Life-long learning, self-direction, and PLPs

One of the major things that students need to learn while in school is how to learn. Not only this, but educators need to be helping students develop learning habits that will make them life-long learners. This idea has become popular to talk about, but how are we actually helping students accomplish this goal in our schools? How are they supposed to learn to keep learning when we tie learning to such a peculiar context (e.g., the school building, sitting in seats facing a whiteboard, reading out of a book, listening to a teacher lecture)?

Photo by Ambro

I think one way to help create life-long learners is to create self-directed learners. If students cannot guide their own learning process and engage in that learning process without the context of the teacher and the classroom, then they will stop being active learners as soon as they leave school. By allowing students to be self-directed in the learning process, they become invested in the process for its own sake and they start to practice the learning process in broader, novel contexts.

One way of allowing for self-directed learning and establishing student ownership of learning is to use a PLP, or Personal Learning Plan. PLPs ask students to set learning goals, evaluate progress, supplement or revise the plan when necessary, and achieve long-term goals. In the school setting, PLPs are frequently set up by teachers, sometimes involving parents and students, to help students plan out and manage their school work. I believe, however, that we should teach students to set their own PLPs as a way to take on ownership of their learning process with a longer vision than just completing four years of high school.

PLPs can help students to:

1) organize their learning over long periods of time

2) track and assess their content and skill mastery while working toward a particular goal

3) set life goals, then create short- and long-term plans to achieve those goals
                - examples of possible education related life goals: go to an ivy league college, become
                   fluent in a foreign language, publish a written or artistic work, start a business


But if this kind of program can help student achieve these kinds of goals, why call it a Personal Learning Plan? If a student comes to me and says "my goal is to open up my own business one day", of course they are probably thinking that there are a few things they need to learn and a few steps to take between the first step (take a high school economics course or join the entrepreneur club) and the final step (open one's own business). But why call it just a learning plan? This is a life plan.

There it is. I mean, that is the goal, right? To create life-long learners. Learning is a part of almost every process that requires a human being to change or adapt. So maybe when ask our students to set some goals in school, the goal they set out on does not always need to look like a "learning" outcome, so much as some outcome that requires them to reflect and adapt to the world around them. That may be setting the goal of reading a certain number of minutes a week, keeping up with current events, or starting down the path to a life-long career.

The point is all of these goals, no matter their scope, require change and promote learning. By empowering our students to work on goals that are important to them and helping them gain the skills and knowledge required to complete them, we'll find ourselves on the right road to creating life-long learners.