Do you really want your students to be independent learners? I don’t think so and will be talking about my stance on this issue at the inaugural Southern Rocks conference on Saturday 3rd February… If you have a ticket and are interested in this topic please come along to my postprandial workshop. If you are not lucky enough to have secured a ticket I am sure you could independently find this all our by yourself. Or not.

More and more I am convinced that there should be interdependence between learner and teacher, combining elements of dependent (teacher-led) and independent (student-led) learning. At a very basic level this could be a teacher going through worked examples on a board moving on to students practising further exercises by themselves. In fact all lessons involve a spectrum* of interdependence.

My Southern Rocks session will look at three ways of trying to promote interdependent learning:

1. Self-regulation of learning
2. Rules of studying
3. Building topic-specific vocabulary

1 and 2 are based on whole-school interventions, whereas 3 is an action research project from my very own classroom. However, if you will not be at Southern Rocks, Chapter 10 of Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson’s What does this look like in the classroom? is a very useful stimulus for discussing what we really mean and want from independent learning. Or for those really short of time see this thread from Daniel Sabato.

*If you are being fussy you might call it a ‘continuum’ rather than ‘spectrum’.