10 Conditions For Self-Sustaining & Self-Directed Learning In The Classroom

The work is sufficiently self-sustaining if the teacher can formatively assess and provide personalized feedback and advice to each student. It seems like the following conditions have to be met to ensure that the work we give students is self-sustaining and worthy work:

1. Rich, challenging, and meaningful problems/issues/tasks that require core content
2. No single, obvious, or superficial solution path – yet, the task is doable.
3. Clear performance goals and criteria for judging progress and knowing when the work is “done to standard”
4. Access to appropriate and varied resources
5. Familiar routines/protocols that help students organize the process (with varying degrees of transfer expected, via scaffolding/explicitness provided by the teacher; depending upon level of student skill and autonomy)
6. Sufficient choice/personalization to enable students play to strengths/interests
7. Self-assessment and self-adjustment guides via models and rubrics
8. Benchmarks, checkpoints and other formal and informal formative assessments, to ensure students are on course and on time.
9. Explicit norms of mutual respect and personal responsibility, preferably built with student input and sign-off.
10. Teacher respect for reasonable non-disruptive student “down time.”