Student Responsibility — Making the Connection

by Priscilla Richardson

Americans were reminded recently that, in spite of cutting edge technology, their DayTimers could be rendered irrelevant by something as old-fashioned as a power outage. As subways and elevators were halted mid-transit, darkened traffic lights stood watch over streets choked with foot traffic. The problem was ultimately pinpointed to shorted transmission lines in Ohio rather than to one of the giant power plants itself.

Students' failure to take responsibility for their own learning could also be blamed on faulty transmission lines — on synapses that were never created or fired, on mental connections that were never forged because of indolence or dependency on others. While each person is born with a "power plant" (brain), those "transmission lines" (nerve cells) are birthed by participation in activities that spark learning. If that network of cells is faulty or nonexistent, the brain's full potential will go unrealized. Obviously, the implications for teaching are enormous.

Probably the single most important component in developing student responsibility is ownership. Students need to feel they have a stake in their own learning, a vested interest in the outcome. The teacher's task then becomes getting students to buy in early to the task at hand. As new units are introduced, stealth becomes a valuable tool as teachers create ways to ambush student interest before the predictable-as-sunrise "do we have to do this?" comments surface. Dr. Mark Forget, of MAX Teaching, Inc., advocates one such method. He suggests teachers create anticipation guides for reading, which distill the main ideas and present them to students as general statements with which they must agree or disagree prior to doing the reading. Then in groups, students discuss the statements and their opinions before they read. After the reading is completed, students re-evaluate their answers, provide any necessary documentation from the reading, and then discuss the statements once more in a group, aiming for a consensus. This is followed by whole class discussion. Buy in is created as students think through the ideas and respond to them, first based on their own experience, then based on the reading, and finally, on a group discussion in which they either defend or dispute each statement. Watching students discuss ideas with passion and intensity is the happy result.

Another way to build student responsibility is to involve students in the process of teaching. When students work in groups, a specific task should be assigned to each member, who has the responsibility of answering to the group and, ultimately, to the class. With advance coaching from the teacher, a student may also be assigned to teach a small part of a unit to the class. Learning for that particular student will be at an all-time high, while his or her fellow students will have immediate interest because they're being taught by one of their own.

Goal setting can also provide students with a vested interest, while establishing a clear purpose for learning. Just as teachers often share their goals for students on the first day of school, students should also be asked to set a goal for a particular class along with the steps necessary to reach it. If it's put in writing, it stands for the rest of the year as silent testament to the student’s initial commitment to learning.

These, as well as many similar activities, work well to foster student responsibility and to get those synapses firing to create the vital connections that are necessary for learning to occur.

Note: The PLS graduate course Successful Teaching for Acceptance of Responsibility™ provides additional information on developing student responsibility. Call PLS at 1-800-526-4630 or check the PLS registration site (http://www.plsregistration.com) for the course closest to you.