Student Selected Learning - Getting kids started.

Where I work the vision is that children will get to a point where they can plan their learning and challenge the boundaries of what they know and what they think they can do. There's a lot of research out there that shows students learn more effectively when they are given opportunities to make choices as they become more involved in the learning process instead of just waiting for an adult to decide what it is pertinent for them to know and what they "should" be able to do.

Think back to when you were a kid - was there any way you could possibly have predicted what today's world would be like? We live in an age where information is growing at such exponential rates that we can hardly keep up, yet todays kids, when given access to tools to process this information, such as hand held technologies, lap it up and adapt to new tools and processes quickly.

Now that we live in an "instant" world, how can we mere humans keep children interested in learning? Once again, by giving them a say in how and what they learn and allowing them to explore "new" technologies.

Over the past few weeks we were visited by Daniel Birch who is the Principal of Discovery1 school in Christchurch NZ. His school has been practising student directed learning for a decade now and his reminder and challenge to us was to give our students greater control over their learning and encourage them to take what is presented to them, play with it, explore it, then reinvent it to make it meaningful to them.

How in the world can you do that? I hear you saying - the same thing I said to myself just a few years ago, take a risk and start with asking the children what they are interested in learning about.

At my school we hold learning conferences with students regularly. We have conferencing prior to our planning sessions and instead of the name teacher, we use the term Learning Advisor. The idea is that conferencing along with our observation of the students informs workshops and targeted teaching in the following weeks. Children are assigned to a home group, but may work with Learning Advisors who are assigned to a different home group.  Staff strengths are utilised more effectively and children are exposed to a variety of experiences and approaches to learning.

When we hold these Learning Conferences sometimes they are with individual students and other times they are with a group of students who have a common interest in studying a particular topic. We call them Passion Project Groups. Sometimes Learning Conferences may occur with more than one Learning Advisor.

When children come to a conference we use a "Spark Sheet" to help them articulate their learning and determine where they would like to go to next. At the moment we are experimenting with ways to record what is agreed upon at each conference, goal setting and the reasoning behind it.

All you need is to ask "What would you like to learn about? Why?" and the students will take it on board, as long as they are confident that they will be listened to and their ideas taken into account. It's really important to follow through on what students say and not be tokenistic. I have realised that when students know that they will actually "get to do it" their ideas become more creative and they are more deeply involved with and aware of their learning.

I urge you teachers out there to try it out - yes it can be scary- but have faith, all kids love to learn when they are given a chance to take it and make it their own!

My school's Learning Process (FYI only)

My draft of a Learning Conference record sheet (FYI as well)