Student Ownership of Learning Defined

To take charge of their own learning, learners need to know how they learn. What can you do as a teacher to make this happen? In student-centered learning, taking charge of your own learning is a top priority. According to the article Ownership of Learning: Fostering Learners With Autonomy, Drive, and Endurance, a student who is motivated, involved, and self-directed has a sense of autonomy, choice, and responsibility in the way they behave. This is known as ownership of learning. This concept is also known as student agency, which plays a crucial role in fostering independent and adaptable individuals.

Paul Main, author of The Role of Student Agency in Fostering Lifelong Learners, provides key dimensions of student agency, and they are:

• Goal Setting: Identifying achievable goals to work towards
• Initiative: Take action towards those goals.
• Self-Regulation: Monitoring and adjusting progress as needed
• Self-Efficacy: Belief in one’s ability to succeed.

Main believes the components of student agency form the bedrock in a classroom. The components of student agency are personal influence, where students recognize their role in affecting outcomes. Intentionality is also integral, as students deliberately set their educational course. Self-regulation and self-reflectiveness allow students to assess their progress and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Creating Student-Centered Learning Environments

When we talk about Student Ownership of Learning, a key component is the environment where this learning takes place. It’s not just about what we teach, but how we set the stage for learning to flourish. Designing student-centered learning environments is akin to cultivating a garden: the right conditions are vital for growth. Let’s dig into the elements that transform a traditional classroom into a nurturing space for student ownership.

See Video Student Centered Learning: Why, How, and Why

Elements that define student-centered classrooms

• Choice: Allowing students to have a say in their learning pathways increases engagement and ownership.
• Collaboration: Moving from solitary work to cooperative learning empowers students to support and learn from one another.
• Varied Instructional Strategies: Utilizing diverse teaching methods addresses different learning styles and keeps students actively involved.
• Real-World Connections: When students see the relevance of their studies to the world outside, engagement skyrockets.

Role of the physical and emotional environment in supporting autonomy

Imagine walking into a classroom that feels alive with possibility — that’s the essence of a space promoting student ownership. But it’s not just about the physical layout; the emotional climate is equally important.

• Physical Environment: A flexible layout with areas for group work, individual study, and class discussions encourages a sense of community and individual responsibility.
• Emotional Environment: Establishing a culture of trust and respect, where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities, is foundational for autonomy and intrinsic motivation.

By thoughtfully crafting these environments, educators empower students to take charge of their educational journey, leading to more meaningful and enduring learning experiences.

Keep Learning

Ten Ways to Leverage Student Choice in Your Classroom by John Spencer

How to Apply Choice and Voice in the Diverse Classroom

Goal of Ownership of Learning

Imagine a classroom where your interests light the way, and lessons are tailored just for you – this is the heartbeat of student ownership of learning. It’s all about personalizing education, ensuring that instruction echoes each learner’s unique needs and desires.

According to Noah Dougherty, author of Personalizing Learning: The Goal is Student Ownership, everything teachers do, from the way they run their classes to the lessons they give their students, should be geared toward making them feel like they own their learning. Each student’s sense of control over their learning is unique, but it is always based on four main ideas:

*Helps them become more aware of their own skills, interests, and best ways to learn.
*Gives them the tools to speak up for themselves and their group
*Learns how to manage oneself in a way that helps with both emotional and academic growth
*Makes them want to continue learning throughout their lives

Strategic Goal Setting: Aim High, Reach Far!

Ever wonder why some students seem to nail their academic targets while others are left in the clouds of confusion? Key to the puzzle: Strategic Goal Setting! When students take the reins by setting clear, attainable objectives, they’re mapping out a path to success that’s custom-fit to their personal learning journey.

Mapping Out Achievable Milestones

Guiding students to set specific milestones is like giving them a GPS for their learning adventure. It’s not about wandering aimlessly; it’s about traveling with purpose! By working with students to pinpoint realistic and relevant goals, we’re helping them to see the big picture, take ownership of their learning, and shoot for the stars—one step at a time.

The Role of Teachers as Goal-Setting Guides

So, what exactly is the teacher’s role in this grand quest for student-led success? Think of yourself as a friendly facilitator, equipping your classroom explorers with the tools they need to set their own course. Our job is to encourage, support, and nudge them along, ensuring their dreams and objectives stay within the realm of possibility—but also urging them to push their own boundaries.

