Self-Directed Learning

As we’ve emerged from the pandemic, one obvious repercussion of two years of virtual learning has been the level of disparity in students’ ability to successfully maintain their individual academic growth trajectory. Large learning gaps emerged as some students thrived in a virtual work space, while others barely survived. Differentiated instruction has always been a part of the WFES approach, but the need for truly personalized learning has never been more acute than right now. Fortunately, adherence to the STEM education framework can bring a form of relief in this area, as it is designed to emphasize and promote self-directed learning. It’s not always easy at the elementary level, but WFES teachers strive to serve as facilitators of learning, believing that it is imperative for students to learn how to self-assess and track their own progress. We encourage students to focus on their personal interests, to research topics that inspire them, to take chances in their learning endeavors, and to not worry about making mistakes on the first attempt. We create an environment where students feel safe to fail. We believe that failure is paramount to developing critical thinking and problem solving skills and that all students should be part of a safe learning community that promotes risk taking. The teachers at WFES view failure as an opportunity for students to guide their own learning. Having to solve the same problem multiple times provides students with opportunities to redesign, re-imagine, collaborate with peers, and to further master the content being learned. Our strongest area of success in the realm of self-directed learning has been through our coding work. All WFES students, from Pre-K through fifth grade, learn how to code, and we have constructed a coding progression that is inherently self-directed as students progress at the pace their individual ability and skill set allows. Beginning with unplugged activities and simple devices such as Cubetto and BeeBot, our youngest learners conduct self-paced lessons and are allowed to experiment on their own, all the while they are soaking in the basics of programming and algebraic thinking. This progression leads to more advanced coding opportunities for the middle grades, where students are exposed to applications such as Scratch and Sphero, and they begin to make the switch from being mere consumers of technology to producers of original content. By the time they reach fifth grade our students are capable of using complex tools such as TinkerCad and designing original apps. Last month, a team of our fifth-grade girls won Governor Kay Ivey’s App Challenge for the entire state of Alabama. Their success is indicative of the skill set a WFES “graduate” possesses and also represents the foundational instruction delivered at each grade level along the way.

Student Choice

One way we like to give students the freedom to direct their own learning is through choice boards and must/may dos in reading and math centers. These choice boards include both content and STEM components. This ensures students have some agency each day while still learning the skills necessary to be successful in the future. Our teachers intentionally choose activities that will engage students while building skills. For example, on one choice board, students can do the may do that has them code BeeBot to practice math facts. In the upper grades, students have choices on how they present their learning. For example, when working on their Black History projects they chose Black inventors, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists to research and then had the option to write a song, host a talk show, make a playlist, or make a social media account to demonstrate their knowledge of their person. Additionally, students lead their learning in science when choosing questions to investigate. Our 5th grade students are able to design their own experiments or research based on a question they have about the big idea. This creates student led learning as educators are able to facilitate learning through what each student needs.

Water Cleanup

Our 3rd graders study how humans impact the environment in Alabama and the world. Through their exploration, they took particular interest in water pollution. They have all witnessed water pollution first hand and know that humans are responsible for the negative impact. They, however, wanted to learn how to make a positive impact on the environment. They researched ways to clean pollution from the water and then built a Lego WeDo robot that they thought would help collect trash from the water. Students built robots that reeled in trash, grabbed trash, or swept trash. After building their robots, students wrote code to make the robot perform the action it was built to do.

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Ecosystems

As a school with a large environmental focus, ecosystems are one of our students favorite units of study because there is so much they can experience on campus. Students take this opportunity to build on their knowledge of ecosystems around them by researching ecosystems they do not have quick access to. In 2nd grade, our students learn about various habitats and then choose one to research further. They create code on Scratch Jr to demonstrate what lives in various habitats and how those things survive. They pair this with a pollination simulation where some students are flowers and some students are bees. In 3rd grade, our students begin differentiating between living and nonliving things based on their ability to obtain resources, reproduce, grow, and maintain their internal conditions. They go out on the nature trail to learn about living and nonliving things on our school grounds and then choose an environment they learned about in 2nd grade to code a living and nonliving scene on Scratch. In 5th grade, our students learn the terms biotic and abiotic and keep track of those using micro:bit while observing the nature trail, pond, and garden. Students then classify the biotic factors as producers, consumers, or decomposers. During this process, they make diagrams of photosynthesis. Once this learning has taken place, students research an ecosystem of their choice and code the interactions between biotic and abiotic factors in that ecosystem. As students build on their knowledge of ecosystems, they also build their coding and research skills while still having choice in their learning.

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