Describe your best school experience (or your best teacher).

What made that experience/teacher so good?

Describe your worst school experience (teacher).

What made that experience/teacher so bad?

What other learning experiences have you had?

Community groups? Church groups?

What helps you learn how to do something new?

What gets in your way when learning something new?

How do your family and friends feel about learning and school?

Describe a job or work experience that you enjoyed.

What was good about that experience?

Describe a job or work experience that you did not like.

What was bad about that experience?

What do you like to do?

What is hard/difficult for you to do?

Tell about someone you know who has a good job.

What did they do that helped them?

What do you think about that?

Describe your typical day.

What do you see as your personal strengths?

What are you good at?

What do you do well?

If you disappeared, what would it take to replace you?

What would your friends and family miss about you?

What do you expect to do after this class is completed?

What do you want to be doing by the end of this year?

What do you want to be doing next summer?

What do you want to be doing in 5 years?

Age: Ethnicity/race:

If you have children, what are their ages:

Do you have a high school diploma or GED? If no, what was the last grade you completed:

Last job you had:

How long did you work there: Hourly wage:

List any volunteer jobs and how long at each:

(from the article: Teaching Learners to be Self-Directed)

• Introduce, connect, and end learning activities attractively and clearly. Specify what is to be done, when, where, and how.

• Begin lesson with short statement of goals.

• Provide a reinforcing event for positive closure at the end of significant units of learning.

• State explicitly the present intrinsic value of learning the content, as distinct from its value as a link to future goals.

• Supervise carefully. Ensure successful learning. Frequently check for student understanding.

• Provide close guidance during initial practice.

• To enhance achievement-striving behavior, provide opportunities to achieve standards of excellence under conditions of moderate risk.

• Reward incremental steps toward larger goals.

• Organize materials on an increasing level of difficulty; that is, structure the learning material to provide a "conquerable challenge."

• Break assignments into small steps. Give detailed instructions and explanations.

• State explicitly how instruction builds on learner's existing skills.

• Review previous, prerequisite learning.

• Introduce the unfamiliar through the familiar. Use analogies familiar to learner from past experience. Present new material in small steps.

• Give praise for successful progress or accomplishment. Provide frequent reinforcements when a student is learning a new task. Have high level of active practice with continuous reinforcement. Provide informative, helpful feedback when it is immediately useful. Provide frequent, systematic positive feedback, reinforcement, and correction.

• Whenever possible, help the learner realize how to operationalize in daily living what has been learned.

• Encourage the learner.

• Give personal attention to students.

• Reduce components of the learning environment that lead to failure or fear. Avoid the use of threats as a means of obtaining task performance.

• Avoid surveillance (as opposed to positive attention).

• When relevant, select content, examples, and projects that relate to the physiological and safety needs of learners.

• State explicitly how the instruction relates to future activities of the learner.

• Provide frequent response opportunities to all learners.

• Use unpredictability and uncertainty to the degree that learners enjoy them with a sense of security.

• Use humor.

• Provide variety in personal presentation style, methods of instruction, and learning materials.

• Selectively use breaks, physical exercises, and energizers.

• When appropriate, help learners to directly experience cognitive concepts on a physical and emotional level.

• Selectively use examples, analogies, metaphors, and stories.

• Use content-related anecdotes, case studies, biographies, etc.

• When learning tasks are suitable to their ability, help learners to understand that effort and persistence can overcome their failures.

• Include statements about the likelihood of success with given amounts of effort and ability.

• Affirm the learners' responsibility and any significant actions or characteristics that contributed to the successful completion of the learning task.
• Emphasize deadlines.

• Use games, role-plays, or simulations that require learner participation.

• Build in problem solving activities at regular intervals.

• Provide learners with the opportunity to select topics, projects, and assignments that appeal to their curiosity, sense of wonder, and need to explore.

• Selectively emphasize and deal with the human perspective of what is being learned, with application to the personal daily lives of the learners.

• Ask learners to relate the instruction to their own future goals.

• When relevant, select content, examples, and projects that relate to love and belongingness needs of the learners and learner values.

• Bring in alumni of the course as enthusiastic guest lecturers.

• Create components in the learning environment that tell learners they are accepted and respected and participating members of the group.

• To satisfy the need for affiliation, establish trust and provide opportunities for no-risk, cooperative interaction.

• Make the learning goal as clear as possible. Keep problem-focused and help students identify strategies they can use to solve the problems—both learning and behavior problems.

• Announce the expected amount of time needed for study and practice for successful learning.

• Explain the criteria for evaluation of performance. Have students practice using the list of criteria to evaluate themselves on an assignment.

• Use creativity techniques to have students create unusual analogies and associations to the content.

• Monitor somewhat closely, but give feedback first by asking students to examine and evaluate their own work, cueing them to relevant information as necessary.

• Verbally reinforce a student's intrinsic pride in accomplishing a difficult task. Hold discussions with students about the role effort plays in their productive work.

• Reward intrinsically interesting task performance with unexpected, non-contingent rewards.

• Encourage students to feel good about successful completion of a project or a step toward completion.

• Allow a student to use a new skill in a realistic setting as soon as possible.

• When learning has natural consequences, help learners to be aware of them as well as their impact.

• Help students make a plan for completing specific projects--starting with short (15-min.) projects and moving to longer ones.

• Show students how to break task down into subgoals. Model this and have students practice it.

• When making an assignment, help students brainstorm lists of strategies for getting the project done. Help them analyze the effectiveness of these strategies.

• Continue to reward incremental steps toward larger goals.

• Give students practice in setting realistic goals and devising strategies to accomplish those goals.

• Use formative evaluative procedures to measure and communicate learner progress and mastery.

• Use imagery techniques to help learners clearly remember specific problems or tasks that are relevant to the knowledge or skill being taught.

• Offer the opportunity for responsible attainment of knowledge, skills, and learning goals that relate to the esteem needs of the learners.

• Hold discussions with students about the role their own effort plays in their productive work.

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