Increasing Self-Education in Students

I believe that all education after grade school, minus special education, is self-education. In some sense, whatever the student learns, they must have been willing to learn it.

This phenomenon increases with age. As an adult, I don't learn anything new unless I learn it. So how do I try to build the self-education practice in students?

The first mindset shift I have had to have is to trust my students to do the learning. For this to happen, there needs to be real stakes involved. Consequently, it's hard for me to imagine this happening in an educational environment where every kid 'has to pass'.

The second practice I have had to do is to stop using the instructional time to deliver brand new content students are supposed to have learned in their reference texts. Instead, I use it to build upon content the students are supposed to have already learned. This means trusting the students to do their job, provided the job is something they could've completed on their own.

Creating an environment of real accountability also requires that I give assessments appropriate to students' learning abilities. While I do have a deadline for when each student should be at which point in their learning, it also means that I have to build in flexibility for the time it takes for each student to learn the material successfully, and be available if they have questions about how to get the job done.

If I can model the classroom after work or a business environment, then I hope that students can build habits of self-accountability (even though I am still there to give them that extra nudge when they need it).

After all, traditional lectures and testing in education are like an employer hiring someone to do a job, teaching them how to do the job for two weeks, and then having the employee do the actual job in a day.

Instead, we should be hiring someone to do the job, trust that they can do it (would we have hired them for any other reason?), have them actually do the job, and then provide coaching for them to do the job better.

The only difference is while employers may give up (with good economic reasons) on their employees by firing them, time is the only thing that ends up firing a student. Within that time, students and educators try their best to maximize learning and if possible, life-long learning.