in their profession.  In Teacher’s Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK) the global reflection includes Evaluation and diagnosis procedures and Data & Research literacy. But I think it really is a broader concept including the global competencies!

Too often teacher PD stays on the first dimension – the practical and concrete classroom practice to deliver lessons. Teaching and instruction trainings and PD sessions talk about the curricula or ready assessments without supporting teachers’ thinking about the pedagogical choices that would be best for their students. How would you incorporate the global competencies into the classroom experience, if everything is designed fro a standard population and scripted by someone else? And how do you think students will learn to investigate the world, recognize diverse perspectives, communicate effectively and take action to improve things if they are not active participants in their own learning? It they are just presented the curriculum?  If they just arrive to school to be instructed and assessed instead of engaging in their own learning with the curiosity they have towards the world?

The underlying instructional philosophies and curricular choices are very important for effective learning experiences! The global competencies are not compatible with the basic behaviorist one-size-fits-all education. We must dig deeper into teachers’ learning!

Pedagogical  knowledge is the middle dimension of teachers’ learning process, which means it needs to be visited and revisited all the time in order to tie the rapid instructional decisions to the theoretical background we have about teaching, learning and understanding. According to this infograph at TeachThought blog teachers make 1500 educational decisions each day. Solid pedagogical knowledge helps us as teachers to become aware about our own choices in classroom practices. With solid knowledge of how learning happens and how it can best be supported we are taking a huge leap towards making learning personal and enabling students to become accountable for their own learning. No classroom or group of students is identical to another, so no practices should be adopted without thinking how well they fit into this particular class or group.

The third dimension of professional learning – global reflection – combined with the pedagogical knowledge helps teachers to decide what strategies are the best fit in the classroom. For educators it is really important to think about the question “why?”. Teaching dispositions, values and  philosophy belong to global reflection, as well as didactic design, even though it is terminology used mostly in Scandinavia. This third dimension in teachers’ learning process and professionalism is s the big picture of teaching and learning, and how different learning theories become alive in our classroom. We only see what we are ready to perceive, which is why we must have solid knowledge of educational research and know how to use assessment as learning and assessment for learning in addition to assesment of learning. Awareness is the first step in everything.  Changing between the big picture and details helps us analyse teaching and learning, because it relates to the ability of taking different viewpoints to the same issue and trying to see what others see. For teachers this is essential, so that they can offer information in student-sized chunks and relate it to students’ previous knowledge, and thus support students’ learning process.

The three dimensions of teachers’ learning process (concrete instruction, pedagogical knowledge and values/research behind it)  are present in all teaching-learning situations. They can be visible in the choices and interactions, or veiled in hidden expectations.

I want to encourage all teachers and instructors to engage in value discussions and joint reflection with colleagues and students to strengthen their own professional competence. PD is very insufficient for us teachers to be effective in our profession, because  it most often is that one-size-fits-all training. Please be proactive and create a PLC (Professional Learning Community) with your colleagues to deepen your own competencies in all three dimensions of teachers’ learning process!

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Using SEL to support learner agency

22 Jan

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.
    • Choosing is a skill that can (and must) be learned in a safe environment.
    • 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!

References:

[1] Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American journal of sociology, 103(4),
962-1023. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231294.

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

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Empower students to learn!

15 Nov

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is here to stay. And that is a great thing! As learning is such a holistic phenomenon, we educators must be aware of the emotional and social parts of it, and encourage students to collaborate and make most of their learning experience. In other words: instead of just teaching/ providing information, we must empower our students to learn.

There is a huge difference between these two approaches to education.

I personally believe that student empowerment is one major superpower of Finnish education. I know I experienced it throughout my own education in Finland, more in some classes and less in some others, througout the basic education (K-12). My deepest and most profound experiences of learner empowerment happened during my M. Ed. studies and teacher training at University of Jyväskylä. So, I am happily exporting student empowerment and making it an integral part of my own practice.

The easiest way to empower learning is to provide choices for students and discuss learning being an iterative process. We generally have stronger emotional attachment to things we get to choose – and that emotional connection increases the likelihood of deeper learning to happen. It’s because ownership, engagement and intrinsic motivation amplify each other. Empowered students have more ownership over what they learn.

Having choices is the prerequisite for ownership!

Empowering students to learn autonomously can be scary in the beginning. I am not suggesting that you should let go of all the classroom rules and allowing students to do whatever they please. That would not be education. But starting to add choices for students to support their self-direction, and embedding SEL into every lesson is a great start. CASEL has awesome resources for relationship skills, social and self-awareness, self-management and responsible decision-making. The only way students can learn to make good decisions is to have choices and get to practice choosing in safe environments. Making good choices is just one skill among other life skills and we should foster it in all possible ways we can. Because that’s how we support students’ critical thinking!

It is important to remember that SEL is so much more than just training students to use their “power skills” like executive functions or relationship skills – SEL is an integral part of human development and needs to be embedded into curriculum and instruction instead of being taught as another school subject.

Teaching with empowerment changes the power dynamics in a classroom, and communications between faculty and students. We teachers and faculty want to assume the role of a guide, not the leader. And we do this to support learner agency which is “perhaps the most higher-order, emergent, abstractly defined, and most cherished of human functions” [1]. This is why empowerment is so important! Learner agency is all about the choices and degree of freedom students have about their learning! Teaching how to choose is an integral part of education.

Empowering students to learn means striving to provide ample opportunities for students to have autonomy (choose readings, assignments, assessments, partners, projects, etc.) so that they can grow their competencies and relate with the teacher and each other. These three (A, C, and R) are parts of self-determination in life and learning. More information under this link. It is crucially important for us as educators to realize that the gaming industry has already harnessed the ACRs and benefit from the motivational pull to play [2]. The three elements are:

  • Autonomy – have choices and be an agent of one’s own life and learning
  • Competence – feel capable in own learning and growing skills
  • Relatedness – accceptance, feeling connected and interacting with others

We can empower students to learn by emphasizing ACRs. Alas, it is harder for students to learn to use their self- determination in compliance-driven learning environments. It is harder for teachers, too, because in the beginning it may not be easy to figure out what kind of choices students could have. Fortunately we have contemporary research to support our choices for empowerment.

APA – Top 20 principles for k-12

Choice and Intricnsic motivation – Patall et al. meta-analysis

Meaningful learning: essential factor – Novak article

Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning – Book

References:

[1] Zelazo, P. D. (2020). Executive Function and Psychopathology: A Neurodevelopmental Perspective. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16. (citation is from page 443)

[2] Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and research in Education, 7(2), 133-144.

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