Independent Learning

Everything you need to know about Independent Learning and why it is important

Encouraging independent learning is great way to yield increased motivation and improved academic improvement in your learners. Here at Teach2030, we’ve compiled this guide of everything you need to know about independent learning and your role as a teacher during it.

What is Independent Learning?

Independent learning is where we move away from the routine style of teaching where a teacher stands at the front of a classroom lecturing students about a topic they need to understand. Independent learning is where we encourage students to take ownership of their learning and forge a path of understanding and success for themselves.

Independent learning is where students self-direct their way through tasks, facing challenges and finding a way to overcome them by themselves. This allows students to develop higher order skills and a more critical approach toward their learning.

Independent Learning v Dependent Learning

Dependent learning is a traditional style of teaching that many teachers rely on. It is where teachers stand at the front and teach, whilst learners take on board what the teacher delivers to them. This is often known as a ‘teacher-led approach.’ This means students need the teacher for learning to occur. Quite often students will be passive and not have an active role in their learning. They often lack engagement, meaning that students can feel unstimulated or unchallenged, which might also affect their behaviour in class.

In independent learning, students take part in the lesson and take responsibility. They are proactive. They have the tools to work out challenges for themselves. Tasks might require interaction, co-operation, teamwork, organisation and presentation. Instead of a teacher-led approach, the teacher facilitates learning. In other words, the teacher assists with making sure the class understand a task and has the right skills to work by themselves.

There is always a place for dependent learning, where teachers direct the development and pace of a topic, but it can be even more effective learning when we integrate both approaches. It is fostering varied teaching and learning approaches which will allow students to cope in various situations which they may be confronted with in adult life as well as providing teachers with various strategies to adapt their teaching to reach all learners – particularly those who are higher attainers.

Why is Independent Learning important for teachers?

Independent leaning is incredibly important to equip students with. When we give students opportunities to direct their own learning journey, we are providing them with skills for life. The strategies of investigation, analysis and evaluation are higher order skills which will allow our students to become successful in their futures.

What are the benefits of Independent Learning?

The benefits of independent learning are multiple. Students become more invested in their learning when they are managing the pace and development of tasks; we are allowing them to become resilient when facing obstacles as well as self-reliant when directing themselves through learning.

Studies have shown that self-directed learning, where students work through tasks independently with the teacher simply supervising or gently monitoring and coaching, prove to yield increased motivation and improved academic improvement; which makes sense as students know their limitations but also begin to learn how to cope with difficulties and what strategies to use to enable themselves to move forward in their own way. This then builds confidence and aspiration to progress further and engage more deeply with tasks and units of study.

Establishing Independent Learning in your classroom

Establishing independent learning in classrooms does take time, patience and consistency. With any new strategy, change does not occur overnight – it is a gradual process.

For effective independent learning, teachers must first explain to learners how it works and the purpose behind it; it is important to give students reasons for doing things otherwise they will see them as pointless and be unwilling to invest in it.

Once students understand this method of learning, teachers need to use this teaching and learning style on a regular basis for it to become a norm in the classroom.

Initially, it may be challenging and ineffective but the more you establish this practice in the classroom, the more the students will become used to it and therefore move forward and make progress with it.

The role of the teacher during Independent Learning

As a teacher, it is your role to guide your students through this method, encouraging and supporting learners rather than telling them what to do or giving the answers.

It will be difficult at first, but learners will progress and will gradually move away from depending on your support and work their way through tasks independently which you give to them.

In order to build up to this independent style or working, you may initially want to introduce more pair and group work, where you assign a role to each member of a group in order to work through a task you set for them. It may be a research role, a scribe role or a presentation role, but it is vital that all members have a task to complete. This allows for all students to work through challenges or presenting their learning to others is an effective way to nurture these independent skills whatever their attainment level may be.

Again, your role is to facilitate the learning and process of learning rather than instructing and telling the students what to do. It is a higher-level skill to encourage students to research and evaluate how to work through tasks you have set.

Using independent learning in lessons is an effective skill for all levels of student as long as the teachers facilitate the process and execution carefully.