Developing the Independent Learner

It is February, and you feel recharged and reset following the Winter Break! In reflection, with over half of the school year complete, you aim to continue to grow your students academically and further develop their love for learning.  This is no simple task, but you can support your students to become more independent to foster deep, lasting learning.  To do this, ensure your students have adequate time to process the curriculum and wrestle with purposeful, student-centered, and challenging tasks.

How often do we hear a student abruptly say, “I don’t get it!” Students are likely to sit passively and lean on the teacher to intervene, provide support, and even carry a significant amount of the cognitive load.  In contrast, we want our students to rely less on the teacher, carry some of the cognitive load, use strategies and processes to tackle a new task, and be able to get unstuck when engaged in a problem-solving activity.

It is vital to offer students sufficient opportunities to develop the skills and habits of mind to engage in meaningful and challenging tasks, encouraging them to think critically and creatively.  So, instead of regurgitating facts and concepts, emphasizing lecture and rote memorization, engage your students in “productive struggle.”  For example:

• Co-create “just-right scaffolds” – Use sentence stems, models, or graphic organizers.
• Ask probing, guiding, open-ended questions – What do you notice? Why do you think that didn’t work? What is another way to approach it? What have you tried so far?
• Give all students processing time – after asking a question, wait at least 15 seconds.
• Try Three Before Me – Teach students to re-read or restate the problem, check notes or examples, ask a peer, try a different representation or approach.
• Use error analysis as a learning routine – Find the error and fix it.  Explain why someone might think this answer is correct. Which error is most common and why?
• Provide supports that promote reasoning, not shortcuts – Sentence starters, partially completed examples, concept maps, vocabulary banks, which one doesn’t belong?, multiple interpretations of the same text, conflicting primary sources, predict-test-revise cycles, etc.
• Use productive group structures – Round Robin (each student shares thinking), Think-Pair-Share, Group roles: facilitator, checker, explainer, recorder, Turn and Talk, Numbered Heads.
• Write First, Talk Second – Stop and Jot, Brain Dump, Free Write, Journaling.

Embrace the struggle and gain momentum as you move toward the spring.  Avoid the temptation to naturally jump in and provide your students with hints or steps to solving a problem – put the onus of thinking on the student.  Although it may not feel supportive, you are doing the right thing and ensuring the student is responsible for doing the thinking!

Contributor: Todd A. Stephan, Ed.D., WCU Region

Reference: Zaretta Hammond (2015). Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.