Creating A Self Directed Learning Environment

Educate the whole child—improve the whole school. Implementing new teaching practices can feel like juggling. This book shows you how to balance standards-based learning, social-emotional learning, and cognitive development and build realistic plans for success. With a flexible, three-tiered, visual framework designed for schoolwide collaboration, it helps you build on your school’s strengths and the potential of existing programs. It also offers: • An integrated philosophy focused on self-directed learning and the whole child • Attention to academic inclusion, behavior intervention, and classroom management • Research sourced from CASEL and state programs and initiatives • Numerous illustrations, tables, and graphics • Tools and supplemental resources for implementation

Don’t do more work—do the right work. Educators at all levels have increasing demands keeping them working harder than ever, but they are often working hard on things that don’t really help them reach the loftiest of goals—student success. This "Fake Work" can mire the most dedicated educator in exhaustion, burnout, and a lack of confidence that improvement is possible. Nielson and Burks show leaders and their teams how to stop doing Fake Work, by providing tools for gaining focus, building high-performance teams, and identifying and driving the right work with the right behaviors. When you offer your team a better way of working, planning, and collaborating, you turn Fake Work into Real Work—and stagnancy into dynamic change. This data-driven, research-based guide shows you • An overall approach to addressing your culture—the foundational elements that supports the change that sets you up for maximum performance. • A simple, three-part model—strategy, alignment, execution—for shedding Fake Work • Road maps for aligning organizational strategies and actions • Tools for gaining focus, building teams, and cultivating productive behaviors • Real educators’ stories • Exercises, reflection questions, charts, checklists, and more School change remains elusive when the path to success is murky. Clear the way for principals, teachers and students by turning Fake Work into Real Work—and uncertainty into true success.

"This book fills the gap between theory-laden academic books designed to help academic faculty incorporate self-directed learning activities into their courses and the self-help books designed to help motivate individuals to learn new skills"--

Educate the whole child—improve the whole school. Implementing evidence-based and innovative teaching practices can feel like juggling: If you have standards-based learning in one hand and social-emotional learning in the other, what do you do with cognitive development? This book shows you how to balance all 3, combining these concepts into manageable, realistic plans for success. In clear, easy-to-follow language, master teacher and educational expert Greg Mullen introduces a flexible, three-tiered, visual framework designed for schoolwide collaboration. He also offers: • An integrated philosophy focused on self-directed learning and the whole child • Research sourced from CASEL and state programs and initiatives • Attention to academic inclusion, behavior intervention, and classroom management • Numerous illustrations, tables, and graphics • Tools and supplemental resources for implementation Make innovation work for your school. With this guide, you and your colleagues will build on your strengths, discover the potential of your existing programs, and implement smart changes that make a real difference for students.

Give your students the skills they need to acquire knowledge for the rest of their lives. Help your teachers and your students face the biggest challenge education offers: the fundamental, necessary change from total reliance on a teacher to self-directed, self-motivated lifelong learning. Focuses on teaching students to learn how to learn. Promotes the concept of SDL, where students begin to teach themselves based on knowledge of their own work habits, insights, and value systems. If you're a principal, superintendent, or teacher who wants to change learning and teaching in your school or district - or if you're a counselor who wants to help students identify and modify self-destructive behavior - this practical, step-by-step guidebook points the way.

Most of our students neither know how learning works nor what they have to do to ensure it, to the detriment both of their studies and their development as lifelong learners.The point of departure for this book is the literature on self-regulated learning that tells us that deep, lasting, independent learning requires learners to bring into play a range of cognitive skills, affective attitudes, and even physical activities – about which most students are wholly unaware; and that self-regulation, which has little to do with measured intelligence, can be developed by just about anyone and is a fundamental prerequisite of academic success.Linda Nilson provides the theoretical background to student self-regulation,the evidence that it enhances achievement, and the strategies to help students develop it. She presents an array of tested activities and assignments through which students can progressively reflect on, monitor and improve their learning skills; describes how they can be integrated with different course components and on various schedules; and elucidates how to intentionally and seamlessly incorporate them into course design to effectively meet disciplinary and student development objectives. Recognizing that most faculty are unfamiliar with these strategies, she also recommends how to prepare for introducing them into the classroom and adding more as instructors become more confident using them.The book concludes with descriptions of courses from different fields to offer models and ideas for implementation. At a time of so much concern about what our students are learning in college and how well prepared they are for the challenges of tomorrow’s economy and society, self-regulated learning provides a reassuring solution, particularly as studies indicate that struggling students benefit the most from practicing it.

This volume focuses on assessing students' abilities as self-directed learners. The authors use 'triangulation' to ensure that the assessment system is balanced and complete.

This book will benefit specialists in the field of the education sciences. It represents significant progress in knowledge production. Self-directed learning has become increasingly important, not only for education in South Africa but also for education sciences in the international arena. This is a result of the changing education landscape, caused by the demands of the 21st century as well as the rapid change in knowledge production. Learners should be equipped with skills to take responsibility for their own learning. New innovative strategies should be incorporated into teaching and learning in order to meet the changing demands in education. Traditional teacher-centred practices are still the norm in most South African schools and higher-education institutions and do not adequately prepare students for lifelong learning in the 21st century. The content focuses on the theory behind self-directed learning, explores strategies such as cooperative learning, problembased learning, case-based teaching and large-group teaching that enhance self-directed learning and the use of blended learning in a self-directed learning environment. The book demonstrates how self-directed learning can be enhanced in mathematics, computer-science and life-science education and through the use of student tutors for geography. Digital technology could, for example, also be used in innovative ways for education in isiZulu folk poetry. The findings are based on original empirical research and a sound theoretical-conceptual framework. In an environment of rapidly changing knowledge production, this book responds to the challenge of how to equip learners with the necessary skills to take responsibility for their own learning. The book presents innovative teaching and learning strategies for meeting the changing demands in education. Group activities, the responsibilities of learners and the obstacles that hinder their learning are analysed, and the way in which educators can support them is discussed. Educational values such as mutual trust are discussed, and self-directed assessment is explored. This is a timely collective work authored by experts who subscribe to the approach of self-directed learning. Educators should discover new teaching and learning strategies and value the integration of self-directed learning in the classroom.