Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maurice Gibbons is education professor emeritus, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia and a former teacher of grades 4 through 13. In his university position he specialized in the development of innovative educational programs, including the internationally celebrated Walkabout program for the transition of youth to adulthood. He has written books and journal articles on innovative education and self-directed learning and currently speaks and consults throughout Canada and the United States Contact Self-Directed Learning at www.mauricegibbons.com.

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The Self-Directed Learning Handbook offers teachers and principals an innovative program for customizing schooling to the learning needs of individual students― and for motivating them to take increasing responsibility for deciding what and how they should learn. Whether the students are struggling or proficient, the program is designed to nurture their natural passion for learning and mastery, challenging them to go beyond the easy and familiar so they can truly excel. The program can be introduced in stages in any middle or high school classroom and enables students of diverse abilities to design and pursue independent course work, special projects, or even artistic presentations, community field work or apprenticeships. Using this approach, the students take on an increasingly autonomous, self-directed role as they progress. The heart of the program is the action contract (or learning agreement) whereby the student sets challenging yet attainable goals, commits to a path for achieving them, and evaluates the results. Special emphasis is placed on developing skills and competencies that can serve the student well in his or her academic and career endeavors.
The Self-Directed Learning Handbook presents a comprehensive, practical framework for introducing self-directed learning approaches in the classroom, showing educators how to:

• Translate conventional curricula into discrete outcomes allowing students to devise individualized approaches to their course work
• Design engaging and powerful classroom lessons
• Negotiate and structure effective student learning agreements
• Modify teaching approaches and other classroom practices to encourage self-motivated learning and skill development
• Encourage student self-assessment of course work and other accomplishments

Aus dem Klappentext

The Self-Directed Learning Handbook offers teachers and principals an innovative program for customizing schooling to the learning needs of individual students— and for motivating them to take increasing responsibility for deciding what and how they should learn. Whether the students are struggling or proficient, the program is designed to nurture their natural passion for learning and mastery, challenging them to go beyond the easy and familiar so they can truly excel. The program can be introduced in stages in any middle or high school classroom and enables students of diverse abilities to design and pursue independent course work, special projects, or even artistic presentations, community field work or apprenticeships. Using this approach, the students take on an increasingly autonomous, self-directed role as they progress. The heart of the program is the action contract (or learning agreement) whereby the student sets challenging yet attainable goals, commits to a path for achieving them, and evaluates the results. Special emphasis is placed on developing skills and competencies that can serve the student well in his or her academic and career endeavors.
The Self-Directed Learning Handbook presents a comprehensive, practical framework for introducing self-directed learning approaches in the classroom, showing educators how to:

• Translate conventional curricula into discrete outcomes allowing students to devise individualized approaches to their course work
• Design engaging and powerful classroom lessons
• Negotiate and structure effective student learning agreements
• Modify teaching approaches and other classroom practices to encourage self-motivated learning and skill development
• Encourage student self-assessment of course work and other accomplishments

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The Self-Directed Learning Handbook

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

NOTHING is so natural to us as learning and accomplishment. We hunger for it from our first breath. We enter school already skilled in it and eager for more. We pursue it, often with passion, for the rest of our lives. The need to survive, become competent, find intimacy, and sustain self-esteem presses us forward on all life fronts. We search for a role and work of significance; for companionship, partner, and family; for understanding each other and ourselves; for mastery over something and for fulfillment. Our species is irrepressibly curious and restless; we question everything and seek answers; we see a need or possibility and press forward to see if we can make it real. The drive to learn can be suppressed-we can be deprived, beaten, and drugged-but these are only frictions to the unstoppable learning momentum that has propelled our species from its prehistoric beginnings to its current civilized state.

Self-directed learning (SDL) is designed to nurture this momentum, to broaden and deepen it, to help students channel and refine it. This design has been enhanced by a flood of recent discoveries about the brain. We have found that the brain is a meaning-making machine that thrives in rich environments, seeks out patterns, builds on previous experiences, and functions best in nonthreatening situations. Not only is the brain a dynamic, self-directing instrument of learning, it is highly individualized as well. Recent studies of intelligence, learning style, and talent or strengths affirm the great diversity in the ways people learn. Cognitive psychology has also focused on the importance of learning how to learn, that is, on developing the strategies that can be applied to any learning task. Such portable skills prepare any learner for the ultimate challenge of lifelong learning.

