ASCD’s Educational Leadership highlights “The Self-Directed Learner” this month. One article, written by veteran 5th grade teacher Kyle Redford, discussed the balance needed between independent and collaborative learning. Redford teaches at the Marin County Day School, and even though this particular school attracts young learners from high-income families, what she lays out here is informative and important for all young learners and their families.
Redford writes,
“In the fall of 2020, I returned to school after taking a year’s leave to care for my sick husband. Zoom school was new to me, but not to my students; they had been learning online for the last part of their 4th grade year. To be honest, I was prepared to meet a group of struggling students who needed a tech-savvy teacher to resuscitate them.”
“That wasn’t who greeted me. Instead, I found myself with a class of 10- and 11-year-olds who had become quite capable with virtual learning platforms and practices. Although their learning environment hadn’t been ideal, they had made the most of it and had figured out how to effectively produce work from assignments and projects primarily posted on their Google Classroom. (As an important clarification, my colleagues hadn’t checked out of their instructional roles that spring; they, like most teachers, had been left scrambling to figure out how to teach from their homes).”
“When my new 5th graders entered my Zoom Room, they immediately distinguished themselves from previous classes I’d taught in terms of their productivity. I was struck by their appetite for independent challenges and their flexibility, resourcefulness, problem-solving skills, and self-discipline. My experience was that students who didn’t face specific obstacles to learning, such as language-based learning differences, complicated home situations, or poor internet access, had become independent learning superstars in the absence of an in-person teacher. They also demonstrated an unprecedented level of appreciation for their learning and willingness to do challenging, unsupervised work—all skills and learning competencies my prior students could not claim. In fact, if I put the classes side by side, these students’ strengths were my former students’ identified weaknesses.”
“Locked down in their homes, this group had also developed new skills and revisited dormant ones. They were passionate poets, builders, magicians, knitters, readers, painters, bakers, musicians, diarists, coders, naturalists, filmmakers, and seamstresses. One student had become an expert on the orca whales of the Salish Sea from her online research (she knew each whale by name, behavior, and family tree). Most of their activities were self-taught and all were self-directed. My new students explained that once their schedules had been cleared of typical schoolwork and after-school activities, they had discovered—or rediscovered—a multitude of interests worthy of their time, energy, and focus. For instruction, some had gone online for information. Some accessed their local library. Many others asked the adults in their lives for help.”
“This resilient group also graciously and patiently coached me through tech challenges and demonstrated persistence when the internet let us down. Their competency and engagement inspired me daily and caused me to reconsider many long-held assumptions about the capacity of this age group that I had taught for more than a decade. I became fascinated with their ability to self-pace their learning and personalize their work schedules, study habits, and content consumption. By the end of our year together, I had begun to seriously wonder if distance learning didn’t possess significant advantages over the conventional classroom in terms of cultivating learning autonomy.”
“Then the 2021–22 group arrived. My new cohort of 5th graders had spent even less of their early school years learning in traditional classroom settings and more time working independently. With all that practice, their production skills even outpaced my previous class. Sometimes they finished work so fast I had a hard time keeping up with them. My colleagues were reporting similar experiences in their classrooms.”
“But it didn’t take long to see the flip side of this exciting new student independence. When the pandemic protocols were lifted and I started to bring my students together to learn as a community, I was stunned by their response. They weren’t only impatient with in-person learning as a group, they weren’t very good at it. They struggled to listen to each other in discussion. They failed to explore below the surface of content and ideas in lessons and discussions. Their empathy for the characters in the whole-class novels we read was minimal, and their implicit understanding of texts was weak. Observations were shallow. Curiosity was almost non-existent—and so was enjoyment in learning.”
“I realized that in their time away from classroom instruction, these students had become transactional in their learning. For these distance-learning whiz kids, the learning process had become driven by wanting to get the work done quickly so they could get back to playing video games, living online, or doing whatever they liked to do in their “free time.” They were less compelled by curiosity or love of learning, especially if they weren’t setting the learning agenda. During a good chunk of the past two school years, their teachers and parents had asked them to figure things out on their own, and they had not only complied, they had excelled. No wonder they were reluctant to return to the diminished flexibility and independence that collective learning involved. But this reluctance also belied what they had missed in being away from the classroom for so long.”
“Witnessing my efficient, capable producers struggle to make meaning from our lessons reminded me that learning environments matter. How we get our learning matters and where we get our learning matters. Helping students grow discrete skills and knowledge banks is essential, but making meaning is the ultimate goal. Learning together invites students to become a part of a curious, caring, and connected community, where they benefit from conversations and shared ah-has. Magic often results from students learning together, and sharing their ideas allows them to refine, deepen, and grow those ideas.”
Throughout the last two years, proponents of independent learning and those who promoted traditional classroom learning wanted us to think that there had to be a choice regarding how young learners learned best.
But Redford is spot on when she reminds all of us that it’s the balance between independent and collaborative learning that makes magic.
We learned this when we ran a personalized learning lab school in the Houston Museum District awhile back. Young learners enjoyed building their capacity to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning. But they also cherished the times when they worked as a cohort on common goals, most often a project-based learning experience.
It’s not an either/or when it comes to independent versus collaborative learning.
It’s an “and”.
The question today is whether traditional schools can figure this out in time to empower a new generation of young learner regarding their abilities to create and own their own learning plans.
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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