Affective Skill development involves a focus on the development of: persistence and perseverance focus and concentration mental quiet over...
Affective Skill development involves a focus on the development of: persistence and perseverance focus and concentration mental quiet overcoming distractions reducing anxiety practising delayed gratification managing self talk 4) Do our schools currently equip our children with the right learning skills? Every school is different but in my experience of working in over 200 high schools world-wide I have yet to find one school that has a fully integrated learning skills programme in place. Most schools that want to place an emphasis on the direct teaching of learning skills do so by bringing in outside experts to run courses of ‘study skills’ for their students.
This is an approach which usually has a short term benefit for most students and a long term benefit for some students but the most effective way to make sure that every student learns how to learn to the best of their ability is to have a fully integrated programme of learning skills incorporated within the curriculum. Across the world there is a growing recognition of the importance of teaching what I am calling ‘learning skills’ within the standard curriculum: Singapore MOE International Baccalaureate - 3500 schools world-wide USA – accepted to date by 46 states Competencies for the 21st Century Approaches to Learning Elementary Integrated Curriculum Framework Civic literacy, global awareness and cross cultural skills Critical and inventive thinking Thinking Skills Social Skills Critical Thinking Skills Creative Thinking Skills skills Information and communication skills Resilience Self-Awareness Self-Management Social Awareness Relationship Management Responsible Decision-Making Communication Skills Self Management Skills Research Skills Academic Success Skills Singapore is also a founder member of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills (ATC21S) project hosted by the University of Melbourne and sponsored by Cisco, Microsoft and Intel which is looking at the teaching and assessing of 21st-century skills in the classroom. ATC21S has defined the essential skills of a knowledge-based economy as those that promote collaboration with others and connection through technology and has categorized 21st-century skills internationally into four broad categories: Ways of thinking -
creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning Ways of working - communication and collaboration Tools for working - information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy Skills for living in the world - citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility ATC21S is now in Phase Four with wide-scale fieldwork trials being conducted in Australia, Finland, Singapore and the U.S., with associate countries joining in to help test how language and culture affect the 21st-century teaching and assessments. This stage will lead to Phase Five where resources will be placed in the public domain.
Government policy-makers, teachers, school systems and assessment institutions will be able to use and modify the existing research and materials to bring the two 21st-century skills into the classroom and utilize the model to build out the remaining skills. Once all these current projects are complete and implemented there will be curricula based approaches to the development of learning skills available across the world for millions of our children to access but until then it will come down to enthusiastic teachers and parents and forward looking schools to design and implement their own approaches. 5) The ATC21S recommendations will come too late for the current generation of secondary school students as they will take several more years to implement; so what can parents do to help their children in secondary school? There are many things parents can do to help their children succeed well at the secondary school level. First there are two key principles parents need to understand and adopt in order to put their focus in the areas which will yield the best results: 1) Successful learning requires the application of good learning skills -
successful learning in any subject depends on the use of the most effective learning processes - skills, strategies and techniques 2) Failure is feedback - any failure to achieve an academic goal, to learn well, or do well in a test or exam is simply giving you valuable information on which processes are not working and which processes need to change, any failure needs to be seen as a failure of process not a failure of the individual. The remedy to ineffective learning is not to do more of it!
The remedy is to change. All too often I see parents whose children are not performing well in a particular subject who get extra tutoring in that subject for their children which does not improve their child’s performance and they just don’t know what to do. The problem in that case is most likely that the child has a learning skill problem rather than a lack of the correct information to study from. Giving them extra tutoring in that subject will just perpetuate the problem unless the learning process problem is addressed first. A learning skill problem is not the same as a learning disability. In my experience, having worked with over 150,000 students around the world, I have found that every student can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their learning. That does not mean they had a disability to begin with it just means that they had not previously been exposed to or taught the most effective learning skills. When they practise the best learning skills their learning always improves. Some subject tutors will of course be addressing the correct problem by first exploring the child’s present thinking and learning strategies with regards the subject matter and then providing training in more effective methods before exposing the child to the subject matter again. Other tutors may address the problem more subtly by exposing the student to the subject matter through a range of different activities and experiences, different media, different sensory processing modes and helping the student to assess the effectiveness of each processing technique or strategy in order to work out the processes that work best for them. Other, more process focused tutors will have in place a specific learning skills programme which teaches the most effective cognitive learning skills eg: Making effective notes – in class and for studying Organising ,transforming and summarising information – mind mapping, spider diagrams, graphic organisers Using structural writing planners – for different types of essays, scientific reports, academic papers, research reports - organizing, writing, editing, and revising Timetabling – general task mapping and specific use for assignments, assessment preparation, goal setting Memory techniques – mnemonics, multi-sensory techniques, visualisation, review Questioning Calibrating own learning preferences – mental representation, environmental and experiential preferences Self assessment If it is a thorough programme it will also address some of the affective learning skill areas like: Self-motivation Developing focus, concentration, persistence and perseverance Overcoming distractions Reducing anxiety Practising delayed gratification Managing self talk Developing resilience Sometimes process focused training is provided by external tutors around specific learning tasks for a student during the school year, eg. preparing for exams. In which case a specific course which teaches your child the most essential skills for exam preparation can be very helpful. See http://www.taolearn.com/events.php?id=9 for such a course t be held in Singapore in May 2012. There are also blogs available which give process tips to parents throughout the year – see http://lancegking.wordpress.com/ And also books available which focus on the processes of effective learning – see http://www.taolearn.com/books.php In terms of practical tips for parents the key is developing meta-cognitive awareness. To do this I suggest parents need to: focus your praise for their achievement on observed effort rather than ability, focus on the work they did to achieve the grade they got rather than the score or the grade itself if your children have difficulty understanding or learning something new, help them to focus on the process
- the strategies they are using - as the best source of improvement if they are having difficulties encourage them to try new ways of learning, to find the information they need to learn represented in a new way, a different style or sensory mode from their teachers methods of delivery and see if they can learn it better that way. There are many good websites for every school subject where subject matter is represented in different ways – see http://www.taolearn.com/students.php for a list of good websites help them to learn from their mistakes encourage them to take on new challenges and to use failure as feedback use role models, biographies and your own stories to show them that failure, resilience and perseverance are the keystones of success make sure they get good training in effective learning skills
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