'Tis the season for road trips! Whether it be a spring camping trip with students, a summer road trip with your own children, or a cross country trip with just you and your dog, take full advantage of learning activities for road trips along the way.
Learning is powerful beyond the walls of a classroom. Hitting the road opens doors to learning experiences that couldn't be achieved in a classroom.
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What are some examples of self-directed learning activities? This is a popular question among educators that have an interest in student-directed learning, and know the benefits, but aren’t sure about semantics.
Before getting into great self-directed learning activities, let’s review what student-directed learning is and why this blog post is worth reading. 
I often get asked about tips for helping self-directed learners independently self-direct in the classroom. Teachers commonly enter the world of student-led learning inspired and confident but quickly discover that many of their students are not able to self-direct, and that can be really frustrating.
Your excitement is squashed and you are disappointed because it didn’t unfold the way you expected. So now what? Call it a day and get back to teacher-directed learning? Or mentor and train learners to self-direct effectively? The strategies in this blog post are to encourage you to choose the latter. 
A student-led learning classroom environment looks different than a traditional learning setting, including the teacher's role.
But what does that look like?  Including self-directed learning in your teaching strategy is invaluable for so many reasons. The benefits of self-directed learning in the classroom far outweigh the costs, and by costs, I mean those concerns that make educators reluctant to have their students design, lead and manage their own learning experiences.
Let’s talk about those concerns, how to squash them, and why to let those concerns go. Let’s look at the benefits of training self-directed learners to design, lead and manage their own learning experiences. You won’t regret it.  What is student-directed learning? This phrase and other variations of the phrase (child-led learning, self-directed learning, student-led learning, etc. etc. etc. ) imply that learning experiences are designed, coordinated, and led by students. Your students are self-directed learners, not passive receivers of information.
Okay, so student-directed learning means that learners lead their own learning experiences, but what does that entail? How can you apply self-directed learning in the classroom or at home, and what are some student-directed learning strategies that you can implement right now? Let's find out!  What is experiential learning anyway? How is experiential learning defined? What does K12 classroom experiential learning look like? What are the characteristics of experiential learning? What are examples of experiential learning? What are experiential learning activities? Why is experiential learning important and what are the benefits? I get these questions a lot.
Most of the inquiries that I get from educators, however, are about how experiential learning can be worked into K12 curriculum. The good news is that it's a great learning tool for people of all learning environments, backgrounds, skill levels, and interests, and it's fairly easy to implement if you know the essential components. Blog Post: Why I Became an Experiential Learning Educator 
Interest-based learning is when students identify their interests and use those interests to drive and lead learning experiences.
The purpose of designing learning experiences around interests is to encourage an intrinsic motivation to learn and inspire a passion for learning. This happens by tying learning experiences with topics and questions that are meaningful, relevant, and interesting to students. Personalize learning through interest-led project-based learning.  What is personalized teaching?
In short, personalized teaching is offering personal learning / customized learning opportunities for each student. Learning experiences are based around every students' unique background, interests, strengths, challenges, goals, and more. 
Last week's blog post was all about how to coordinate and implement self-directed project-based learning activity. Whether the experience is teacher-led or student-directed, writing a driving question is often the first step in PBL design and one of the biggest struggles. So how do you write one? How do your students write one? What are some PBL driving question examples? Find the answers to all of these questions right here.
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Blog IntentTo provide innovative educational resources for educators, parents, and students, that go beyond lecture and worksheets. AuthorSara Segar, experiential life-science educator and advisor, curriculum writer, and mother of two. 
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