And I benefit from a thought partner, someone to think aloud with. My inner critic won’t let me be! And my strengths: I compose best when I’m moving: walking, running, cross country skiing. Getting words on the page is the first step for me, but I agonize over choosing the right ones. I’m ready to reflect on mine too! My limitations: I struggle with writing a first draft. Their new skills in group-awareness could be applied to themselves – they were ready to reflect on their own personal strengths and challenges. And if they aren’t interested in the work at hand, it is hard to stay engaged.Īfter many opportunities to debrief their learning in this way, the class had a pretty thoughtful list of strengths and limitations AND they were familiar with how to reflect in this way. A little silliness is okay, but a lot of silliness makes it hard for the group to learn together. When students have side conversations or talk over each other, they lose focus and don’t learn as well. Strengths go hand in hand with limitations, and she allowed the class opportunities to reflect on these as well: And they learn well when the expectations are clear. Opportunities to move their bodies help them do their best learning. These students are great at hands-on learning. At the end of a learning activity she would ask them: The class began with a strengths-based approach, asking the group to reflect on their work and identify their strengths as a class. As they developed self-awareness they moved their pieces up the path. Students chose an image to represent themselves and they chose a collective image to represent the class. And she wanted to make this process visible, so she made a class game board to monitor their progress. While self-direction seems like something students would have to do alone, Heidi began with the whole group in order to scaffold the learning: reflecting as a group on elements of self-direction before moving to individual reflections. Starting with self-awareness (and then self-direction) And while these are not meant to be linear, self-awareness is a great entry point. It’s a complicated framework that takes some time to fully understand and actualize. Lexington, KY: Center for Innovation in Education at the University of Kentucky Essential skills and dispositions: Developmental frameworks for collaboration, creativity, communication, and self-direction. Here are the components of Self-Direction: Lench, S., Fukuda, E., & Anderson, R. This framework targets four skills: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Self-Direction, and goes into great depth into the components, development, and interpersonal and intrapersonal nature of the skill in action. Created by the Center for Innovation in Education and the Educational Policy Improvement Center.Īuthors: Sarah Collins Lench, Erin Fukuda, and Ross Anderson. Ludlow Elementary and the entire Two Rivers Supervisory Union have adopted the Essential Skills and Dispositions framework as their transferable skill model. They’ve been building self-awareness around self-direction under the guidance of their teacher, Heidi Baitz. So I’m going to take some lessons from the 6th graders at Ludlow Elementary School. But somehow, those concepts weren’t helping me. I’m well versed in the language of the transferable skills and I know that self-direction requires taking initiative, managing learning goals, and persevering when the going gets tough. What’s a Professional Development Coordinator to do? I’m a busy person with agendas to develop, meetings to attend, reading to do… and it’s been really easy to put other work ahead of this post. I’m going to be honest with you, writing this blog post about self-direction has taken, well, a lot of self-direction.
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