Help seeking: agentic learners initiating feedback

Abstract

Effective feedback is an essential tool for making learning explicit and an essential feature of classroom practice that promotes learner autonomy. Yet, it remains a pressing challenge for teachers to scaffold the active involvement of students as critical, reflective and autonomous learners who use feedback constructively. This paper seeks to present a recalibrated perspective of feedback by exploring the concept as a student-initiated learning action, manifested within classroom practice as help seeking for learning. Teachers and students from years 2, 4 and 6 at an Australian primary school worked together on a writing project, which was structured as a three-phase learning process. The value of this approach was revealed by data gathered through students’ planning templates, writing samples, interviews with students and teachers along with email correspondence with the teachers. A framework of social cognitive theory guided the analysis. It is suggested that the three-phase Assessment as Learning (AaL) process has the potential to support teachers in scaffolding students to seek help at a time when they are receptive to feedback. Furthermore, this AaL approach appears to have enhanced the teachers’ practice, particularly in respect to providing support for students during the forethought stage of the learning process. Practical techniques for scaffolding students’ adaptive help seeking and autonomy as learners are presented in the paper.

Keywords:

• Help seeking
• feedback
• self-regulated learning
• formative assessment
• agency
• assessment as learning

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Sue Plowright and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.