#136 Creating Independent Learners

Hi Everyone

Those of you who are regular readers will be familiar with the fact that I regularly present a webinar for Parentkind, around ‘How to Help Your Child Achieve in School’. Due to its popularity, the organisation (who act as a hub for UK Parent/Teacher Associations) recently approached me about adding a follow-up webinar to provide parents particularly, (but also teachers), with further support.

The new webinar will be about ‘Helping Your Child Become an Independent Learner’ and is due to be delivered at the beginning of April. As I’m about to take a short break (from this busy retired life of mine), the presentation is ready early and I’m in a position to share a few titbits from it with you in advance of the actual event.

Some parents can feel a bit disenfranchised when their child starts formal education, because their personal sphere of influence seems to narrow considerably once school takes over responsibility. It can be difficult for us as parents who have been our child’s first teacher, to accept that we’re now physically out of the picture for a large chunk of that learner’s day.

We still contribute by making sure that our children leave home carrying their book bag, lunch box, PE Kit, snack money etc, so that they’re ready for a day in school, and we get used to the idea that they’re now being taught by others. As time goes by however, some parents become concerned about not understanding the current curriculum or more recent teaching methods, and feel less able to influence educational outcomes for their child(ren).

For me, our greatest sphere of influence at this stage is not the equipment we provide them with, or how we get them to school, but rather what they carry away from home each day inside their heads! It’s known that what any learner brings with them mentally into a lesson has the greatest influence on how they will absorb and use information from the classroom. (Promoting Reflection in Learning - A Model (p36) 1985, David Boud, Rosemary Keogh, David Walker).

We can therefore make a real difference by having a positive influence on how they think. Every learner in school has been born with some level of cognitive ability, so already possesses a massive potential for learning. As with all potential, which only exists as a possibility in the first instance, something has to happen that causes its release. Action is therefore required and in the case of our young learners, that action has to come from within themselves.

So, our role as parents is similar to that of the old proverb which reads something along the lines of; Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day, but teach them ‘how’ to fish and you feed them for a lifetime. I’d like to piggyback that with a new proverb; Tell a child ‘what’ to think and they can pass that day’s assessment, but teach them ‘how’ to think and they can learn independently for a lifetime.

So, teaching our children how to think effectively is a really important part of our influence on what they can achieve in school. The first of my Parentkind webinars looks closely at how parents can communicate with their children in a way that develops the pre-cursors to metacognition. Metacognition allows a learner to analyse their own thought processes, realise there may be other ways of thinking that might bring better results, and have the confidence to try something different.

In this new webinar, we look more closely at specific actions we can take to help our children climb over any barriers they may face and become more independent in their approach to learning. One of those is supporting them to understand what happens to the blood flow in their brains when they feel stressed. There are so many things that happen during the school day which have the potential to create that ‘threat’ response in students.

Here's just a few; being asked to read out loud, being expected to answer a question in front of the whole class, not understanding what the teacher said, public attention being drawn to a mistake, being told off by the teacher unfairly, losing a piece of equipment, arriving late to school or a class, falling out with a friend, forgetting to do homework, receiving poor test results, coming last in a competitive activity, not remembering how to do something, feeling left out in some way, or being laughed at for being different.

Unfortunately, these things happen, but do we teach our children how to handle those stressors so that they are confident about recovering quickly? One of the resources from my Learner Success Pathway leads a student through 4 quick strategies for regaining calm following an emotional response to something that’s happened in school. I will be sharing that with parents during the session, because the ability to self-regulate is an important contributing factor in improving learner independence.

We also look in more detail at how important it is for any learner to appreciate all the different stages of the learning process and where they might personally be getting stuck. Even more importantly, we discuss what children and young people need to know in order to become ‘unstuck’ without relying on others. Planning for success is another essential skill for an independent learner, because taking personal responsibility for growth is what maintains progress.

I hope if you’re a regular reader that you’ll recognise the constant theme of ‘metacognition in practice’ woven into what I’m planning to share during the Parentkind session, and invite you to join me next time for more insights around this essential topic. If you’ve not yet subscribed, you might like to do so now to make sure you don’t miss out.

Take care in the meantime.

Warm regards

Liz