How can you help learners become expert learners?

In personalized learning environments, learners understand their strengths and challenges and are able to deploy strategies to support their learning. Daily, they are developing the skills needed to be self-directed learners, able to monitor their progress and make connections to prior learning.

These learners can also choose and use the right technologies for the task. As they progress, the anticipated result will be expert learners who are truly prepared for their future. The continuum toward mastery provides learners of all ages with a blueprint for building expertise. Lets take a look at the Stages of Personalized Learning Environments and how we can develop expert learners by helping them develop the skills at each stage along the Continuum of an Expert Learner.

Research in social neuroscience fosters our understanding of the development of social and emotional competence in the classroom. This translates into essential instructional elements for students with autism while creating a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for all students. The outcomes of the Social Emotional Engagement Knowledge and Skills (SEE-KS) focus on ensuring that learning strategies are implemented by fostering student engagement, presenting information in multiple ways, promoting student participation and ensuring equitable access for students at various developmental stages.

In 2014, the state of Tennessee mandated that digital content be made accessible for all students in order to remove barriers to learning. Inspired to build on that mandate, the team at Chattanooga State Community College set out to make post-secondary courses accessible. In the process, the team discovered that removing learning barriers involved more than simply increasing accessibility. It evolved into an examination and embrace of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In researching accessibility and UDL, Chattanooga State Community College collaborated with stakeholders across campus as well as with other colleges and universities across the state. The original focus centered on the creation or redesign of traditional and online classrooms. The discovery of tools, technologies, and options for content presentation allowed us to meet accessibility standards and implement the three principles of UDL to improve student experience and success (UDL Center, 2016). The team was guided by the concept of Systematic Learner Variability as we learned about options for presenting course material (CAST, CAST UDL Exchange, 2016). Finding non-traditional options for submitting work encourages ownership and engagement among today’s tech savvy students.

Aspects of learning, including attention, memory and decision making, are inextricably integrated with emotion networks.  Emotion is central to cognition. In addition, there is variability in engagement; what motivates and encourages one student to persist through challenges will differ from that of another student, and will even differ within the same individual at different times. Knowing how essential emotion is for learning, how can educators use the UDL framework to design lessons that support variability in engagement? How can they measure engagement to reflect on progress towards the deeper learning goals that are desired at a classroom, school, and district level? This resource presents initial reflections from a Massachusetts school district implementing the UDL framework in order to achieve improvement in student engagement.

An overview of the principles and guidelines of UDL framed in the context of diverse employee populations, suggests a role for UDL in the private sector.  The author argues that the competitive advantage goes to companies that honor and support all employees in a spirit of diversity.  Implications for corporate training are emphasized.  

Angela Watson, teacher and educational entreprenuer, posts the 2×10 strategy in her blog.  The idea is simple: spend 2 minutes per day for 10 days in a row talking with an at-risk student about anything she or he wants to talk about. The strategy builds a rapport and relationship between teacher and student, and lets the child see that you genuinely care about him or her as a person.

Affect represents a crucial element to learning, and learners differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. There are a variety of sources that can influence individual variation in affect including neurology, culture, personal relevance, subjectivity, and background knowledge, along with a variety of other factors presented in these guidelines. Some learners are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty while other are disengaged, even frightened, by those aspects, preferring strict routine. Some learners might like to work alone, while others prefer to work with their peers. In reality, there is not one means of engagement that will be optimal for all learners in all contexts; providing multiple options for engagement is essential. For greater detail, please refer to the CAST UDL Guidelines on Engagement.

• Provide options for recruiting interest: Information that is not attended to, that does not engage learners’ cognition, is in fact inaccessible. It is inaccessible both in the moment and in the future, because relevant information goes unnoticed and unprocessed. As a result, teachers devote considerable effort to recruiting learner attention and engagement. But learners differ significantly in what attracts their attention and engages their interest. Even the same learner will differ over time and circumstance; their “interests” change as they develop and gain new knowledge and skills, as their biological environments change, and as they develop into self-determined adolescents and adults. It is, therefore, important to have alternative ways to recruit learner interest, ways that reflect the important inter- and intra-individual differences amongst learners.
• Provide options for sustaining effort and persistence: Many kinds of learning, particularly the learning of skills and strategies, require sustained attention and effort. When motivated to do so, many learners can regulate their attention and affect in order to sustain the effort and concentration that such learning will require. However, learners differ considerably in their ability to self-regulate in this way. Their differences reflect disparities in their initial motivation, their capacity and skills for self-regulation, their susceptibility to contextual interference, and so forth. A key instructional goal is to build the individual skills in self-regulation and self-determination that will equalize such learning opportunities (see Guideline 9). In the meantime, the external environment must provide options that can equalize accessibility by supporting learners who differ in initial motivation, self-regulation skills, etc.
• Provide options for self-regulation: While it is important to design the extrinsic environment so that it can support motivation and engagement (see Guidelines 7 and 8), it is also important to develop learners’ intrinsic abilities to regulate their own emotions and motivations. The ability to self-regulate – to strategically modulate one’s emotional reactions or states in order to be more effective at coping and engaging with the environment – is a critical aspect of human development. While many individuals develop self-regulatory skills on their own, either by trial and error or by observing successful adults, many others have significant difficulties in developing these skills. Unfortunately some classrooms do not address these skills explicitly, leaving them as part of the “implicit” curriculum that is often inaccessible or invisible to many. Those teachers and settings that address self-regulation explicitly will be most successful in applying the UDL principles through modeling and prompting in a variety of methods. As in other kinds of learning, individual differences are more likely than uniformity. A successful approach requires providing sufficient alternatives to support learners with very different aptitudes and prior experience to effectively manage their own engagement and affect.