By offering students choices and giving them active control in making decisions that affect them, we can encourage them to move from passive to active learning. We can support their reflections in making their own decisions and setting their own goals.

Sometimes experiences of trauma can make people feel that they have been robbed of their own power. Some come to believe that they have little control over their own lives, and can lose the motivation to try to change things. Therefore, this can be a barrier to some students accessing the support they need.

Choice and Control To have the power to make their own decisions, manage and determine their own lives.

Ask yourself: How can you enable students to make choices and exercise control over their studies?Try it

The term learned helplessness is credited to Prof Martin Seligman. Click here to read his original 1972 paper.Read It

Learned helplessness can create a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop that can inhibit achievement

in education and across life.

This feeling of being stuck can be conceptualised as learned

helplessness .

Click here to listen to one student s experience of choice and control Listen