Conclusion
Conclusion
This document is intended to provide guidance and suggestions, rather than to be prescriptive or restrictive. It outlines the principles underlying teaching and learning in the DP, but still leaves room for flexibility and creativity of individual teachers and schools. For example, although there is a wide variety of approaches to the teaching of ATL skills, there is general agreement that in order for the teaching of skills to be effective it needs to be both explicit and sustained. Improving skills requires reinforcement over an extended period of time, and in a variety of contexts. Which specific strategies a teacher or school employs to transfer this underlying principle into their practice is left to the professional judgment of teachers and coordinators, as they are the people who have the deepest insight into the specific situation and needs of their students.
Although some of the techniques for developing skills are complex, others are relatively simple. One of the easiest ways for teachers to get students to start to notice learning strategies is to encourage them to reflect on the different ways in which they are taught on a regular school day and to consider which strategies work best for them. The key consideration for students is not which teaching methods they enjoyed most, but which were most effective in helping them understand, remember and learn that particular subject matter. This in itself is a big step forward in metacognitive development for students—to separate pleasure from effectiveness in order to better identify their own best ways of learning. If this exercise is performed regularly, then analysis of the information generated will allow any individual student to build up a profile of themselves as a learner and enable them to more finely calibrate their own most effective ways of learning. The results of which can then be used by students to improve their performance.
Establishing this kind of metacognitive awareness creates what Dweck (2008) calls her “growth mindset”, characterized by the belief that learning improvement is a function of effort and strategy use, and that both of these things are within the student’s control. Students with this type of awareness treat learning as a process requiring many different techniques and strategies depending on the subject and the context. They actively seek out options for every stage of the learning process, they try out different things and they notice what works and what doesn’t. They view any learning failure as a failure of process rather than that of the individual, they find better processes and apply them, they reflect on the results and they continually improve the success of their learning efforts (Derry and Murphy 1986, Hattie et al. 1996, Kobayashi 2004, Yaworski, Weber and Ibrahim 2000).
The implementation of process-oriented, skills-based teaching can be challenging for both teachers and students. The teacher’s role becomes more facilitative and the student’s role more inquiring. Many students, especially those comfortable with, or habituated by, transmission teaching will find it difficult to adjust to a classroom scenario where they are expected to do the learning for themselves rather than simply being told what to learn. These approaches to teaching and learning do, however, have the potential to develop “minds well-formed rather than minds well-stuffed” (Alec Peterson, 2003: 43), an aspiration at the heart of an IB education.