How learning journals can help students grow | Jiang Xueqin | Big Think

the hardest thing to learn for students is the ability to self -assess accurately and so um but you know unfortunately in schools we don't give kids enough space enough autonomy to learn the skills of self -reflection and self -assessment now what's really interesting about this time is that because of coronavirus kids have all this time to suffer self -reflect and self -assess and so we should be actively promoting meta -learning during this time and so what i've suggested is that we promote the idea of a learning journal so the idea is this let kids decide their own learning path let them decide what they want to learn it could be they want to learn how to cook it could be they want to learn how to drive a car it could be they want to learn programming it could be they want to participate in the finish challenge it doesn't matter so but what's important

is that they write down their learning journey and so there are three components to a learning journal first is to define learning the goal concretely and precisely so it's better to say i want to be able to run a marathon in less than four hours and let's just say i want to finish first in the marathon second is to write down the learning process so think of a cooking recipe and writing out how you cook something and the third and most important component of a learning journal is to write down your observations collect data self -reflect and developing new and develop new learning strategies for yourself and during this process teachers don't go away teachers play a very important role in that they become coaches and i would say that being a coach has three main functions the first function is to motivate the student second function is to identify witnesses in the learning journal

and the third and most important um function is to constantly suggest new learning strategies so let's go back to the marathon example um students when they're learning when they're when they're in a process they tend to become very focused right so they keep on running so as a coach you want you might want to say to the student hey have you thought about sleep patterns have you thought about diet have you thought about lifting weights have you thought about running with friends so the idea is not to give correct solutions the idea is to suggest new possibilities so that students can self -diagnose more more accurately so that's the idea of a learning journal i believe that um if we go through this learning journal students when they come back to the classroom will be much more motivated and they'll be much more effective learners get smarter faster with new videos every week from the

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