Mentoring to Become a Self-Directed Learner

This chapter provides a mentoring roadmap for success in college life and when transitioning to the workplace. First-year students learn that a successful mentee is self-directed, knows what to look for in a mentor, uses skills to engage in effective mentoring, and recognizes there are various types of mentoring relationships. The authors describe what a first-year student should look for when seeking an effective mentor. Readers are shown the benefits for using a developmental mentoring network and for becoming self-directed learners and mentees. The chapter includes activities and exercises to develop critical skills in self-understanding, listening, help-seeking, problem solving, and goal setting to be applied in both academic and professional settings. When successful people receive an award or recognition, what they have in common is they did not make it alone – others guided and supported their learning, growth, and success.

A full year COVID-19 crisis with interrupted learning and two school closures: The effects on learning growth and inequality in primary education

After more than a year of COVID-19 crisis and the school closures that followed all around the world, the concerns about lower learning growth and exacerbated inequalities are larger than ever. In this paper, we use unique data to analyse how one full year of COVID-19 crisis in Dutch primary education has affected learning growth and pre-existing inequalities. We draw on a dataset that includes around 330,000 Dutch primary school students from about 1,600 schools, with standardized test scores for reading, spelling and mathematics, as well as rich (family) background information of the students. The results show a lower learning growth over a full year for all three domains, varying from 0.06 standard deviations for spelling to 0.12 for maths and 0.17 standard deviations for reading. Furthermore, we find that the lower learning growth is (much) larger for vulnerable students with a low socioeconomic background. This implies that pre-existing inequalities between students from different backgrounds have increased. These results are quite alarming and suggest that distance learning could not compensate for classroom teaching, although it prevented some damage that would have occurred if students had not enjoyed any formal education at all.

Reporting student progress: What might it look like?

The Communicating Student Learning Progress review produced by ACER in 2019 set out recommendations for schools and systems to improve the way schools report on student learning, in particular learning progress. Two case study schools from Victoria – a Catholic primary school and government secondary school – discuss changes they’ve made to their student reporting processes, in response to the review’s recommendations. Further research is recommended into how schools are rethinking reporting to engage students and parents in monitoring learning growth.

Supervisi Pendidikan

Etymologically, supervision comes from the word super and vision, which means to see and review from above or view and assess from above, which is carried out by superiors on the activities, creativity and performance of subordinates. So that supervision can be formulated is nothing but an effort to provide service to teachers both individually and in groups in an effort to improve teaching. The key word from the supervisor is ultimately to provide service and assistance. Educational supervision has benefits and goals that are very important in education. Supervision activities are process activities to improve the professional abilities of teachers, in the long term aiming to improve and maintain the progress of children's learning, the target of the supervision program is shown directly to teachers who serve learning activities, however the supervision program also pays attention to student learning growth. Therefore supervision can be interpreted as a professional activity for teachers. In carrying out supervision, professional understanding and skills are needed. Professionals in organizing teachers, strengthening supervision techniques, and having good ethical behavior.

Cues for word-learning during shared book-reading and guided play in preschool

The present study examines the perceptual, linguistic, and social cues that were associated with preschoolers’ (4;11) growth in word-learning during shared book-reading and guided play activities. Small groups of three preschoolers (n = 30) and one adult were video-recorded during an intervention study in which new vocabulary words were explicitly taught. Adult use of taught words was coded for perceptual and linguistic cues and type of social interaction. Hearing taught words used in the book text and learning information about words’ meanings during play was positively associated with growth in word-learning. Adult use of words in responsive, or child-initiated, interactions was positively associated with word-learning growth in both book-reading and play, while adult-initiated use of words was negatively associated with word-learning growth in both settings.