How to engage students in their own learning process

3JAN
The fundamental idea of student engagement in education us, being the focus of hundred papers
and even more on the blog posts. We know that students’ engagement leads to better educational
outcomes, and how students engage better in their learning if they find the information interesting and the
learning meaningful. But, sometimes building instruction that meets the interests of a classroom full of
students seems impossible.

One main problem is that “students are typically presented as the customers of engagement,
rather than coauthors of their learning ”.[1] It is really, really hard to be intrinsically interested and very
engaged with things you cannot control, or in activities that are mandated by someone else. To be engaged
in the learning process students must be given ownership for their learning. This ownership grows from
personal and situational choices within the learning experience.
In formal education, whether K-12 or Higher Ed, students’ behavior is too often emphasized over the
affective and cognitive parts of their engagement. I understand how much easier it is to measure the visible
behaviour, but am worried it leads to a shallow view of learning – which is so much more than just a change
in one’s behaviour. Emphasizing behavior easily leads to the approach where learning is seen as
successful completion of various learning products (essays, projects, worksheets etc.).
Learning is a complex experience, and we all engage in different kind of learning experiences in our
everyday lives. These experiences have an effect on formal learning, the learning that happens in the
classroom, and we shouldn’t ignore the importance of informal learning experiences. Already preschoolers
arrive to school with preconceptions and filters that strongly affect their learning experiences. These
different perceptions about learning also explain why engagement is so different for each individual student,
and why some students choose to engage deeply, and others just on the surface level.
 The easiest way to increase student engagement in any given level of education is to provide students
with choices for their learning activities : how to obtain necessary information, and for task/assignments
and formative assessments. This also creates a student-centered learning environment:

o Information can be obtained from reading, or listening a lecture, watching a webinar or

demonstration etc. The information sharing (or direct instruction) is also the part where students’
preferences for getting information are seen to have an impact on their learning and engagement.

o Students are more engaged in their assignments when they get to choose from a selection. It is
also harder for a student to explain why s/he did not finish the homework s/he got to choose. But the
choices must be real, not just the topic of your essay. The best practice is to have students justify their
choice for an assignment or assessment, because this reveals the filters students use to choose their
approach in learning and engagement.

o Formative assessment (especially in the form of timely and individualized feedback ) seems to be
an under-utilized practice in education, both in K-12 and in higher education. During the last year I have
gone through classes in my studies where the feedback was virtually non-existent and summative
assessment was provided after the class was over. How did that support my learning as a scholar-
practitioner?
In order to provide a balanced learning experience and increase students’ ownership in their learning
process students should also be provided with ample opportunities for self-assessment and self-
evaluation. These cannot be tied into the grade, because the purpose is to engage students in a dialogue
about their learning process and their goals, but the self-assessments provide excellent talking points for
the teacher and the student, especially if the student either over-or underperforms in the assessment when
compared to their self-assessment.

I hope these ideas help teachers to advocate for students to be seen as co-authors of their own
education. I am not promoting fully student-directed models of education, because I believe in core
curricula, but I am trying to emphasize the fact that students’ learning outcomes –in any given educational
model – are greatly improved when students are seen as active participants in guiding their own learning
process.
Is Learning a Product or Process

Best teacher is the one who makes herself unnecessary by

empowering students to become autonomous learners.

~Nina Smith

When learning is seen as a product, the emphasis of the learning-teaching interaction is in instruction – and
the thinking behind comes from the idea of students only learning when the teacher is instructing them, and
only what they have been taught. The reality is different, as any curriculum leader can tell you. At any
given moment of time any given classroom has several ongoing curricula: intended, written, taught,
actualized, learned, etc., so we cannot simply look at the learning product. This product may be a paper,
worksheet, notes, homework, essay, grade, etc., that we use to measure the results of students’ learning.

Emphasizing learning products makes mistakes very undesirable phenomena in the classroom – after all a
perfect product is the goal, right? And often the grade only reflects the finished learning product, without
paying attention to how the student got there. Maybe s/he already knew the content or had the skill, and
didn’t have to study or practice at all? If we pay too much attention to the product, we may miss the
important part of the learning-teaching interaction: the individual students’ main gain, her/his increase in
knowledge/understanding/skills that has happened as the result of instruction.

Now, very seriously: which one is more important to you? What your students know/can do — or how much
they improve in what they know/can do?
There is a big difference.

Improving what students know/can do inevitably leads to different end results, because each student has
her/his own starting point. And this improvement, the increase, of course, IS the result of the individual
learning process of each student. This is also why helping students to become independent learners is so
important.

Independent learners tend to automatically (or by learned habits) engage in their own learning process.
While observing these students we can see them intentionally influencing their own learning behaviours,
and Bandura (2006, p.164-165) described the four following components in their engagement: the
intentionality of their learning, the forethought of their actions, their self-reactiveness and self-
reflectiveness. Of course, to be able to do all this, students must have certain amount of freedom in the
classroom, which is why I am so fervently advocating for providing more choices in classrooms. Choosing
is a skill that can (and should) be taught and learned, and it only grows when students have ample
opportunities to try choosing in an emotionally safe learning environment, where mistakes are not only
allowed but celebrated.
Just imagine how much more these students learn! They don’t need the teacher to motivate or engage
them, because they are already “in the zone”. In the classroom these components apply straightforwardly
to students’ engagement as intentional learning activity, and learning motivation and goal-setting as their
forethought. Meta-cognitive knowledge is about knowing and understanding how I learn, knowing what is
easy and what is hard for me, and where do I need to put in extra effort in learning. Independent learners,
who engage in their own learning process already know these things. Wouldn’t it be important to help every
student to possess this knowledge of themselves?
The third component in independent learning, self-reactiveness, relates to the way students control their
own learning actions and regulate their own behaviour in classroom. As a teacher it is important for me to
ask myself, how can I support my students’ self-regulation and provide more autonomy for them. When
students get to regulate their own learning process (pace, depth, breaks, note-taking, collaboration,
additional information, etc) also the learning results, the visible and tangible products of learning, do
improve.

Maybe the easiest way to support students’ learning process is to provide accurate and timely
feedback. This strengthens the fourth component of independent learning, student self-reflection, which is
too often overlooked. Feedback has been statistically identified as one of the important teaching-learning
factors (Hattie & Timperley, 2007), because it enhances both the learning process and the product we get
as an end result of successful learning. Students self-evaluation is an important classroom practice,
because it combines feedback and self-reflection.
To me it seems that too strong focus on the learning product leads to shallow learning (to just get by),
and strategic learners (to just get a good grade) instead of deep learning. While independent students
may have strategies to cope in product centered learning environment, the dependent students may not
have a clue what they should do, or how they are supposed to do it – which further decreases their learning
motivation.
Focusing on the learning process emphasizes the students’ responsibility in the learning-teaching
interaction. It both enables and encourages students to engage in their own learning. This engagement
helps both students and teachers to build learning up from standards and to achieve competencies
needed in our modern world.

https://notesfromnina.com/2014/02/27/is-learning-a-product-or-process-part-2/