Baturina E.Ye., Rassolova L.V.

Donetsk Nationale University of

Economics and Trade named

after Tugan-Baranovsky

Self-directed learning as a part of learning process

If we believe that we are preparing students to strategically confront and creatively resolve the ambiguous, paradoxical, and dichotomous problems and conflicts the will encounter in our increasingly more complex society, then the focus of education must shift. Both teachers and students must become continual and internally driven learners: self-analyzing, self-referencing, self-evaluating, and self-correcting. Modern educators are realizing that new goals are becoming increasingly apparent as survival skills for our students’ future. Such goals include the following:

– the capacity for continued learning;

– knowing how to behave when answers to problems are not immediately apparent;

– cooperativeness and team building;

– precise communication in a variety of modes;

– problem solving that requires creativity and ingenuity;

– the enjoyment of resolving ambiguous, discrepant, and paradoxical situations;

– the generation and organization of an overabundance of technologically produced information;

– knowing and accepting ourselves;

– personal commitment to larger organizational and global values.

Students will have to know how to develop and defend their opinions based on the information they absorb. This requires continuous self-directed learning. A self-directed person can be described as being self-managing, self-monitoring and self-modifying. Students often come from previous schools and classrooms and home environments in which evaluation, rewards, and accountability are external. Students will need to understand the significance of self-evaluation and the role it cars play in their learning process. The article suggest how teachers mediate students’ self-directedness through designing instruction lessons, units, and activities; by creating class-room conditions for self-directed learning; by engaging and enhancing reflective dialogue; and by serving as a model for students to emulate.

We shall start from investigating teacher's mediating role. Mediate comes from the word middle. A mediator interposes him or herself in the middle between a person and some event, problem, conflict, or other perplexing situation that needs resolution. The mediating teacher may intervene in such a way as to enhance the three phases of self-directed learning:

Self-Managing: to assist the person in approaching a problem with clarity of outcomes, and a strategic plan that includes past experiences, anticipates indicators of success, and includes a thoughtful exploration of creative alternatives.

Self-Monitoring: to assist the person in establishing metacognitive strategies that will alert the perceptions for in-the-moment clues and indicators as to whether the strategic plan is working or not, and to assist in the decision-making process connected with altering the plan.

Self-Modifying: to assist the person in reflecting on, evaluating, analyzing, and constructing meaning from the experience and to apply the learning to future situations. The ultimate goal of the mediator is to modify the person's intellectual capabilities for self-directed learning - to help the person become self-managing, self-monitoring, and self-modifying, with no need for intervention from others.

Teachers constantly make decisions about what tasks, projects, and problems they assign to students that will engage and promote their learning. Teachers consider such things as the amount of time it will take to complete the project, the resources that are available in the HEI and community, the standards to which the projects might relate, the conceptual learning that can accrue, the developmental levels of the students, and their capacities for working together and independently. We would also suggest that a critical consideration is whether instruction is designed to provide opportunities for students to be self-directed. This level of intentional design for self-directed learning has some key attributes, such as the following:

Planning: Students should be included in planning for a given project or assignment. They should be involved in clarifying the goals, thinking about time management, and establishing criteria in accordance with standards. If students and teachers agree upon shared indicators of how well the process works as well as what a quality product will look like, the chances of achieving that product are greatly improved. The work should produce some relevant, authentic, and tangible products that have significance and meaning for the student. The design of the product and the production process should be left to student choice as long as the product will meet the established criteria.

Feedback: Learning requires continual direct feedback given throughout the production process as close to the performance and as timely as possible so student can be in a continuous spiral of learning. During the process of developing the product, the standards, criteria, and rubrics should be monitored and revisited with invitations for students to make comparisons and judgments about the degree to which the standards are being met. Students can be given feedback from peers, critical friends, the teacher, or other expert resources. The quality of the feedback should be neutral and without value judgments. If students are to become self-evaluative, then the teacher and peers must remain nonevaluative so as not to rob learners of opportunities to evaluate themselves and their own efforts against a set of criteria.

If the criteria for progress and product are not adequately being met, the student is offered additional opportunities to complete the product without sanctions. The consequence of successful or unsuccessful effort should be the same – a careful review of what went well and what did not. When students know that, they have a greater chance of learning from the experience.

The process of self-assessment provides internal and external data that promote one’s own learning and growth.

We may draw conclusion that self-directed people consciously reflect upon, conceptualize, and apply understandings from one experience to another. As a result of this analysis and reflection, they synthesize new knowledge, learning accumulates, and concepts are derived and constructed.