Toward self-directed learning in secondary schools: what do teachers do?

Promoting self-directed learning has become an important educational goal. This goal requires a new role for teachers: not traditional transmission of knowledge but activating and process-oriented teaching. An observational study was conducted to establish the features of teaching in Dutch senior secondary education. Activating features of teaching were more predominant than the mere transmission of knowledge, but process-oriented teaching occurred very little. In other words, the observed teachers did not devote much attention to teaching the students how to learn. Two patterns of activating were discerned: one pattern in which the teacher interacts with students focusing on the subject matter, and another pattern where the students are working on their own and the teacher is coaching and supervising. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.