• Help students define what they want to achieve.
• Show them how to break down big goals into bite-size actions.
• Teach them the art of self-reflection and course correction.

It’s not just about setting goals; it’s about tracking triumphs and tackling challenges along the way. When students take the wheel with Strategic Goal Setting, they’re not just passengers on their educational journey—they’re confident, capable pilots soaring to new heights.

Empower Student Ownership of Learning

The article “Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice” talks about three important areas for student success: academic knowledge, social and emotional skills, and transferable skills that can be used in different situations. These three areas support and give students power, like the legs of a stool. The stool won’t stand without all three. The good news is that if students do well in all these areas, they will be ready to do well in college, their job, and their personal life.

Three Important Areas for Students’ Success

Academic knowledge is important for building a strong foundation, and that’s why K–12 schools exist in the first place. Academic knowledge includes skills and competencies: See below

Teachers often agree, though, that academic knowledge might not be enough on its own.

Transferable Skills: Employers look for candidates with skills that can be used in different situations, such as communication, teamwork, innovation, and critical thinking. Because jobs are always changing, companies want to hire people with good basic skills that can be used in any new job. It is important to include these core adaptable skills in all subjects if you want to be successful in the future.

Today, students need strong social and emotional skills to do well in school. These skills help students deal with problems, keep their cool, handle their feelings, and see how their actions affect other people. Students might not be able to use their academic and transferable skills if they don’t have grit, self-control, empathy, good behavior, and the drive to do well on their own. Building social and emotional skills should be part of all learning if you want to be successful.
You can read more about social and emotional skills from my web page Building Block of Social and Emotional Learning.

Promoting Students’ Success

Academic Knowledge, Transferable Skills, and Social Emotional Learning help students’ succeed in life. From the concept map, you can see that social and emotional learning can help students improve their academics, manage emotions, and develop a growth mindset and positive attitude towards learning. When students learn and practice SEL as part of their instruction, the academic and SEL skills are transferable into students’ work and life.

Importance of Empowerment

The article Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice dives into the importance of empowerment of a learner. John Spencer emphasizes that students need to be empowered throughout the learning process. To do this, schools need to shift the students’ experiences from compliance to engagement to empowerment.

In simple terms, compliance in education refers to students following instructions without much effort to learn. It suggests students merely need to listen to directions and go along with the plan. This means that as long as they cooperate and stay quiet, they often get by as passive participants in the classroom.

From the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), student engagement is a lower-level goal and is not the highest learning destination. The goal is to reach student ownership.

Student engagement reflects what students are “doing” and “understanding” about their learning. To take that learning a step further is when students own their learning. NIET shows what students are doing at each part of the progression from doing to learning:

According to NIET, student engagement is exemplified through doing and understanding. Student ownership is when teachers and students co-facilitate the learning. When students own their learning, they are doing more than just engaging: They are taking a role in leading their learning. When this happens, the teacher serves more as a guide for students to take them further.

How Teachers Foster Student Ownership

NIET emphasizes student ownership begins when the teacher examines the standards and content, including their curriculum, from the students’ point of view. As students move from doing to owning their learning, the teacher also shifts from directing learning most of the time to co-leading learning alongside students. So, instruction moves from teacher-led to joint ownership, as students take on more responsibility for the learning process. For more information, go to my webpage Building Student Ownership of learning

Keep Learning

You can hear John Spencer, author, professor, and former middle school teacher, podcast The Power of Empowering Students Part 1

You can read Making the Shift from Student Engagement to Student Empowerment John Spencer (meaning of empowerment)

Cultivating Self-Assessment in Students

Two Powerful Pathways to Success: Creativity and Choice

The Power of Creativity

A teacher’s secrete superpower allows students to become creators, rather than passive consumers. If a teacher can do this, the classroom will be transformed, according to the Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice article by AVID Open Access.

The article supports igniting a student’s passion for learning by providing the opportunity to create. The creation process involves students to think at the highest cognitive levels (Bloom’s revised taxonomy). Students solve complex problems throughout the process, and the content knowledge becomes an authentic part of the learning process, rather than an answer on a test. In other words, “what students “do” with what they know becomes more important than simply what they “know”. These skills are of high interest to employers. A 2019 Forbes article, cited by the article, believes creativity as the soft skill most “vitally important for career success”.

Students further benefit and develop additional skills when they are allowed to collaborate during the creation process. Students authentically apply all 4 C’s: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking by creating with others. This is a good way for students to practice and develop these skills.

