Do my students need me or can they just teach themselves?

The role of self-paced learning in my classroom

As I begin to write this, I’m already asking myself “why am I going public with this particular topic”? The only reason I can think of is that I’ve already derived some benefit previously by blogging about the things that I mull over. I’ve had useful feedback from teachers and  professionals whose opinions I value and it’s all gone into the soup of ideas and opinions that I’m continually formulating as I struggle along with the teaching of digital technologies and my role as my school’s e-learning leader.

My school has a PLD inquiry cycle in place and this year’s inquiry is to hinge on the concept of “empowering our students”. My take on it has been to investigate self-teach (self-guided, self-paced) learning for my students. My aim is to “empower my students to take charge of how and when they learn and, to some extent, to be able to negotiate what they choose to learn”. All very worthy, but in essence it came down to simply being able to offer my Year 11 students the opportunity to opt in to learning programming and computer science, if they so wished. This was on the understanding that, if they chose to do so, they must accept that most of their learning would be self-directed.

My main inquiry focus was to be able to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of self-paced learning (hoping to mitigate any pitfalls) and I trawled through a few scholarly articles with this aim in mind. Of course, school life being what it is, I soon became more consumed with completing the self-teach course ahead of the students than I did with the whole pedagogy thing because the time for them to get stuck in was approaching at light speed.

There ensued a terrifying time of learning basic Python just a squeak ahead of my small class of highly motivated and very intelligent students. I had tried to minimise risk by choosing a method that provided assessment tasks and assistance with the creating of the plan for the program too and maybe I just expected a wee bit too much. Anyhow, I was surprised to find that, after completing the course, the students were still quite a way from being able to complete the assessment task. I still needed to spend a considerable amount of time unpacking things for them. I set all sorts of mini tasks to get them using what they’d learnt in a range of different situations. I had to research articles online to make sure I had definitely reached the right understanding before helping clarify things for them.

Now, I have some pretty smart cookies in my class. I’d be reasonably confident that most of their stars will rise on a steeper trajectory than mine as they go out into the world. There was absolutely no reason at all for me to go to all the effort of scaffolding their knowledge and building them up for the assessment - they should be able to do that for themselves … right? Well that’s where things get a little confused for me. I know the kids could prepare themselves for the assessment - given enough time. But should they? What is my role in this new world? There’s been a fair bit of discussion on NZACDITT about offering a range of standards and allowing the students to select. The more we offer, the more we move away from our comfort area in terms of content we are familiar with. Looking at the range of standards available in digital technologies, should I be able to offer the students assessments from the electronics standards despite knowing absolutely nothing about this particular strand?

Finally, my students sat the assessment (two tasks - two standards). To be able to grade their work I had to have a thorough understanding of what was expected of them. Whenever we discuss offering a huge range of options for kids in technology we definitely need to consider (delivery method of teaching aside) whether we have what it takes to be manage the assessment from start to finish. I have learnt so much and yet know so little. Taking Level 2 on board will be another step up again, and one that scares the Bejeesus out of me.

We also ran out of time to do the learning and write the report for the computer science external. Which has thrown out all my plans for Level 2 next year and made me seriously reconsider what I’ll do at Level 1 next year.

So after all that, why am I blogging about this? Because if anybody actually reads this, I would love some input as to how much we should or shouldn’t be doing for our students. Do we spoon feed them too much? What are they actually learning? By doing all the little extras like finding practice tasks and helping them break down the self-teach into chunks that I know suits the way they work better, am I scaffolding their learning and allowing them to focus on the important stuff. Or am I taking away opportunities for them to be truly learning. And if I step back completely, what role do I have at all? Am I missing something vital here that everybody else just gets?

[Sigh]