This attention to learning for life reminds us, as we address adolescent students in middle and high school, that we are dealing with a whole life-not just intellect but emotions and performance as well. And it reminds us that adolescence is a life between childhood and adulthood. Major tasks in this chaotic teenage period include development in personality, character, and talent as well as in academics. The challenge of the transition is to leave childhood behind and to stand on the threshold of adulthood with purpose and confidence. This means maturing as a person, finding a social place, becoming independent, and finding a focus for work. The key to such readiness for students is self-efficacy, that feeling of certainty, forged in action, that they can set a course and then make the journey. The journey into adulthood-into the world-has seldom been more challenging. Globalization is rapidly expanding the economic field of play. Change is dramatically shifting the nature of life and work. Knowledge is doubling every few years. Technology is transforming the way we live and the way we work. Work itself is transformed from the well-protected life-long job to the precarious short-term performance contract. Individuals will not be looked after from the cradle to the grave; increasingly, they must look after themselves. Students must know how to learn every day, how to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances, and how to take independent initiative when opportunity disappears. SDL prepares students for this new world in which the active learner survives best.

What Is Self-Directed Learning?

SDL is any increase in knowledge, skill, accomplishment, or personal development that an individual selects and brings about by his or her own efforts using any method in any circumstances at any time. A student, for example, decides to build and launch rockets that will rise one mile into the atmosphere. He inspires others to join him. They go on the Internet, contact the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, consult with a science teacher, find a machine shop, build experimental models, and, after many attempts, succeed.

Teacher-directed learning (TDL) by contrast is any increase in a student's knowledge or skill brought about by initiatives taken by a teacher, which includes a selection of the learning to be accomplished, presentations about it, assigned study and practice activities, and a test to measure mastery. A teacher, for example, selects the topic of propulsion, presents lessons to all students showing the physics involved, assigns readings and questions about it in a textbook, conducts demonstrations with assembled rockets, and then tests students about their mastery of the principles.

Both are important approaches to learning. TDL is important because it is an efficient way to present new bodies of knowledge and practice. SDL is important because it enables students to customize their approach to learning tasks, combines the development of skill with the development of character, and prepares them for learning throughout their lives.

SDL is dramatically different from TDL. It requires a different approach by the teacher and demands new skills from students. In SDL, students gradually take over most of the teaching operations that are traditional in TDL until they are designing as well as executing their own learning activities. The teacher's role is transformed and becomes even more important and more demanding. Teaching SDL requires a full professional repertoire of instruction, including training, coaching, guiding, and counseling skills. It represents a paradigm shift in thinking about teaching and learning (see Table 1.1).

The choice, of course, is not simply between teacher-controlled and student-controlled learning. There are many stages between these two poles. Students can be taught to think for themselves, work at their own pace, learn in their own way, choose their own goals, and design their own programs. Each of these is a step toward SDL, and each can be the focus of a teacher's program. How far across this bridge any teacher decides to travel will be determined in part by individual judgment and the circumstances in which he or she works. This book is a challenge to teachers to challenge themselves to go as far as they can in this effort. Fortunately, as we will see, there are excellent schools to model each of these stages of SDL.

In TDL, we teach students about the nature of flight; in SDL, we teach students how to fly. When students learn to fly, they "earn their wings." They study in the classroom, work on simulations, and practice in the air with a flight instructor until they have the knowledge and skill to fly solo. When they prove that they can make skillful flights on their own, they can fly anywhere they choose. Teaching SDL is about teaching the skills and providing the experience that students need to guide their own learning lives. It is teaching them what they need in order to solo safely and successfully in life. SDL teachers, like flight instructors, succeed when their students no longer need them.

SDL not only encourages teachers to help students to find a passion; it requires it. In SDL, teachers not only challenge students to excel; they challenge students to challenge themselves to go as far as possible beyond the easy and familiar. SDL ends not in exercises but in action, and action as often as possible in the world beyond the classroom. Teachers do not direct students so much as they teach them to direct themselves by empowering them. SDL students work closely with other students and adults, not just independently. They are...