Optimal Learning

Contributed by:
Club X Youthniversity
To be our best! Optimal Learning refers to learning attained when the learner can command the new information to create valuable outcomes.
1. Extended OLE
Domain: Create emotionally, intellectually and physically safe environments
o Positive relationships
Kind, caring, respectful
o Self-awareness with healthy expressions of emotions
o Reasoned thoughts and ideas expressed
o Focus is on effort, growth and risk-taking
o Co-created routines, procedures and classroom designs
o Safe and engaged interactions
Focus is on risk-taking
 Provides opportunities for student competencies to emerge in multiple contexts in
response to varied challenges.
 Provides practicing and gaining understanding, or reaching the point of mastery
 Supports student’s learning-journey by expressing confidence in their efforts
 Supports student’s intellectual risk-taking
 Provides targeted feedback that affirms student progress
 Balances approaches to requiring rigor (academic press) while also providing
adequate supports
 Provides a caring relationship to boost student agency in terms of commitment to
learning, effort, and future orientation.
Supports safe and engaged interactions:
o Creates a classroom where all student interactions feel safe and engaged.
o Provides protocols that clarify and deepen students working together
o Supports student’s diverse perspectives and learning needs
o Supports students in developing self-awareness of how they think, feel, and act,
both individually and with others.
o Supports opportunities for students to acknowledging differences while also building
connections, a sense of community and relationships grow
o Creates routines to strengthen curriculum, instruction, and assessment and provide
respectful ways to build student engagement and social bonding
o Prioritizes inclusion, discuss difficult issues, resolve interpersonal conflicts, and
redress harm to others.
Co-created routines, procedures and classroom designs
o Co-creates classrooms where their interactions feel safe and engaged
o Provides specific protocols that clarify and deepen their work together
o Supports student’s diverse perspectives and learning needs.
2. o Supports students in developing self-awareness of how they think, feel, and act,
both individually and with others.
o Builds connections, a sense of community and relationships grow
o Provides structures and routines that strengthen curriculum, instruction, and
assessment
o Provides respectful ways to build student engagement and social bonding
o Prioritizes inclusion, discuss difficult issues, resolve interpersonal conflicts, and
redress harm to others.
Domain: Meet the needs of diverse learners
o Individual strengths leveraged to support growth
Academic
Social
Emotional
o Multiple pathways to learn and demonstrated learning
o Learners are supported in productive struggle
o Scaffolded instruction to meet the needs of each diverse learner
Multiple pathways to learn and demonstrated learning
o Activates students’ prior knowledge and builds on previous lessons.
o Posts and explains an agenda clarifies each day’s learning target and key tasks, and
students use checklists to monitor their progress.
o Uses a combination of different methods to present new material (e.g., reading
directions aloud while students view the words and/or images projected on a
screen).
o Offer a variety of options for learners to engage with content,
develop skills, and demonstrate competence.
o Use strategies that draw on students’ interests and strengths
o Increases the value attached to work and bolster their belief that
their effort will pay off.
o Uses a choice of compelling questions, projects, and formats to
anchor units of study
o Helps students with diverse needs meet high standards.
o Provides choice in how students access, engage with, and
demonstrate learning
o Brings more emotional, social, and intellectual investment to
student work
o Provides student reflection about how they learn best.
o Increases learners’ interest and attention but also allows their
brains to better store information in long-term memory.
3. Learners are supported in productive struggle
o Moves past providing only “right answers” can have an important negative effect on
learning and can inhibit learners from grappling with uncertainty.
o Provides, when needed, explicit explanation of hidden rules or assumptions or
cultural contexts
o Provides a prompt, question, cue, or modeling will nudge most students closer to
understanding.
o Doesn’t always explain exactly how to solve a problem,
o Provides students the opportunity to figure it out themselves.
o Allows students to flounder, either individually or in groups, their errors can play
just as important a part in the learning process as the answers can.
o Provides opportunity for students to work through possible approaches on their
own, without the teacher providing a roadmap to the solution.
