Research Blog Post #6- Self-Awareness and Self-Direction

    In Chapter 6 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she discusses the important independent skill of self-direction. Hess (2023) states, “Self-direction is a complex competency that includes both the intrapersonal skills of self-awareness and reflection and the intrapersonal skill of collaboration” (p. 261). With self-direction, students utilize this skill by identifying their interest about a topic, collaborating with others, and using their ideas to shape and mold their own learning experiences. Students’ learning experiences include goal setting, questioning, using prior-knowledge to inform decisions, assessing and revising based on feedback, and taking ownership for their own quality of work that they produce. Hess (2017) further breaks down self direction into five components:

1. Self-Awareness- Students should be using past experiences to self-evaluate and reflect on one’s strengths, challenges, interests, and desires and how they are connected to a variety of different topics and learning experiences.

2. Initiative and Ownership- Students are responsible for their own learning. It is important that they show initiative by questioning and collaborating with others in order to extend their own thinking and knowledge of different topics and concepts.

3. Goal Setting and Planning- Students need to have a goal to work towards when engaging in learning experiences, both short term “benchmarks” and long term goals. This helps students to plan their steps throughout the learning process.

4. Engaging and Managing- Students learn best when they are engaged in the content that they are exploring and learning about. In order to support their own engagement, students should use relevant resources and information throughout the learning process. For the managing portion of this component, students can rely on the short term and long term goals they created in order to keep them on track.

5. Monitoring and Adapting- As students progress through different stages of the learning and exploring process, they should be evaluating their progress as they reach different benchmarks/checkpoints. This allows them to change their strategies as needed based on their results. Students need to be taught to grow from their mistakes, not be ashamed of them. One of the most important things about the learning process is learning from mistakes and understanding how students can adjust or change strategies during the learning process in order to produce a new outcome. Students often feel empowered when they are finally able to figure out a problem, especially when they may have had to revise their strategies a few times in order to get the desired results.

In an article I found titled, “Self-awareness and self-direction” by Audrey Homan, the five components of self-direction that Hess addressed, are also addressed by Homan. The visual below shows Homan’s interpretation of self-direction and you can easily see the connection to Hess’ ideas:

I found it interesting how both authors used almost the same exact language to a tee when explaining each component. With their ideas being so similar, I was curious to see how Homan might expand upon Hess’ ideas. I was shocked when I noticed that Homan took only the first component of self-direction… self-awareness… and expanded on it so greatly that it amazed me. 

Homan talks about how self-awareness is a great “entry-point” for students as they learn how to utilize the self-direction framework (aka the five components). Her article goes on to further explain “self-awareness” (and then self-direction) and how they relate to real-life 6th grade lessons. Homan (2020) states, “While self-direction seems like something students would have to do alone, Heidi began with the whole group in order to scaffold the learning: reflecting as a group on elements of self-direction before moving to individual reflections”. This is helpful so students can understand what will be expected of them. This teacher chose to create a visual game board to track both class progress and students’ individual progress. As self-awareness developed, students were able to move their game pieces up the path. The path included reflecting on individual strengths and challenges. Students were able to reflect upon class strengths and challenges, and after a lot of conversation and opportunities to debrief their learning, students were ready to self-reflect on their own strengths and challenges.

The teacher then expanded upon the self-awareness component by incorporating a self-evaluation. Students were asked to reflect on specific skills that self-directed learners practice:

I found this self-evaluation very meaningful because not only does it help students develop self-awareness, but it also helps teachers to better understand students as learners and how they can better support students with skills that they may struggle with.

Expanding on this, Homan talks about how the teacher (Heidi) continues to expand on self-awareness by creating intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences for students. Homan (2020) states, “Heidi asked her students to do this too by sharing their strengths and limitations within the learning community. They each hold a piece of the classroom puzzle, learning from each others’ strengths and offering support for growth.  Students shared their self-reflections in the form of puzzle pieces”. I found this experience powerful because it shows students how their class has a wide variety of diverse learners and all students have strengths and challenges that are unique to them, while also noticing similarities and differences between themselves and other peers. It also shows students how they all fit together in the classroom, no matter what their strengths and challenges are.

Homan continued running with the idea of self-awareness as she described the next lesson as well, this time, by observing a lesson that focuses on identifying students’ motivations. With this lesson, students were invited to reflect upon what motivates them to learn (ex: curiosity, grades, sense of accomplishment, etc.). They did this as a class before, once again, doing it independently which allowed them to further engage in the component of “self-awareness”. In this process, students also organized their motivators into the categories of intrinsic (motivated to perform an activity in order to earn a reward or avoid a punishment) and extrinsic (motivated to perform an activity for its own sake and personal reward).

Going EVEN deeper, Homan then created a learning experience where students were asked to brainstorm their own aspirations. Homan (2020) states, “Students used their self-awareness to dream big! They evaluated their aspirations and created a rationale to explain why they were or were not achievable”. With this, students were able to come up with their own aspirations/dreams and they were able to reflect upon whether or not each aspiration they came up with was achievable. They were also able to give their explanation for why their aspiration is or is not achievable.

Lastly, Homan touched upon an activity where students created “WOOP” goals which identifies their Wishes, Outcomes, Obstacles, and Plans. Homan (2020) states, “They are creating goals and plans that are informed by their evaluations of their aspirations, strengths, challenges, and motivations.  Now that is self-direction!”. Creating these goals allows students to reflect on their past learning of self-awareness and apply it directly to their own aspirations in order to develop a plan of how to achieve their aspirations/goals. 

At the end of the article, Homan mentioned that the 6th graders would then be moving on to tackle the component of initiative and ownership.

Overall, I found it interesting that both authors connected upon the five components of self-direction in such a linear way. I found it even more interesting that Homan was about to take just one component of self-direction and write a whole article about it and how it can be taught and used within the classroom. It goes to show how important each component is and it goes to show how teachers should take their time when exploring each and every aspect of the five components of self-direction.

References:

Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by Design, Not Chance: Deeper Thinking Through Actionable Instruction and Assessment. ASCD.

Homan, A. (2020, January 30). Self-awareness and self-direction. Innovative Education in VT. https://tiie.w3.uvm.edu/blog/self-awareness-and-self-direction/