Teaching Learning: Building Independent Learners

TL;DR

Because we are all busy and stressed about the shift to remote learning, here's the TL;DR version (a flowchart and a graphic organizer).

Here's a graphic organizer I made to use with my students. Click here to see it.

The Whole Version:

Educators are some of the most amazing people in the world, and we are about to see that on full display over the coming weeks. As schools across the nation are shutting down in response to COVID19, teachers are ramping up their creativity and finding new ways to reach students in these trying times.

So many schools are switching teachers into online environments and making remote learning the norm for the next few weeks. Here are a few things I would encourage people to remember around this:

1. Not every student has access to the internet at home. 
2. There is a good amount of research out there that shows how improper technology implementation can actually hinder learning. 
3. Education is about a whole lot more than content. 

As such, here's what I sent home with my students in anticipation of this closure.

I wanted to make sure my students were still getting the things that they came to school for, things like compassion and love, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc. If you would like to use this, click here to make your own copy.

The reason that I wanted to provide my students with a holistic approach to learning in this time is because we need to remember that the point of education isn't to pass a test; the point of education is to create happy, healthy, productive people who know what matters and how to make a difference. 

Creating Learners

Here is where we get to what I really want to talk about in this post: creating learners. I don't mean creating students who know content, I don't mean creating students with good grades, and I sure as hell don't mean creating compliant followers. What I mean is that, now more so than ever, students need to learn how to be a learner. 

To do this, we have to think about what it means to be a learner in the modern age. This summer, my own learning was around how to build a patio. My wife and I bought a house last year, and the backyard looks like Narnia, but like the version of Narnia where people forgot about it for a solid century and let the weeds take over. There was this terrible fire pit, something that might barely meet the criteria of a patio, and then a whole lot of weeds and dirt. 

Here's what I started with after clearing everything out.

So, what did this learning process look like, and how does it apply to the classroom?

The Learning Process

Let's start by going through what my learning process actually looked like.

1) The first thing I did was to determine what I needed to learn in a big-picture concept. For me, that was building a patio. For students, that would be your content or skills. 

2) The second thing I did, and I'm sure this will surprise absolutely no one, was to hop on YouTube and watch a couple videos. I started by developing my context around the learning that needed to take place. This is such a crucial step, and just as importantly, I watched more than one video. 

3) I identified the important elements from the videos. For me, I made a list of all the steps I needed to take (excavating, leveling, drainage/gravel, sand, pavers). I took the big picture and identified the key learning that needed to happen for me to get there. For a classroom example, I did this with my students as we started our unit around persuasive communication. I gave them 15 minutes to look up persuasive writing and watch videos about it. From there, they told me what the most important concepts were. As a class, we used those to make our unit objectives. 

4) Talk to other people about your understanding. This step so often gets overlooked. We do a bunch of the "peer review" when we get to the end of the learning process, but it's so important to use "peer review" when we are in the middle of the learning process. This forces us to bounce our thinking off someone else, not just our product, because engaging collaboratively in the thinking process is where learning happens. 

5) From there, it was time to create a sequence or prioritized list for my learning. With the patio, that was easy because it was sequential. For students learning content, most of the time they will have to evaluate and prioritize (important thinking skills) which pieces of the content are most important. 

6) Once they have their list, then they begin really digging in and learning the individual pieces. Now, each piece of this goes in a learning cycle. 

• The first step is to access the information. Watch a YouTube video, read an article, look at images, etc. 
• The second step is to test your understanding and get feedback. For the patio, that was easy. For students, this is where a teacher becomes crucial. We need to provide opportunities for students to get immediate feedback on their level of learning so that they can make choices for where to go next. 
• The third step is really just to loop back to the beginning and then repeat until they have mastered the content. 

Here's how that process turned out:

This was the reward for my own learning process.

So what? 

Well, in a time where we are delivering instruction from home, we have two choices: (1) create a bunch of screencast lectures and make students watch them, or (2) teach students how to be learners and then support them in that process. 

How great would it be to explicitly teach students the process of learning, simply provide them the topics they need to learn, and then facilitate dialogue and assessment around that learning? 

Isn't that the goal, that students become the type of lifelong learner that can tackle any challenge because they've been afforded opportunities to do so in school?

Final Thought:

This is a tough time for all educators. Shifting to online learning can be rough. To lessen the load, stop recording a screencast for every lesson. Not only is it exhausting for you, but it puts students in the passenger seat for their own learning. Put them in the driver's seat. Explicitly teach them the process for learning. It will give them some ownership and give you your life back. 

We can get through this. We're all in this together. If you have any questions or want to reach out, please do. Find me on Twitter: @Mr_Rablin.

Need support taking students through the process?

Here's a graphic organizer I made to use with my students. Click here to see it.

If you want you own copy, click this link to make your own copy in Google Docs.