How we can enable learners to take themselves more seriously as students? What are the best ways to encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning and what can we do that will help to make risk-taking a safer option in our classrooms? If we agree that we want our learners to see themselves as strategic, speculative and social learners how can we help our students to develop those skills, with a focus on creating more independent learning situations in our classrooms?

Perhaps the first issue to address is the danger of being positioned as our students ‘Life Support Machines’, keeping them ticking over for as long as possible, with the only measurable output from them, on their own behalf, being a pulse. Or of becoming the even more familiar ‘Knights in Shining Armour,’ dashing to their rescue (usually way before there is any distress expressed), in order to keep them ‘on track’ and to make sure they don’t feel uncomfortable or get demotivated. And we have all at some point become the ‘Echo Chamber’ happily over praising and paraphrasing students comments for the others (who often weren’t listening to their peers) and helpfully adding our own element of rigour too. We have become accustomed to accepting our students first sound bite responses too readily, not planning spaces for them to think and not properly grilling their responses. And our students know all of this. So what’s their incentive to change? The less they do, the more we do on their behalf. They get their thinking done for them and then handed out to them on a platter. So it’s no wonder they so often complain of boredom.

The thinking below is a way of mapping what we would want our students to become and ways that should help to encourage it. It is also designed to build  work on resilience, reflectiveness, reciprocity and resourcefulness. The significant factor in all of this is that it is up to you and your school to adapt and adopt approaches that make sense in your context. These are useful strategies in their own right, but they must take part in a wider framework that only your school provides. Firstly a look at strategic independence focusing on ways that we can get across to our students what we want them to aspire towards.

Encouraging Strategic Independence 

In the film, Austin Powers, before Dr. Evil was sent back in time to 1969, his minions made him a clone. The clone was identical to him in every way but was “one-eighth his size”. Upon being introduced to his clone, Dr. Evil immediately declared, “Breathtaking. I shall call him… Mini-Me”. Later in the film he adds, “Mini Me, you complete me.”

It is hard for students to take responsibility when they are sometimes given so few opportunities in school to exercise any. They become trapped in a ‘locus of control’ cameo role. They don’t see themselves as independent reflective individuals, but more as simply passive receivers of the teacher’s wisdom. It’s not about how much effort they put in that matters, but whether they get the right notes given to them to conveniently regurgitate at the right time. And the problem with Mini Me’s is that they just aren’t that successful in the long run. There needs to be a substantial transfer of the accountability issue.

To begin with, it is probably a smart move to let your students understand your high expectations of them through the tasks that you set, and the language that you use. Using complex and technical vocabulary helps them to start to think and express themselves with the precision necessary to eventually see themselves or start to become scientists/linguists/historians. Be really specific about what you require your students to do in an activity and don’t backtrack if they initially resist or complain. What you believe they can achieve can have a significant impact on their self-esteem. Keep your ambitions on their behalf high and make your expectations and their responsibilities clear.

Keep reminding your students to focus on what their learning priorities are, in terms of their own learning journey. Encourage them to compare their past and present results to start forming the basis of a focused discussion and ensure that they know how each activity can contribute to their learning, where they can take it next and how they can evaluate it themselves.

Clarify that consistently achieving top marks and easy success really just means that the challenge was insufficient, and that it is only through increased effort and determination that they will they really achieve. Show them that finding things pretty difficult is a significant part of the learning process and that encountering difficulty is actually where they start to learn.

On occasion take your students ‘behind the curtain’ of your lesson to help them to access and understand your teaching and learning intentions. If the lesson needs to be adapted during class discussions and veers away from where it was going, let the students know why that shift is often a significant learning moment. Have an element of choice (either in the task or in the response) built into the lesson, allowing students to exercise self-direction. Allow them to exercise critical autonomy. Take their views seriously enough to interrogate and scrutinize them.

Encourage students to understand the benefits of peer assessments and the importance of reflecting on their own and others’ achievements. Students should get used to being their own first marker and editor.

Don’t be afraid to set high challenge ‘beyond syllabus‘ tasks and don’t allow the specifications to define the learning; even though that may be a tough call it is necessary one, especially if you want to explore the genuinely interesting aspects of your subject that might encourage your students to want to take it further.

