Encourage Self-advocacy
Overview
Encouraging all learners to ask questions and seek help when needed creates a safe space for risk-taking, peer learning, and skill development. Fostering an environment for self-advocacy helps learners take ownership of their own learning needs.
Use It In Your Learning Environment
Watch how these students become self-advocates for their learning as they share their strengths and challenges. By having a voice in their learning, these students develop greater awareness of what works best for them and how to advocate for supports they need.
Apply It In Your Learning Environment
Example: Use This Strategy In in the Classroom
Design It into Your Product
Apply It To Product Development
- Create a "help" button for learners to reach out for support and ensure there is a notification to someone on the other end to provide the help needed.
- Provide growth mindset feedback that specifies ways for learners to advocate for themselves.
- Equip notifications and reminders to educators when learners reach out for help.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Teacher Modeling & Support Strategies
Content that is provided in clear, short chunks can support students' Working Memory.
Building positive and trusting relationships with learners allows them to feel safe; a sense of belonging; and that their academic, cognitive, and social and emotional needs are supported.
Teaching students how to label, identify, and manage Emotion helps them learn Self-regulation skills.
Teachers can help students understand that learning involves effort, mistakes, and reflection by teaching them about their malleable brain and modeling their own learning process.
Providing feedback that focuses on the process of developing skills conveys the importance of effort and motivates students to persist when learning.
Providing students a voice in their learning is critical for making learning meaningful.
By talking through their thinking at each step of a process, teachers can model what learning looks like.
Wait time, or think time, of three or more seconds after posing a question increases how many students volunteer and the length and accuracy of their responses.
