One of the skills children develop at school in preparation for adulthood, increasingly during their final school years, is how to learn independently.
Independent learning is the process whereby someone manages their own learning, rather than their learning being managed by a teacher. But the process of learning involves far more than the action of learning. The process involves study and revision; writing and discussion; planning and reflection; monitoring and evaluation; and, perhaps, rewards and sanctions. Independent learning is where a student manages the process of learning themselves, rather than the teacher, such as the planning, monitoring and evaluation of their learning.
Independent learning should not be conflated with independent thinking. These two types of skills can develop independently of one another. Independent learning comes in a wide variety of degrees. One need not be a complete autodidact in order to be an independent learner.
While studying for a PhD is mostly a process of independent learning, a doctoral student has a supervisor or several from whom they receive feedback on their work; and a doctoral student typically discusses their work with and presents their work to their supervisors, peers and others working in their field.
All of this is integral to the learning process of graduate study. The best society is one with well-educated citizens.
This has limits; a well-functioning society would not be entirely made up of scholars or academics; and those who govern society need not remain in formal education until midlife.
Plato would disagree with the final of these claims: those that would govern the just city-state he outlines in the Republic should receive an education until the age of thirty-five, followed by fifteen years of holding offices to gain life experience, before they would be ready to govern — if, that is, they excelled during those fifteen years.
But we should strive to educate as many of our citizens as well as possible until at least their early adulthood, in school and then through whichever form of higher education they might choose to pursue thereafter.
Beyond the education we receive prior to and in the early stages of adulthood, while people can and should enrol onto continuing education courses, people should, more importantly, continue to educate themselves. Editors: Norbert M. Contents Search. Independent Learning. Authors Authors and affiliations Kay Livingston. How to cite. Synonyms Autonomous learning ; Self-directed learning ; Self-regulated learning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Bandura, A. Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52 1 , 1— CrossRef Google Scholar. Bruner, J. Hopefully their confidence will increase as they look back and become aware of how far they've come throughout the school year. Supporting the development of independent learners in your classroom can be challenging. By video recording your lesson and afterwards reflecting on it, you can effectively recognise the level of student involvement in a lesson, analyse your teaching and identify areas of improvement.
Video reflections allow you to plan your practice better, develop independent learners and ultimately improve student outcomes. Developing independent learning skills that improve outcomes Posted by Christophe Mullings on January 7, What is independent learning?
Why is it so important? Provide students with opportunities to self-monitor Self-monitoring depends on the two processes of establishing goals and receiving feedback from others and from oneself.
Use questioning as scaffolding to independent learning The aim here is a gradual, step-by-step transfer of responsibility from the teacher to the student. Learn more about effective questioning in this article: How to improve your questioning skills 3.
0コメント