Developing resources for self-directed learning
Paul Collett, Kristen Sullivan, Malcolm Swanson
The trend in faculty development is towards accountability, more awareness of student needs and building courses accordingly, with bridging of levels becoming an important issue. With this in mind, Collett, Sullivan and Swanson are teaching their students how to learn, in tandem with presentation of EFL course material. They feel that students tend to be reliant on instructors to ensure that they are making an effort to learn so it is important to get goals straight from the beginning of the course and then reflect on them again half-way through and at the end ("goaling"). Course objectives presented very explicitly via "can-do statements" start self-directed learning cycles, keeping their well-understood goals firmly in mind—facilitated with "Study Progress Journals". Students need to understand self-assessment, to know that something may not have succeeded not because they are stupid but because they need to reevaluate their methodology. This results in what is called English Improvement Goals and Objectives (E.I.G.O.)
As an illustration of preparation for this type of class, we individually examined some sample textbook units for useful learning/teaching points, wrote them out as "can-do statements" and then pooled our results on the whiteboard for discussion.
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