Over the past eighteen months, our teaching and learning community (TLC) has been working on an action research project designed to develop metacognitive strategies and cultivate self-directed learning with our further education students.
Teachers have developed a range of strategies in the classroom, with the aim of encouraging students to consciously think about and reflect on how they are learning. In addition to developing resources, teachers have facilitated student focus groups, encouraged students to complete regular structured reflections, and taken part in reciprocal peer observations. All of this work has been widely shared, contributing to an ongoing feeling of continuous professional development and learning.
Over the course of this action research project, we have met semi-regularly to discuss and reflect on our practice and have created a partnership with a local university to develop as teacher-researchers. We have continuously shared our work on the TLC virtual forum as well as through teacher-led presentations in professional development (PD) sessions.
This has all contributed to an emerging ground-up research culture, characterised by collaborative learning and a willingness to take risks and trial innovative strategies, modelling the kind of behaviours we seek to inculcate with our students. For example, teachers have begun to experiment with the concepts of freewriting and diagrarting (Gilbert, 2022); the latter being a combination of diagrams, dialogue and art and a new form of writing and drawing to develop thinking.
