STUDENT CENTRED LEARNING AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH-Part3

STUDENT  CENTRED LEARNING  AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH-Part3
Dr.S.Sekar,  Educational consultant & Academic Researcher

HELPING STUDENTS TO LEARN HOW THEY LEARN:

This is the most important thing that human beings ever learn.  In an educational institution, it is vital that everyone is fully aware of the natural processes underpinning human learning, so that they can take control of these consciously, and develop them systematically. 

The following suggestions may help you to keep learning to-learn uppermost in your teaching and in your students approaches to learning:
1. Remind students how long they have been learning to learn 
2. Ask them to reflect on just how much they actually learned during the first two or three years of life. 
3. Remind them that most of this learning they did more or less under their own steam, without any conscious thought about teaching, or even learning. 
4. Remind them that they still own the brain that did all of this, and can still use it to learn vast amounts of new knowledge, skills and competences.
5. Ask students about their learning in school.  They would have learned large amounts of information and would have forgotten most of this! Also, however, they would have learned a great deal about how to take in knowledge and information, and will still have this skill.
6. Remind students that they will never stop learning to learn:  Get them to talk about learning to senior people they know, and retired ones too.
7. Ask them what they have learned only recently.  Ask them how they learned it.  Ask them what they found out about themselves while learning it.  Then ask them which of these was most important and most interesting to them.
8. Provide programmes for students to learn about learning.  Training programmes can help students to tune in to the power of their own minds. 

A good learning facilitator can help students to gain control of the processes by which they learn most efficiently.  Many students find it useful to explore how their minds work in the company of other students, and learn from each others experiences.

Provide resources to help students to learn about their own learning: 
1. Not everyone is comfortable attending a training programme about learning to learn. 
2. Some students fear that inadequacies or deficiencies may be exposed. 
3. Computer-based or print-based packages that help students explore their own learning in the comfort of privacy may be more attractive to such students.
4. Get students asking themselves:  What did I learn about myself when I learned this?. 
5. Learning to learn is closely connected with understanding ones own mind, and ones own preferences and choices.

Get students asking:
What really worked when I learned this?  The chances are that the factors that made one element of learning successful will be transferable to their next element of learning.  There are long works for this, such as  metacognitive processing, but it is simply about helping students to be looking inwards at what works for them when they learn, and what doesnt.

Get students teasing out what slows their learning down.  The more we all know about how the brakes work, the better we can use them only when we need them.

Devloping students key skills.
The development of students problem solving skills is also increasingly being addressed in Sr.Secondary education.

The following suggestions may help you think about your own ways to implement students development of these skills:
Try wherever possible to build into your course provision the assessment of students key skills. 

Whilst stand-alone key skills assessment and accreditation is now available international school students, the evidence suggests that a subject-based, integrated approach works better for most students.

Use assignments as the vehicle for testing studentss key skills.  When designing assignments, angle of activities and tasks that you set towards meeting specific key skills criteria.  For example, look at how an assignment might involve working with others elements. 

Be careful, however, not to pack in too many key skills requirements, or to allow assignments to become too unwieldy for students to undertake, or for you to assess.

Where possible, store your handout materials on disk.  Go for small print runs.  It is then easy to make considerable adjustments and additions to handouts each successive time you use them.  Avoid the waste associated with piles of handouts that youve subsequently replace with updated , improved versions.