In addition to fostering social emotional skills, creative problem solving can be a great opportunity for students to grow. As they tackle challenges and obstacles, they will learn to persevere with the guidance of their teacher. This process helps them develop determination and a mindset that embraces growth. Moreover, teachers can coach their students to approach empathy problems and think about how their decisions affect others. These experiences allow students to uncover their passions and choose their preferred learning methods. Alongside metacognitive thinking skills, these insights will prove invaluable as they continue their learning journey. Below are the two areas for metacognition and growth mindset. You can read more about.

Unlock Your Learning Potential: Mastering Metacognition

Fostering a Growth Mindset

Students have numerous avenues to express their creativity, but one of the most impactful methods is by integrating technology. When we empower students to create and share digital tools, we equip them with essential digital skills that are vital for thriving in our tech-driving world. With a wealth of free online resources, students can explore a vast array of creative opportunities and inspirations. Many of these tools are accessible to anyone with a computer and internet connection. Even a low-cost Chromebook can open nearly limitless avenues for creativity, allowing students to reach real audiences beyond their classroom walls.

The Power of Choice

One essential way to empower your students is by giving them a voice and choices in their learning journey. This approach requires you to let go of some control, which might feel a bit daunting at first, but the results are incredibly rewarding. By allowing students to express their opinions and make decisions, they begin to see themselves as integral to the educational process, shifting the dynamic from being “done to” them to being “done with” them. This significant change fosters a sense of ownership and encourages students to take charge of their learning experience.

A study by Hanover Research titled “Impact of Student Choice and Personalized Learning” highlights why offering choices is crucial. It shows that when students have more choices, it positively affects various aspects of their lives, both personally and academically.

…Such freedom typically correlates with higher personal satisfaction and well-being in educational settings, alongside improved academic results. Research indicates that students who are granted some level of choice in their learning tend to perform better on standardized assessments (p. 3).

Furthermore, the study emphasizes how offering choices in different areas of the learning experience can influence motivation, involvement, and achievement. Hanover Research particularly underscores the value of giving students options concerning their educational paths and curricula:

Methods that promote and highlight student choice—regarding their learning journey and the curriculum they follow—are widely recognized to foster increased motivation and participation, leading to enhanced academic output (p. 13).

Creative assignments provide a fantastic opportunity to empower learners by incorporating their voices and choices. As you design these projects, think about ways to genuinely weave student choice into every step. Here are some options to consider, centered around key questions: who, what, when, why, where, and how.

Common Pathways to Structure Projects

There are many ways to structure projects in your classroom that allow student creation and choice. Here are a few common pathways to get you started. Each subsequent set of ideas becomes more cognitively complex and incorporates greater student choice and control over the learning experience.

Places to Start:

• Show What You Know: This is a common entry point into student choice and creation. In this option, students find creative ways to “teach back” what they have learned. Ideally, they will apply it at a higher level, but even a simple reteaching of a concept can help cement the learning while also giving room for the higher-level cognitive tasks of creation and choice. Often, teachers will allow students to decide either what they teach or how they will communicate it (or both). For instance, a student might create a video explaining the causes of World War II, or a math student might create a screencast of themselves teaching another student about a math concept.
• Apply Your Learning: This is just like it sounds, with students creating something that applies what they have learned. The more authentic this application is, the more meaningful the work will become. For instance, students studying journalism might create a newspaper or TV newscast. Students in a welding class might use their welding skills to create something that they can use at home. A key question to get you and your students started with this approach is: “What would someone outside of school authentically do with what I’ve learned?

Branching Out:

• Inquiry Projects: If your creation project is framed as an inquiry activity, choice will drive much of the experience. In an inquiry project, students will typically start with a question and then work to find an answer. This might be in the form of a problem/solution activity, and the solution may come in the form of some sort of creation. Throughout this process, it’s questions, inquiry, and problem-solving that drive the learning, and it all leads up to some type of creative solution in the end. The “creation” might be an idea, or it may be a physical product. Inquiry leverages the power of allowing students to ask questions. Once they have generated questions, they seek out answers through research, experimentation, creation, and/or other forms of discovery. For example, you might start an inquiry project by exposing students to a scientific phenomenon and then have them conduct research to determine why and how it happened. In a history class, students could seek answers to why certain events occurred as they did and whether or not the outcome might have been changed. English students could research a favorite author to determine how their lives impacted their writing.
• Project-Based Learning: In this popular strategy, students generally identify a problem or task and then work to solve or achieve it. The best project-based activities include authentic problems and audiences. This can make the learning experience real, and it provides motivation beyond an academic grade. PBLWorks is a great resource to get you started with project-based learning. The design process is another popular version of project-based learning. In this model, students design and create something, generally to solve a problem. Design thinking is very popular in the STEM areas.

