Week Eight: Reflection #7: Autonomy Is Not the Enemy

“Providing young students with assessments and choices in their learning that are meaningful to them encourages them to be engaged learners.”-Laura McLaughlin Taddei & Stephanie Smith Budhai, Nurturing Young Innovators (2017)

Both Chapter Four of Nurturing Young Innovators and Chapter Six of Transforming Learning with New Technologies discuss the importance of allowing students to have a degree of autonomy in their learning. Maloy, et al. (2017) state the following: “Teachers can use web-based information to teach the school curriculum and assist students to pursue individual interests” (p. 133). Digital information, therefore, (or “web-based information” as Maloy, et al. term it above) can prove to be extremely useful in allowing students to have autonomy in their learning. The more student shave autonomy in their learning the more that they will take interest in their work and be motivated to further learn the subject matter, as indicated by the excerpted text at the start of this post. Taddei and Budhai (2017) further state, “Young learners need exposure to a variety of tools and methods for expressing their creativity through digital media” (p. 66).

Digital media, as we have been learning throughout this semester, is an ever increasing facet of the modern day classroom. Our students consume digital media in every aspect of their lives—they consume it at home and they’re definitely consuming it at school. Therefore, the more we engage them on their level of interest—and the more autonomy we allow them to have in their learning, then our students will want to engage with their curriculums more and more. Taddei and Budhai (2017) state: “Learning to think about thinking (metacognition) is an important part of innovation and creativity” (p. 67). As I’ve said in previous blog posts, we need to encourage our students to be creative thinkers and individuals, and to do that we need to get them in a metacognitive mindset, before we can even begin to engage them with the curriculum. It’s not enough to teach them academically, but we need to teach and engage them socially, as well (p. 73). Therefore, “young learners need opportunities to have hands-on experiences, and interacting with others socially through play within the classroom helps children to develop creativity and innovation skills” (p. 73). Play and interacting with peers, thereby, are important aspects in developing a creative mindset.

I will end with the following from Maloy, et al. (2017): “Teaching might be better named constant learning because that is what the job requires, always enlarging your knowledge about the subjects or topics you teach to find interesting and engaging lessons for students” (p. 132).