F - Psychological tips for Empowering Learners

Summary

Empowering learners means giving them voice, a sense of control, and a feeling that they can make a positive difference to their learning. When teachers empower learners, they enable them to take an active role in directing what and how they learn.

• 86 Help students break long-term goals into short-term ones

• 87 Show students how to use if … then strategies to reach goals

• 88 Make learning progress visible

• 89 Give questioning over to students

• 90 Help learners understand their role in achievement

• 91 Inspire your students to engage in deliberate practice

• 92 Welcome desirable difficulty

• 93 Praise effort and process, not product and person

• 94 Prompt students to be proactive about their learning

• 95 Show students how drawing can enhance their learning

• 96 Build in brain breaks

• 97 View feedback as a dialogue

• 98 Encourage your students to keep a portfolio

• 99 Help students learn how to learn

• 100 Embrace all learners’ languages

• 101 Integrate life skills

86 Help students break long-term goals into short-term ones

Students may feel overwhelmed by complex long-term goals. Help them set short-term goals in addition.

The behavioural science literature shows that goal setting significantly increases performance compared to an approach where students are simply told to do their best. However, if the goals are long-term and complex, such as, for example, I would like to gain some work experience in an English-speaking country, teachers need to give students additional support to help them reach such goals. This is because long-term and complex goals may feel unattainable and it is hard to feel a sense of progress, which can lead to loss of motivation. In contrast, short-term goals offer more opportunities to check progress and gain a sense of achievement, which in turn can boost students’ work morale. They also enable students to try a different strategy more readily if they notice that they are not successful in achieving a shortterm goal before it is too late.

• • Talk to your students about their learning goals. Ask them to share their goals and discuss whether they are more short- or long-term goals, and reflect on how easy they are to achieve and why.

• • Ask them to categorise the reasons.

• • Working with their reasons, explain that long-term goals are best supported with additional short-term goals.

• • Challenge them to break up their long-term goals into short term ones without losing sight of the long-term goal.