Exploring Student Projects and Fostering Self-Directed Learning | 8min snip from Silver Lining for Learning

Speaker 6
Yeah,
Speaker 2
I think one of the ones, I mean, I'll just chime in here because it's one of the examples that, you know, my daughter did. And if you want to talk about the differences along the spectrum, what those projects might look like. You know, last week, she did a project on her favorite stuffed animal, you know, that she had created this whole story, this whole background story for and kind of gave a narrative like, you she was and why she loved this stuffed animal. So, you know, kind of a personal reflection type of project. Whereas two weeks ago, she, you know, tripped on the playground and smacked her head into a pole and had to go get a CT scan. And she was like, well, this is interesting. What does this giant machine do? so she did an entire project on what is a CT scan, how does it work, had all these metaphors that she had figured out. And then we went for this follow up. And the doctor was like, can you tell me what happened? And she's like, so approximately 10 AM on June 29, I hit my head here. And then she's going, and then we went in the CT scan. It's like this big donut machine and it takes a bunch of pictures from a bunch of different angles and just like a loaf of bread that takes slices of pictures and then you go see the whole picture once it comes back together. And like the doctor's like, you know, listening to the seven year old describe, you know, exactly how a CT scan works and what happened her. But I think that like just illustrates nicely the range of projects and the reason I mean they're going to get a lot of things that they're interested in through their, their daily lives. good reflection time to delve deeper into those questions that they have and to have that reflection time, you know, that consolidation time. So it's doing a lot with a fairly simple structure. And then the facilitators like Allison are really good at kind of like, you know, teasing out questions and getting them curious about kind of new things to delve into. So a
Speaker 4
big part of the instructors and the learning coaches and the mentors, a big part of their job is to broaden they don't know about, they're going to become really curious. And it depends on the kid. Some of them are a lot less curious for certain reasons, but we all have that in ourselves and our job is just to coax it out, you know, to broaden those horizons and show them the world and then it'll just kind of click and they'll light up and then once they light up they are so motivated and it's so cool like that's that's like one of my favorite things is the world is seeing a kid light up with a project idea and just go go go go because they're so motivated.
Speaker 5
So if this week will initiative or project just
Speaker 6
gets
Speaker 5
boring for you guys I got a suggestion. you started off talking about SDL, self -directed learning, and how to foster that curiosity. And Ayla has expanded on that herself quite a bit here today to help people not give up, right, in all this. But, you know, there are over 7 billion people on the planet. There are billions of people who are going to be forced to be self -directed learners in the coming century, the coming decades. We need to know more about how to foster a self -directed workforce, their lifelong learning and all
Speaker 1
that.
Speaker 5
If you can write the book,
Speaker 1
you'll,
Speaker 5
you'll get millions of teachers reading that book and, and other educators and other interested people. I've been researching self directed learning for a couple of decades, in particular the last decade, and have a checklist for self -directed learning and some guidelines. And so I will send that to you after the show. And then you go ahead and write your book based on, know, and you'll you know, help the whole world out I also have a book on on motivating learners online That's free called tech variety or adding tech variety with 101 activity hundred activity and has a new book motivating supporting learners online of Variation of that first book tech variety that's free and it's available, the first one's available in Chinese and English. And I'll send you the link to as well. Some of your teachers might find that valuable, you know, all the resources. And so we talk about tone, effective climate, right? Encouragement, curiosity, variety, autonomy, relevance, interactivity, engagement, tension, and yielding products. Those are the 10 principles of the tech variety model, spells tech variety. Anyhow, I've been dabbling in this for decades myself. I find your what you've been talking about exactly in line with the tech variety model. I have a second model, read, reflect, display, and do, R2D2 is my Star Wars model. Unfortunately, that book is not free, but I'll send you something on that as well. But I really encourage you to just keep collecting anything you are learning about self -directedness, how to foster it, and even if you just create some guidelines and put it on the Wequel website or, you know, about what's been successful in regard.
Speaker 1
Yeah definitely. We, I mean, Ila's been putting together a ton of resources. I know Allison has his well -writing projects on this philosophy. We're also working with Jimmy Edwards, the chief of educational success for Weequilab. He's getting his doctorate in curriculum and instruction and he's been a big help in helping us to try to communicate all of our ideas and approaches in a way that other people can try to replicate because we did come to this philosophy from a very different we don't have an education background. We never thought about homeschooling or education before the pandemic. And a lot of these ideas really came from the startup world. Because, you know, a lot of the people that we that we learned from our leaders, like, creation, and the age in the digital age where, you know, all of these, the tasks that were necessary, what the public education system was made for, all of those things are now increasingly becoming automated either through software or robotics. And so because of that, the whole nature of success and what humans need to do is changing radically. And so we kind of came to that from that perspective, but also it can be hard to bridge that gap in terms of communication to just parents and teachers who are thinking, oh, well, I have these and what am I supposed to do? And it can be it can be scary and overwhelming sometimes. So definitely there's there's lots to explore there.
Speaker 5
So we were running a little bit low on time. I'll make sure Lydia and Funa gets asked a question. But let's just plug this, go to the blog, our listeners should go to this blog post, and I'm gonna encourage Sumay, Alia, Ayla, and Alison to send more, and Justin, send some links. We can put more links in this blog post, so people can learn, we all wanna learn more about this. Okay, so thank you all, Lydia. Actually,
Speaker 7
Punia, do you wanna go first? I have plenty of chatting with this.
Speaker 3
Okay, sure.

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