This is the partial title of a fantastic paper by Professor Erica McWilliam and Professor Peter Taylor of Brisbane Girls Grammar School called Why Our Kids need a powerful disposition to be self-managing learners when they finish their schooling, why they are unlikely to have it, and what we can do about it.
I thank Jenny Luca and her blog, Lucacept, for tuning people’s attention to this.
It has most of my soapbox elements contained within and ties together the need for active learning that engages brains, encourages creativity and risk-taking, learning from errors in a deliberate way, authentic tasks that respect the rigour of disciplines, the need for challenge to poke and push thinking and the absolute importance of the role of the teacher in all of this…and how we, too, need to display all of the above learning behaviours in our professional learning. I like the idea of the teacher being the “meddler in the middle”…the person who designs learning tasks, intervenes when necessary and continually scans his/her learners to determine the best way forward for each and every one of them.
Cannot recommend reading this highly enough.
First Person, Secondhand, Third Dimension 