How do service learning and self-directed learning connect and what are the implications for early adolescent students? The authors explore both the service learning and self-directed learning literature and research to discover the connections between the two approaches and concepts. This essay reviews existing frameworks for self-directed…

Our school career culminates in a set of exam results, but if students want to do well, attending lessons is not enough: the implicit expectation is that all students will reinforce learning independently outside of the classroom. Really effective learners employ effective independent study techniques, but when, how and where do they learn to do…

The goal of this chapter is to propose a cyclical process of how teachers can use multimodal multichannel data of cognitive, affective, metacognitive, motivational, and social processes to assist with the understanding of their own and their students' self-regulated learning (SRL), and their subsequent instructional decision making. What…

Along with the increased interest in self-regulated learning research, there has been a high engrossment in computer-based learning environments that facilitate instruction and promote learning. These two crucial pedagogical approaches have been identified as being valuable to educators and learners. They merit refreshed considerations in light of…

Self-directed learning is a core theoretical construct of adult learning. Importantly, self-directed learning represents a fundamental meta-competence for living and working in our increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Nonetheless, the construct of self-directed learning has become obfuscated. In order to redress this concern, this…

Learner modeling systems so far formulated model learning in three main ways: a learner's "position" within a lattice of declarative and procedural knowledge about highly structured disciplines such as geometry or physics, a learner's path through curricular tasks compared to milestones, or profiles of a learner's achievements on a set…

Contract grading provides graduate-level students with greater control and autonomy within the learning process. The contract grading approach requires students to take greater responsibility for achieving course learning outcomes as well as allowing learners to adjust the style and focus of assignments to meet their own unique needs and desires.…

Practitioner Inquiry (PI) is the systematic, intentional study of one's professional practice. It makes reflective teaching visible and actionable. In this article, we reflect on our experiences as practitioner researchers across elementary, secondary, and teacher education and engage in critical conversations with one another to present a common…

In this paper, we lay the foundations of the personal learning environment or PLE, its conception, cognitive and theoretical underpinnings, and implications for the design of pedagogical processes and learning ecosystems. We characterize the PLE as a technosocial reality that embodies the sociomaterial entanglement with which people learn as well…

In "Learning Without Lessons," David F. Lancy fills a rather large gap in the field of child development and education. Drawing on focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology, ethnographic accounts of childhood, and insights from archaeological studies, Lancy offers the first attempt to review the principles and practices for…

Amidst a steady clamor about "learning loss" during the pandemic, a minority of educators have cautioned we must, in the words of Donna Haraway, "stay with the trouble," giving children space to grieve, explore, and make sense of a new reality. In this paper I interrogate what it means to stay with trouble and specifically call…

The needs of society have changed significantly over the years, and so we must ensure that how we educate evolves to meet those needs.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a contemporary of the first non-European Nobel Laureate from Asia, Rabindranath Tagore. Their educational ideas and practices of reform were deeply informed by their own troubled experiences of schooling within the highly mechanised industrial model of education imported from colonial England. Both were school dropouts and…

In the Fall of 2014, several universities came together to offer a unique "dual-layer" open online course. This course was designed with two complete layers from two different course design modalities (instructivism and connectivism). Learners were granted the freedom to create an individualized pathway through the course involving…

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic brought about several challenges in both learning and instructive styles. Chief among these was engagement in classrooms that were remote, in-person or switched between the two due to quarantine periods. In a content centric biomaterials core course, here we describe an 'inclusive engagement toolkit' that combines…