Independent learning

Working as teachers, we deal with a great variety of personalities and different types of students. Some of them have difficulties making the transition from high school to university because superior education requires students to take responsibility for their own learning and to make decisions by themselves. Also, it’s kind of difficult for students to make the transition from high school to university because they are surrounded by more distractions and the level of education is higher, so it means that they have to make a bigger effort and study more than how they used to study.

The main goal for teachers is to facilitate independent learning that is a process in which a student acquires knowledge by his or her own efforts and develops the ability for inquiry and critical evaluation.

One of the big challenges that we as teachers have is to encourage our students to make decisions by themselves about how they could learn the best and how they could be more independent and creative in their own learning. Also we have to create opportunities for them to pursue their own interests and practice skills in a variety of ways in order to create students able to know what they want or don’t, willing to take risks, able to set goals and initiate tasks with less direction and avoid procrastination.