Working towards independent learning

Woodleigh School is a small to medium (780 students) coeducational early learning to year 12 two-campus school in Baxter and Frankston, on the Mornington Peninsula, in Victoria, Australia. Our students travel from all over the Mornington Peninsula and some from the southern bayside suburbs of Melbourne to attend classes. The school is known for its contemporary style of education and has a beautiful natural bush setting. There is a strong emphasis on developing broad life skills, nurturing self-esteem and relationships, and teaching the whole child. The curriculum offered is a traditional one as found in most independent and government schools in Victoria. We offer as broad a range of Victorian Certificate of Education subjects as is possible to a small cohort. Our compulsory years curriculum is influenced by the Curriculum and Standards Framework published by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

Background

The Woodleigh School independent learning working party formed in 2004 to attempt to improve teaching and learning by centring the learning experience on the individual needs of the student. While student independence is a hallmark of the diverse and rich extra-curricula and pastoral life of the school, it was felt that more could be done within the formal learning environment. We have established an action research project at year 9 level. We chose this year level as these students are experiencing all the independent urges of middle adolescence. At Woodleigh, they also experience Outward Bound and City Bound, two programs that work on individual and collaborative skills. During term 1 of 2005, the students were tested for preferred intelligence and surveyed using a ‘constructivist learning environment’ survey and a ‘views about teaching and learning’ survey. We had hoped to test for learning style but a number of issues delayed that testing. The data was analysed to give a macro-class response and is now being analysed to produce individual student profiles. However, interesting challenges are becoming obvious and it is these I wish to share with you here.

Multiple intelligence

The multiple intelligence responses display a very diverse group of students in each class. This was to be expected. However, what can we do with this information? As a teacher, or team of teachers at a year level, the first response could be to audit complete units of study to ensure that, over the breadth of the unit, all the eight intelligences are featured, if appropriate to the topic. Activities could then be edited to make it possible for more of the intelligences to be included, if this is found to be required. The second level of response is to be flexible in our delivery of the curriculum so as to incorporate as many of the intelligences as possible and to match our expectations of the student to their profile details. Finally, we can work with our students to find ways to build skills with linguistic and logical-mathematical tasks as these two areas are central to much of what occurs in our society, and these two intelligences are poorly represented in our student cohort. This clearly links to the work being done to improve literacy and numeracy skills amongst our students. It should be remembered that, for many of our students, these skills will always be inherently difficult and an ethic of care and patience is required.

We haven’t yet collected the learning style data, but we can expect that the same level of diversity will exist. As for multiple intelligence, the first response could be to audit existing curriculum materials to ensure that the full range of learning styles are represented across a unit of study, to edit the materials to make them more inclusive (if necessary) and then to be flexible with the delivery of materials and our expectations of students’ outcomes in line with their unique abilities.

A constructivist classroom

The data suggests that the students would prefer a maximally constructivist inspired classroom. That is, a classroom in which they are able to almost always:

• focus on the connectedness of school to out-of-school experience and in which use is made of student experiences as a context for learning
• experience knowledge as evolutionary, non-foundational, culturally and socially determined and arising from theory dependent inquiry; that empowers the student to question the teacher’s pedagogical plans and methods
• have the opportunity to discuss, explain, negotiate and reflect on the viability of their own and other students’ learning.

However, they are less interested (suggesting that this should happen sometimes) in sharing control of the learning environment, such as the articulation of goals, design and management of activities and determination and application of assessment criteria. The response to the shared control scale is of concern, as the students are focused on a teacher-directed model, while this working party is attempting to challenge this idea and foster independent learning. It must be remembered that this response is not universal and individual student profiles should be considered.

Other data results confirm much of what the students have suggested in the earlier data. The students appreciate teacher-directed tasks (scoring between agree to strongly agree), but this is balanced by an appreciation for student-centred activity. As we are striving for independent students, we could search for ways to slowly and patiently wean the students off a focus on teacher-directed tasks. The scores for the collaborative scale are much lower (ranging between disagree and agree), despite interpersonal intelligence being a common and frequently reported strength (students displaying this intelligence generally prefer collaborative tasks). This inconsistency suggests that we have a couple of issues to consider. The first is to support students in how to work in collaborative teams in a consistent manner, across all classes, giving members of teams a particular role. Professional development for the staff to address this concern may be beneficial. The second is that we need to consider the needs of our best students, who often become disenchanted with collaborative work as they regularly have to organise the other students in their group and/or complete much of the work for the others in the group. Students involved in a previous study reported this concern during interviews. I plan to interview our students during term 3 to check for similar views.

The challenge

Having collected the data, it is now important that the working party develop pedagogical tools and approaches that the teachers are able to adopt. We will then use the survey tools at the end of the year to assess whether our students have moved toward a more independent learning approach.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Gary Simpson is a teacher at The Woodleigh School, in Victoria, Australia.

 

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