Page 17 - Foundations of Learning, 4th Edition (Revised)

“Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet
your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality.”

Ralph Marston, American personal development expert

1 IMPROVING PERFORMANCE

What Kind of Learner What Kind of Learner Do You Want to Be?
Do You Want to Be?
Welcome to the start of your new learning journey! Seeing college, and life, as a
Introducing series of journeys is a cliché, it’s true. And yet, college is in many ways a journey.
Jennifer 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,
Initial Assessment doubtless with a few detours and rest stops along the way. The learning skills
of Yourself presented in this book will help you become a more confident traveler.
as a Learner
Some of you may have taken a cross-country trip with friends before you started
The Performance college. Chances are you planned for the trip and packed according to your plans.
Model 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
Learning Skills 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
Levels of your skills as a traveler. In other words, you have
Performance increased your foundational skills for traveling.
Foundations of Learning will offer you a similar
Rubric: kind of guidebook for college and beyond.
Continuum of Despite good planning, there are skills you may
Performance Levels not even know you need for college. This book
will make those skills explicit and provide you
The High with activities and reflections that will help you
Quality Learner strengthen them.

Goals for Regardless of what career path you have chosen
This Course to follow, your main identity now is as a learner.
What kind of learner do you want to be? A passive,
Activity 1.1 “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
Building Learning of performance that identifies factors that will affect your level of performance.
Communities Based on the Performance Model, you can evaluate yourself as a learner, and
based on that determination, identify your goals for the course.
Activity 1.2
Being in this course, and in college, makes you part of a learning community.
Analyzing a You will be given many opportunities to work with others. You will all enrich
Course Syllabus 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...

GLOSSARY context learning skills performance rubric self-grower
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