Basic HTML Version
READING
E
XPERIENCE
1: P
ERFORMING
L
IKE
A
S
TAR
4
L
EARNING
TO
L
EARN
: B
ECOMING
A
S
ELF
-G
ROWER
What Kind of Learner Do YouWant to Be?
Welcome to the start of your new learning journey! Seeing college and life as a series of journeys is a cliché,
it’s true. And yet, college
is
in many ways a journey. This book will help you navigate the exciting and
challenging road ahead. This road will not end when you graduate, of course. It will continue on to new
destinations, doubtless with a few detours and rest stops along the way. The learning skills presented in
this book will help you become a more confident traveler.
Some of you may have taken a cross-country trip with friends before you
started college. Chances are you planned for the trip and packed according
to your plans. You probably had a great adventure, and you now know
more about how to plan for the next trip: how to read and navigate from a
map, how much money to bring, how to negotiate disagreements among
travelers, how to leave behind what is not needed, and where you might
like to go next. You have increased your foundational skills for traveling.
This book and course will offer you a similar kind of guide for college and
beyond. Despite good planning, there are skills you may not even know you
need for college. This book will make those skills explicit and provide you
with activities and reflections that will help you strengthen them.
Regardless of what career path you have chosen to follow, your main identity now is as a learner. What
kind of learner do you want to be? A passive, “back seat” learner? Or an active learner who performs well
and receives positive feedback from instructors? To help you meet this goal, we will explain a theory of
performance that identifies factors that will affect your level of performance. Based on the Performance
Model, you can evaluate yourself as a learner and identify your goals for the course.
Being in this course and in college makes you part of a learning community. You will be given many
opportunities to work with others. You will all enrich each other’s learning and the development of your
skills. We have also created a learning community for this book, made up of fictional students. Their job
is to help turn theory into visible practice and to give you an overall story that may parallel your own or
that may give you points of contrast with your own story.
Let’s meet Jennifer...
Jennifer is eighteen and a first-year student who
plans to major in journalism.
Her aunt is a photojournalist who works for
travel magazines, and she inspired Jenn
to do a lot of writing in high school. Jenn
worked on the yearbook during her junior
and senior years and won a few writing
contests along the way. Although she did
well in high school, Jenn is a bit nervous
moving from a small school to a large
college.