Today I will be talking about how we get students to take
ownership of their learning.
It really continues on from last week's episode where I unpacked the
four key insights into the strategies that really drive student engagement
from the recent report, on classroom engagement from Lego Education.
I want to start by thanking you firstly for listening to Blooming
Curious and encouraging you to leave a review for the show, , because the
more reviews a podcast has, the easier it is for people to discover them.
And the more educators discover this podcast, the more inspired they'll be
and that of course means more students ultimately benefit.
So let's talk about students taking responsibility for their own work.
I think it's important to realize that there is a difference between
compliance and busy work, and engagement.
The students that always follow the directions that complete the
tasks we set and the same ones that raise their hands to answer a
question are not necessarily engaged.
They are often the people pleasers, the ones that want to
be seen as doing the right thing.
The ones that don't want to get into trouble.
I don't know about you, but I often hear, and I've experienced this in my own class,
that children just sit there and they expect you to pour information into them.
They're passive receivers of information, and then they do
nothing with that information.
That's ultimately disengagement.
And so often, we're killing ourselves, delivering a lesson, we do the talking, we
do the questioning, and then students go off and they complete a task that we set.
We do all the work.
We end the day with sore throats from all the talking and it's
no wonder we're exhausted and constantly on the brink of burnout.
But it doesn't have to be like this.
What we really should be doing is getting students to do all the work.
They need to be taking ownership of their own learning.
They are the ones that should be talking and questioning and doing, not us.
So how exactly do we get students to do this?
Well, from my own experience working with inquiry and project based
learning, I know that when children are interested in a topic and it's
something that's relevant to their own lives, they're better engaged.
They need to feel that it has meaning beyond the task that
they're doing at their desks.
This is why asking a question or setting a problem to explore is so important.
And then you get students to work in small groups to find a solution to that problem.
or the answers to a question.
And by the way, this is the basis of an inquiry classroom.
But we don't just set a question and then tell kids to go off and
look for the answer in small groups.
If you do that, you will find that students start messing around,
they're chatting about everything except the problem, and very soon
you'll have chaos on your hands.
And then you're going to be left thinking inquiry is a terrible
strategy that doesn't work.
And that's because you haven't taken the time to first teach
children explicitly what to do, how to approach finding the answers.
You have to model the model, as Jessica Vance says.
You have to train them up first.
And now I know that many teachers out there, and it might even be you listening
right now, will be saying, . I haven't got the time to train them up and
teach them these skills to do inquiry.
I have a curriculum to get through.
Well, as you heard in last week's episode, and I urge you to have a
listen to that episode if you haven't already, that teacher engagement
leads to student engagement.
And the way teachers become better engaged is through taking ownership
of their own personal learning.
And as we also heard from that data that was published by LEGO Education,
is that when students are engaged, Teachers enjoy their jobs more, and
that leads to better teacher retention.
So doesn't it make sense that if we as educators make engagement our mission.
Then not only will we enjoy our work more, but students are going
to love learning more and they'll take ownership of their learning,
which isn't that ultimately our goal?
So let's get back to teaching those skills.
Let's take asking questions as an example, since we want children to be asking good
questions and we want them to find out the information to answer those questions.
Now, if you follow Trevor McKenzie, you will know that he has a new
book out and this book is all about different questioning techniques.
I will leave my affiliate link to the book in the show notes so you can get it there.
But you start by setting a problem or by giving children a short.
piece of text or get them to watch a short video clip and then you ask them
to ask questions or to come up with questions to which the answers were found
or to which the answers are found in the text that they've just read or in the
video clip that they've just watched.
I've used this technique in my classroom many times and it works
wonderfully because students don't feel that pressure of having to
come up with a question first.
It's a sort of reversed engineering process.
They then brainstorm questions in pairs or small groups, pairs are probably better,
and then they write their questions onto sticky notes and then they come
up and they place those questions on a continuum of whether the question is a
deep question or a shallow question or a thick question or a thin question,
basically just another way of saying
an open or closed question.
There are lots of examples of this in Trevor's book, too.
And what you've just done is taught children the skill of asking questions.
The basis for engagement because you've obviously discussed the
questions and where they've placed them and you've got them to work in
small groups, which is another key insight from the engagement data.
And it's that students value working together.
And you're getting them to move and to be hands on because they've got to
get out of their seats, they've got to place a sticky note onto the sheet of
paper that you have or onto your board.
Now, I know this probably sounds really simple, you just hearing it
like this from me, but I can assure you that once you try this, you will
feel the energy in the room change.
This is the kind of learning you'll do when you're working on projects.
Children will take the skills that you've taught them in a questioning lesson like
I've just described, for example, and then they'll apply it to their own projects.
They'll ask better questions.
They'll know where to look for the answers.
And they'll present their answers and their findings in a way that
you've also previously taught them in an explicit lesson, whether
that be an information report or a PowerPoint or an oral presentation.
The bottom line is that if you want students to take ownership of their
learning, we need to make that learning relevant to their lives.
We've got to find inspiration in what's going on in our community.
What's going on in the world or in their homes?
If they're learning about persuasive texts, for example, let's not get them to
write about the same old boring things.
Yes, we can use, what's better, cats or dogs, to teach them the
structure of a persuasive text, but then we allow them to write about
something close to their own hearts, something that affects them directly.
I remember a few years ago in my year two class, I had a family
that were building their own home and their child was fascinated
with the whole building process.
He didn't love reading or writing, but when I allowed him to integrate
this house building project into his own work, into his own writing,
into his own planning, he lit up.
He made a model diorama, he wrote about the process, we read about house building,
and we even included it in our mathematics lessons, working out the perimeter,
which we then took further and walked out the perimeter of our school playground.
And this was something that children could relate to.
It was something they saw around them all the time with
all these houses being built.
To take ownership of their learning, children need to be engaged.
. We simply cannot as teachers carry on with this thing where we think that we're just
going to pour information into children and then they're going to be engaged and
actually apply this information to real life settings to transfer this learning.
It's just not going to happen.
I haven't seen it happen and I'm sure you haven't either.
We have to get children to take ownership of their learning.
We cannot do the learning for them.
We are just the facilitators that lead them on this path.
So to get them to take ownership of their learning, they need to be engaged.
So let's recap how we get students engaged and taking
ownership for their own learning.
Number one, is we make this learning relevant to their own lives.
Number two, is we get them to do the talking, the questioning
and the working, not us.
Number three, we get them to work in small groups.
Number four, We get them out of their seats.
And number five, we get them to do hands on tasks, where they're doing, where
they're making, where they're creating and finding solutions to problems.
I hope this episode has given you something to think about
and perhaps inspired you to try something different this week.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
on this, so please send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook, just
look for Blooming Curious, and share your thoughts with me there.
And if you would like more actionable strategies to nurture curiosity and a
love for learning, then sign up to Get Curious, my weekly newsletter for curious
forward thinking educators just like you.
I'll leave a link in the show notes, so just go there and click and sign up.
Once again, thanks for listening.
And please leave a review if this content has resonated with you so that educators
can find this podcast and until next week, remember, curiosity isn't just a trait.
It's a superpower.
And that's why you absolutely must stay Blooming Curious.