Earlier this year I had an accident and I was away from
school for seven weeks. My exam classes
were without me for a large part of the vital Spring Term. During this time my Year 13 learners put
together their final coursework projects.
In previous years, I would be in the classroom with them during this
time and I would be able to answer their queries at a moment's notice. This year, I was at the end of an email and I
was not necessarily able to answer promptly due to hospital appointments,
ongoing treatment and concentrating on my recovery. I have now marked their projects. The standard of them is higher than I would
have ordinarily expected from these learners despite me not being available to
them all the time - or was it because I wasn't available to them all the time.
I am convinced that the learners did better than would
normally have been expected because they could not take the easy way out and
ask teacher every time that had a problem; they had to find the answers out for
themselves. They had to be independent
learners. Turning them into independent
learners had been my aim from the start of the course. The exam board specifies that they should run
their coursework projects themselves and, for once, they had no option. Over time I had taught them all the skills
that they would need to complete their projects. I made sure that they had a stack of back up
material including exam board mark schemes, help sheets, and other support
material. They were all aware of where
this material was and what material was available to them. It appears that this time the learners really
did use the resources that were available to them rather than asking teacher
for help at the first sign of difficulty.
For me, this simply reinforces the idea of learners looking
in books and asking a fellow learner before asking the teacher for help - book,
buddy, boss, or 3B4ME. The key to making
this happen is quality first teaching and having the necessary support material
clearly available, but most of all, the teacher must know when to let the
learners struggle and find the solution for themselves. Teachers must accept that learners have to
take responsibility for their own learning and that over helping and over
teaching can in fact hinder this.
Teachers' natural instinct is to get involved with their learners and
their learning, but this is not always the best way forward because it can take
power away from the learner. In this
case, less teaching leads to more independence.
A little while ago there was a huge push in education for
independent learning. Like many fads
over the years this seems to have been abandoned and replaced by someone else's
trendy idea that will equally be left in the gutter when overtaken by the next
pedagogical fashion. Perhaps it is time
we revisited independent learning and really tried to make our learners
independent. This means that teachers
must force the learners to do it for themselves.
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