Autonomy, Active Learning, and Learning Strategies

Teaching must be autonomous so that it model stuents' responses and motivation. Students are more likely to learn from modeling that from being talked out. Autonomy in teaching requires eventually making decisions that might be not planned in advance, or stopping the class if an existential issue arises; it requires closing the text book in order to change the activity with the purpose of gathering attention back, or even simply going out with no apparent reason. However, students must know the sense of what they are doing because this is the very first step to becoming (more) autonomous.

Students need to be involved and actively participate of their learning processes, and teachers are responsible for the circumstances surrounding such proceses. Students need to feel they are important so that their motivation to contributing keep up. They must have the chance to show what they know and say what they have to say, which together with proper feedback helps self esteem grow healthy.

Learning Strategies work suitably towards having our students be in charge of their own processes and monitor their outcomes. It is important for them to know the ways in which they learn and be trained on these strategies. Once they visualize how they learn, they can consequently use strategies distictively, for particular purposes.

Probably the best approaches to students are the ones rid of pretensions and thus closer to them. In terms of evident committment and motivation, the best way is to depart from what is familiar to students because treating topics realted to their own lives catches their interest and willingness to spontaneously contribute.