Group items tagged

When the teacher dominates the learning, students take shallow approaches to learning.

1.  Teachers do learning tasks less. Assign to students some of the tasks of organizing the content, giving examples, summarizing discussions, solving problems, and drawing diagrams, charts, and graphs.            2.  Teachers do less telling; students do more discovering. Give a quiz on your syllabus and policies without going over it first. Let students discover information in assigned readings without presenting it first or summarizing it later.  3.  Teachers do more design work. Design activities and assignments that move students to new skill levels, motivate engagement in the course content by doing the work of practitioners in the discipline, and that develop self-awareness of their learning of the content. 4.   Faculty do more modeling. Demonstrate how a skilled learner (the teacher) continues to learn. Show them drafts of your articles, notes on your own reading in professional journals; talk aloud as you solve a problem, thereby revealing  and modeling your thinking process. 5.  Faculty do more to get students learning from and with each other. Create work for small groups to do in class. 6.  Faculty work to create climates for learning. Create a climate that promotes interaction, autonomy, and responsibility (more in chapter five). 7.  Faculty do more with feedback. In addition to assigning grades, use other means of providing frequent feedback (more in chapter six).

focuses on student responsibility for learning and how to promote it.

transforming passive students into autonomous learners

The more structured we make the environment, the more structure students need

The more motivation we provide, the less they find within themselves. The more responsibility for learning we try to assume, the less they accept on their own. The more control we exert, the more restive their response. We end up with students who have little commitment to and almost no respect for learning and who cannot function without structure and imposed control. (p. 98)

The more we decide for students, the more they expect us to decide.

eimer explains several strategies for creating a climate that produces self-regulated intrinsically motivated learners: 

The instructor should “make the content relevant, demonstrate its power to answer questions, and otherwise show its apparent intrigue.” Make the student responsible for learning decisions by relying on logical consequences of action and inaction, rather than punishment. For example, to deal with lateness, present important material or assignments early in the period that you do not repeat, rather than deduct attendance points for lateness. Do not summarize chapters if students have not read them. If they arrive unprepared, put the unread material on a test; give frequent tests. Be consistent in administering policies. If your syllabus says late homework is not accepted, never accept late homework despite the heart-wrenching excuse offered by the student. Involve students in a discussion of creating a climate that promotes learning. Have this discussion early in the semester. Weimer’s suggestion for starting the discussion is to have students complete sentence stems such as “In the best class I ever had, teachers . . .” “In the best class I ever had, students . . .” “I learn best when . . .” “I feel most confident as a learner when . . .” (p. 108) Obtain feedback on the classroom climate occasionally and revisit the discussion of policies and procedures. Employ practices that “encourage students to encounter themselves as learners” (p. 111). Explain the purposes and benefits of assignments and projects; tell students what problems they might run into in doing the assignments and suggest remedies. Help them with time management. With group projects, provide guidance in managing the project, handling group dynamics, and assigning individual responsibilities.

helps us deal with the fact that almost all students will resist their teacher’s learning-centered approaches. Most of the learner-centered strategies recommended in this book change what students have become accustomed to. Understanding the reasons will help teachers deal with the inevitable student resistance when they present learner-centered practices and policies that withdraw the support students have become dependent upon during their first twelve years of schooling. The good news is that most students see the benefits of learner-centered approaches and benefit from them.

, why do students resist it? Based on her research, Weimer lists four reasons: Learner-centered approaches are more work. When the teacher does not summarize the important points in the chapter, the students will have to read it for themselves. When the teacher asks small groups to produce five applications of a concept, rather than supply it in a handout, the students have to do more work. Learner-centered approaches are more threatening. Students who lack confidence in themselves as learners become filled with anxiety at the prospect of becoming responsible for decisions that might be wrong. Students who are not used to questions with no single, authority-approved right answer are fearful of being wrong. Learner-centered approaches involve losses. The strategies recommended in this book are designed to move students to higher stages of self-directedness and higher stages of intellectual development. Moving from one stage to another requires a loss of certainty and the comfort that certainty brings. Learner-centered approaches may be beyond students. Some students’ lack of self-confidence or intellectual immaturity may prevent their accepting responsibility for their own learning.

overcome student resistance to learner-centered approache

The communication is frequent and explicit The communication encourages and positively reinforces The communication solicits feedback from students The communication resists their resistance.

developmental approach to transforming passive dependent learners into self-confident autonomous learners. Learners become self-directed in stages, not in one sin

moment of transformatio

Energy andmatter: Flows, cycles, and conservation

connections

Structure and function

Stability and change

Scale, proportion, and quantity

Systems and system models

all humans have an intrinsic need to be self-determining or autonomous

as well as to feel competent

connected

SDT explains extrinsic motivation processes in terms of external regulation as the reasons for undertaking the task lie outside the individual.

a perception that what they do will not affect the outcome

an attribution of low value to the task being undertaken

the tendency to focus only on intrinsic motivation

It measures situational intrinsic motivation, extrinsic forms of motivation (external regulation and identified regulation), and amotivation

Case study one was situated within a compulsory integrated science and technology course

Case study two was positioned within an introductory social studies curriculum course that formed a compulsory component of the same programme.

suggests that higher quality, more self-determined types of motivation were only slightly more evident than the traditional type of extrinsic motivation–external regulation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and amotivatio

suggesting that autonomous types of motivation (i.e., identified regulation and intrinsic motivation) were more prevalent.

associated with individuals who engage in an activity because the results may have personal value to them or because the activity is regarded as worthwhile.

these findings clearly show that motivation can be a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be fully explained from the perspective of motivation as either a learner characteristic or an effect of learning environment design.

practitioners need to be cognisant of the important role they play in influencing learner motivation when designing learning activities.

he relevance and value of the task

need to be clearly identified and linked to learning objectives to help

By offering meaningful choices (i.e., not just option choices) to learners that allow them to pursue topics that are of interest to them, the perceived value of the activity is further enhanced.

ongoing communication with learners, where they feel able to discuss issues in an open and honest manner, practitioners are in a better position to accurately monitor and respond to situational factors that could potentially undermine learner motivation.

Motivation is enhanced by the way in which the instructional material is organized

produces a mild level of anxiety

It is important to help each student set goals and to provide informative feedback regarding progress toward the goals

And I really liked online teaching – still do – because it allows me to reach students on a personal level.

I can’t help but fear, deep down, that the students just don’t care. And I hate feeling that way.