The Journey Toward Self-Directed Learning

In a nice series of posts on Softchalk Dennis Sale offers guidance on how teachers might operate to lead students to become self-directed learners. Each of the five posts highlights important steps along the way to becoming self-directed.

Framing Self-Directed Learning considers SDL alongside related work on self-regulated learning, and metacognition and considers how they relate to current discussions of 21^stcentury competencies

A Pedagogic Framework for Developing Self-Directed Learning reviews three key stages of the learning cycle: planning, managing, and evaluating learning. Pedagogical opportunities are noted for each, including: enhancing interest in setting goals, developing student self-efficacy to sustain effort, and cultivating the application of metacognitive strategies in assessing learning processes and outcomes.

Infusing Metacognition in Teaching and Learning considers strategies for using metacognition to support learning. The process begins by identifying desired learning outcomes and then introducing the metacognitive skills necessary to achieve such outcomes and allowing students to practice them, all as part of the content curriculum. All of this occurs in the course of teacher led learning while giving students the opportunity to practice metacognitive skills that will serve them well in self-directed learning.

Infusing Motivational Strategies highlights the essential role that motivation or interest plays in learning and links such motivation to learner self-efficacy and beliefs about the nature of knowledge. Pedagogical practices that encourage motivation include teaching about mindsets and learning, communicating positive growth mindset messages, and promoting mastery learning.

Developing Agentic Learners begins by reviewing how highlighting cognitive strategies or the conscious mental activities necessary to solve a problem can play an important role in developing self-directed learners and continues by developing the idea of agentic learners as those who have learned how to learn and adopted habits of mind that promote active engagement and autonomy in learning.

To see some of these principles applied check out Singapore Polytechnic University where Sale is an advisor. For a capsule summary, review the refrigerator magnet from SP below.