Encouraging Social Independence

As a teacher and learner is is significant that we talk about our own learning careers and histories, particularly the times when we have struggled to understand. This enables the students to recognise that we were not always the fully formed expert that we might appear to be now. We should learn aloud and externalise our thinking, feeling and decision-making so that our students can follow the processes and difficulties involved.

Have visible ongoing speculative learning projects in the subject that the class are studying which takes as its focus things that there might not be easy answers to. Ask them to discuss and contribute their own thoughts and intuitions to these projects. Stress that all of them together are by definition cleverer than any one of them alone.

Focus on quality of response, brevity and tight timelines but try not to become the classroom ‘ringmaster’. Allow students opportunities to lead sections of the lesson, including the plenary sessions. They probably won’t get it all right the first couple of times, but that will improve with practice. The mistakes themselves can become significant learning points if treated well. Try not to just reward the fast thinkers in discussions and use approaches such as ‘think, pair, share,’ to give your students collaboration, exploration and reassurance time.

Don’t accept their first, easy or glib responses and by rigorously using ‘so what’ interrogation approaches you can challenge selected students to go beyond the superficial. They need to become more aware of what they are thinking, but also why they think these things and how they can justify them. Provide specific opportunities for able pupils to show what they are capable of achieving. Be prepared to negotiate, to be surprised or to be wrong.

However tempting it is, try not to paraphrase on their behalf. They will become used to having you as a ‘safety net’ and not develop the skill of listening to themselves accurately. Before students are allowed to speak in debates sometimes insist that they are able to accurately paraphrase the previous speaker and show how the point they will be making follows on from what has gone before. This means that they need to be genuinely responsive to their classmates, rather than just waiting until someone else has finished before launching into a new opinion.

Encouraging Speculative Independence

Actively encourage students to chew over, digest and question learning methods. This encourages a clearer understanding of what we are trying to do and what we expect/want from them, as well as offering them an insight into the learning process.

Present students with subject matter that is genuinely difficult and therefore more intriguing. Try to not pre-empt their learning by pre-chewing the materials and ‘neatening up’ the subject learning. Be prepared to pull away the rug to challenge their sense of security. Students can also only really learn to become more experimental if we teachers are prepared to take risks and fail.

Respond to unforeseen events and questions in our lessons in ways that model curiosity and learning to our students. Try to make any learning environment a safe place to be uncertain and to make mistakes. Use probing questions to deepen the level of challenge. Be open about our responses when we are asked genuinely challenging questions.

Encourage students to meet ideas with a ‘could be’ point of view and genuine questions. Establish that the significant questions in our subject have a wide number of possible solutions and that easy facts are often convenient simplifications.

Wait before we reveal the purpose/objective of lessons. Give your students the chance to be inquisitive before it gets too locked down too soon. Rather than restricting potential exploration at the outset give  students a chance to discover their own limits and methods. By not trying to control or regulate how they approach tasks or where they are going with them, and be surprised by where their journeys can take lessons. Give ourselves time in the lesson to observe what is happening and to give students similar chances to observe and notice. Allow them time to observe and comment on the lesson to improve their own noticing abilities.

Don’t support their helplessness by reassuring/intervening when they encounter a block. Allow students to struggle and not get it, and then have to work out ways to get it for themselves. Don’t fall into the controlling trap of thinking we always need to be there to support or scaffold out difficulty. Setting up protocols like ‘three before me’ lets your students know they must go elsewhere for ideas and that we are not on tap. Students need to be allowed/enabled to form their own ideas and to learn from their mistakes. Only by experiencing key blocks to their learning and overcoming them can students learn how they learn, and develop the necessary resilient strategies they will need later in their lives.

Don’t unconsciously prejudge outcomes or define the parameters of inquiry. Often it is only by letting our students off the lead that we find out what they are capable of achieving. Try not to leave the best/most challenging activities to last where time is often tight and discussion usually rushed. Don’t always require a detailed written response and through having writing free days/weeks and using thinking maps as evidence of inquiry allows students more freedom to explore.