o Provides explicit protocols for collaborative inquiry, offering safe ways for them to
articulate and navigate possibilities.
o Leads students to think more flexibly.
o Helps students to eventually enjoy the process of productive struggle, despite its
frustrations, and get better with practice.
o Acknowledges that students did it themselves, making them more confident to
tackle the next challenge that comes along
Support academic growth
o Provide multiple contexts in response to varied challenges
Wherever students are in the process—encountering new
content or skills for the first time, practicing and gaining
understanding, or reaching the point of mastery—teachers can
o Supports student learning journey by expressing confidence in
their efforts
o Supports students in intellectual risk-taking
o Provides targeted feedback
o Affirms student progress
o Provides balanced approach to requiring rigor (academic
press) while also providing adequate supports in the context
o Provides terms of commitment to learning, effort, and future
orientation.
Scaffolded instruction to meet the needs of each diverse learner
4. o Provides timely support can keep a learner’s attention on a
desired goal.
o Provides temporary structures to keep workers safe while they
move to the next stage.
o Helps learners to explore new territory, with new supports as
necessary.
o Prepares every student for success on each learning journey.
o Attends to student variabilities and what skills need building,
o Provides plentiful chances for practice, knows where students
work productively with others on meaningful challenges.
o Provides support through their attention—
questioning, checking for understanding, prompting,
cueing, explaining, and modeling—
keeps the focus on the “zone of proximal development”
Domain: Provide equitable, culturally responsive and rigorous instruction and
Content is
o Relevant
o Rigorous
o Grade-level
o Learner agency with feedback
o Opportunities for self-directed learning
o Diverse and learner variability that is understood, expected and welcomed
o Curiosity to seek other’s perspectives
Create inclusivity where all aspects of learners are welcomed
o Demonstrates knowledge of individual student
o Offers meaningful intellectual activities that “stretch” every unique learner
o Provides a safe environment of mutual respect
o Engage students in a collaborative cycle of engagement, modeling, coaching, practice, feedback,
and encouragement
o Adapts continuously to learner variances
o Helps students to develop relationships among peers to support each other in the learning
process
o Instruction reflects attention to—their diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds
o Provides opportunities for student’s sense of ownership and voice
o Provides intellectual tasks connected to student emotions and experiences
o Provides opportunities for students to works alongside peers and role models
o Provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their achievement
5. Rigorous Instruction
o Ensures every student obtains high-level academic outcomes
o Supports students to develop the confidence, mindset, and dispositions to pursue
demanding, independent work
o Coaches students in key cognitive strategies and providing relevant contexts for
learning.
o Provides tasks that hold challenge, value, and interest for diverse learners
o Ensures that every student has the capacity to succeed at grade-appropriate levels.
o Knows each student’s motivation so they continue to invest more in mastery of
learning.
o Understands that individual students differ in ways they are
motivated (affective network),
comprehend information (recognition network),
express what they know (strategic network).
o Provides culturally responsive cognitive routines
o Provides student choice in accessing and demonstrating learning
o Provides productive academic habits over time
o Uses strategies to strengthen student engagement
o Provides opportunity for students to expand their repertoire of
thinking skills, and deepen their understanding of key course
concepts.
o Makes learning accessible to all students
o Provides multiple means of engagement,
multiple means of representation, and
multiple means of action and expression.
Curiosity to seeks other’s perspectives
o Ensure equitable outcomes for every student
o Demonstrates understanding of how deeply culture impacts teaching and learning.
o Examines their own and their students’ social identities and cultural frames as well as
implicit biases
o Reflects about unexamined beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors, work to address
systemic discrimination and barriers to achievement
o Develops lessons and learning resources that are relevant and engaging for students
who are culturally and linguistically diverse.
o Facilitates open conversations about culture and cultural
differences
o Uses practices that empower every student
o Supports positive identity development for every learner
6. o Guides students to seek and understand other perspectives.
o Prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion
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