Teach students how to ask for help

When starting to experiment with more autonomous and personalized learning, many teachers face the challenge of responding to the many questions students have. Students need time to adapt to more responsibility for their own learning. At first, they may still depend (too much) on the teacher's directions and thus may not be capable to start or continue learning once they face a difficulty. Personalized learning is only likely to succeed when students are taught the necessary self-regulation skills. Teaching when and how to ask for help, is a great way to start supporting students' self-regulation and will likely benefit both students and teachers.

More about effective-help seeking strategies in the tMAIL app. Have a look what the following teacher did in her classroom after finishing the tMAIL mini-course on help-seeking.

The teacher is an English teacher in Spain. While her students were working in “learning stations”, she asked them to think about some strategies that they could use when they needed some help. They turned their help-seeking strategies into cards and placed them somewhere they could all access it. Students who had a question could now go and look at the different ways to find an answer and were able to judge what was the most appropriate strategy for them. The teacher reported she needed to intervene far less and was able to focus her attention on the group she was working with.

Source: tMAIL Pilot Report