Take the Reins with Project-Based Learning

Student Ownership of Learning leaps to a whole new level when classrooms shift towards Project-Based Learning (PBL). By tackling real-world problems, students engage in a deeper exploration that goes beyond textbooks, fostering a profound connection between their studies and the world they live in. This method not only enhances knowledge but also hones vital skills needed for future success.

How to Craft a Successful Project-Based Learning Experience

Ready to implement PBL in your classroom? Here’s a roadmap to designing an impactful project-based learning experience:

• Begin with the End in Mind: Identify clear learning objectives that align with your curriculum and relate to real-world scenarios. What skills and knowledge should students gain upon completion?
• Choose Relevant Problems: Select problems for students to solve that are stimulating and connected to genuine issues. Authenticity in projects increases engagement and the application of learning.
• Scaffold the Process: Provide structure through timelines, checkpoints, and support resources. PBL is student-centered, but guidance is key to keeping students on track.
• Encourage Collaboration: Facilitate opportunities for students to work together, share ideas, and leverage each other’s strengths. This not only builds social skills but also enhances learning outcomes.
• Incorporate Reflection: Ensure there are moments for students to reflect on their learning journey, what they’ve accomplished, and areas for growth. Reflection is crucial for developing critical thinking and self-assessment skills.
• Publish or Present: Conclude the project with a presentation or public display of their work. This promotes accountability and gives students a sense of pride in their achievements.

When students take ownership of their learning journey through PBL, they are not just passive receivers of information, but active, engaged learners who are better prepared for their future challenges. It’s a game-changer in education, and implementing it might just be the key to unlocking your students’ full potential.

For more information, go to the What is Project Based Learning You Need to Know page.

Inquiry-Based Learning: Sparking Curiosity in Every Learner

Ever noticed how a child’s eyes light up with curiosity over a simple “why?” or “how?” That’s the power of inquiry—a natural drive that leads to deeper understanding and greater ownership over one’s learning journey. By weaving inquiry-based learning into the fabric of our educational approach, we’re not just teaching facts, we’re nurturing savvy, self-motivated explorers eager to take the helm in their educational voyage.

Encouraging Curiosity and Questioning

It’s the questions that stir the pot of knowledge, creating a rich stew of insights and discoveries. In the classroom, we encourage students to raise their hands, not just with answers but with thoughtful inquiries. A question like, “Why does this matter?” or “How does this connect to what we know?” can light the fuse for an explosive learning experience, blasting through the boundaries of surface-level education.

Using Inquiry to Drive Understanding and Ownership

Inquiry-based learning isn’t about spoon-feeding students information; it’s about encouraging them to take the spoon and explore the feast of knowledge themselves. When students use inquiry to drive their learning, they actively construct their understanding. Each question propels them forward and each investigation cements their ownership of the material. After all, when you discover the answer yourself, it sticks with you—it becomes part of your intellectual toolkit for life.

• Engages students as active participants in their learning
• Fosters independence and confidence
• Empowers students to form connections and seek real-world applications
• Develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills

It’s through inquiry that students become pilots of their educational journey, navigating through the clouds of curiosity toward clear skies of understanding. Let’s give them the compass of questions and watch as they chart their own course.

For more information, go to Inquiry Based Learning Benefits and Strategies You need to Know

Keep Learning

How to help students take ownership of their learning

You can learn more details from my blog Series from the book Developing Student Ownership:

How to Develop Students to Own How they are learning

How to Help Students to Own How well they are learning

How to Develop Students to Own What They are Learning

Examples of Student Ownership in the Classroom

Students demonstrate ownership by taking initiative in independent or group work to develop a plan to solve a task or problem in more than one way. Fostering Student Ownership Through Thinking and Problem Solving discusses ideas and examples to help teachers foster student ownership.

Conclusion

I can connect more and more things as I learn more about how students can take charge of their own learning. Teacher Clarity is still being worked on. I will do my best to ensure that my blogs give you useful information.

You are welcome to look around my website and pick ideas that speak to you.