1. Strategic, goal-directed learners. They formulate plans for learning, devise effective strategies and tactics to optimize learning; they organize resources and tools to facilitate learning; they monitor their progress toward mastery; they recognize their own strengths and weaknesses as learners; and they abandon plans and strategies that are ineffective.
2. Resourceful, knowledgeable learners. They bring considerable prior knowledge to new learning; they activate that prior knowledge to identify, organize, prioritize and assimilate new information. They recognize the tools and resources that would help them find, structure, and remember new information; and they know how to transform new information into meaningful and useable knowledge.
3. Purposeful, motivated learners. Their goals are focused on mastery rather than performance; they know how to set challenging learning goals for themselves and how to sustain the effort and resilience that reaching those goals will require; they can monitor and regulate emotional reactions that would be impediments or distractions to their successful learning.
November 1, 2008 at 7:39 pm |
My experience is that most learners want learning to be simple and quick. Their learning objective, too often, is “to be done as fast as possible.”
November 28, 2008 at 5:40 am |
Cam, you raise a good point. I am high school teachers and see this insistence on speed a lot. Often it occurs when we started a new area of study, students seem to get confused between knowing and learning. The uncertainty of not yet knowing makes them jumpy but rather than go back over new material or talk it out with other students they speed up and confuse fast with accurate. Once they fail at the outset they are comfortable with giving up. It’s a real struggle to get them to study new material interactively. After a week or so a MIRACLE occurs, they KNOW the material and it seems they feel that they always KNEW it. No, Eureka’s! Worse, no generalization to the next NEW section. EXPERT LEARNERS are those students who recognize the process within themselves, and use that knowledge to actively learn. This stage may start for a few around 10th grade, more widespread by 11th and 12th. I don’t think it becomes automatic for most students until 2nd and 3rd year in college.
My concern is with teachers who are annoyed because the students resistance at the outset.. Persisting in giving students more ways to approach a problem when the student has firmly declined is frustrating. When students catch me presenting the same material in different ways, I look sheepish and agree with them. But I go on to explain that I know they would understand it, IF I could just find the right way to present. I encourage them to laugh at my pathetic efforts and soon they are telling me where I am wrong and how to better explain it to them. I never expected a teacher’s capacity to be pitied could be an effective learning strategy.
June 29, 2009 at 11:24 am |
I am a student teacher and during my secondary practicum I found that many students were so disconnected from learning that it was difficult to get them to even want to learn. It was more like they wanted the information to pass, but did not understand the difference of actually learning.
October 10, 2009 at 10:04 pm |
Cam, As a special educator who support students with learning disabilities, I know first hand what you mean by, “to be done as fast as poosible”. I see this with the learners, but also with some teachers who need to get through the curricula in a given time period. My belief is to let them (the students) learn something, which can be different for each child, before throwing new material at them. I see many students ’shut down’ before the mid term of a trimester. Why shouldn’t they? The curricula moves quicker than they can absorb it and then they are penalized with failing grades on tests. How about what they did learn? It’s like it doesn’t matter because they failed to learn all of it. Maybe they have learned most of it, but were not given the opportnity to demonstrate that because of ‘one size fits all” assessments.
October 15, 2009 at 12:28 pm |
I am a high school paraeducator. My daughter had this sticker on her bedroom door ‘Failure is Not An Option’. Like Mary McCAll says, ’shut down’ mode is common after receiving a failing grade. I believe that low grades should be viewed like the gas gage on your car; got some knowledge , need more. The car runs just fine on half a tank, but you need to top it off if you want to go very far.
I work with a teacher who gives grades in class every day for ‘work accomplished’. It is reward and accountability each day. She has a grade-assignment sheet for each week. There is a box after Mondays assignment that says “8″ possible/ then she puts the actual that they earned. They must take it home Friday and have their parents sign it.
In this case, the goal for the students in our class might be to be able to ‘go out’ this weekend.And, by the way, if they happen to learn a little math along the way,it can’t hurt a thing!