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How to Encourage Students to Take Responsibility for their Learning

Teachers are responsible to make sure that students make progress in learning. They need to facilitate the learning process, making it easier for students to grasp course material. However, at the end of the day, students are responsible for their own learning. 

Empowering students involves giving responsibility and ownership of learning. Teachers need to encourage and motivate kids to take control of their own learning. In this post, you will learn about some tips to empower students and make them responsible for their education.

1. Help Them Make Academic Goals

Setting up goals is the first step to taking responsibility towards learning.  Without goals, there can be no progress towards learning. You need to ask students what they want to learn from the course. Help them make weekly, monthly, and yearly goals that they can work towards and improve their learning. The goals can be anything relating to academic such as learning new skills or improving their grades.

You need to clarify to students what is a good performance. You should tell them about expected performance. Provide examples of what is considered satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Let them reflect and decide what goals can help them later in their academic life.

2. Provide them Opportunities to Learn

You should help students know effective strategies to master a topic. However, you need to let them complete the task themselves. For instance, you can tell them about how to solve problems, but you should let them solve the problems. Tell students to write down what they have learned during a particular day. This action will help them realize their strengths and weaknesses. It will make them work hard to overcome weaknesses by utilizing their strengths.

3. Make an Essay Test and Let them Choose the Questions

Consider using a test maker to make a quiz, but let the students pick the questions. You can write 15 questions and ask students to pick 10.  Also, you can let students pick from essay or multiple type exam questions. This will help students to work to their strengths and perform well in exams.

4. Empower Students to Grade their Own Work

When you give a quiz, lab report, or essay, you should create a rubric for it and ask students to grade themselves. Then you should ask them to grade their classmate's paper. Afterwards, you should collect all the papers and grade them yourself. In the end, you should ask students to compare the three rubrics including your own evaluation, peer review, and self-review. This will help them understand how grading works and so perform prepare better for the exam.

The above tips can help in empowering students to become responsible for their own learning. As a teacher, you need to guide and coach your students to unlock their true potential and excel in their studies.