Toward Self-Directed Learning in the Secondary Classroom addresses and explores the challenges teachers have faced and continue to face in a pandemic and post-pandemic context while attempting to implement self-directed learning in the secondary classroom. Drawing on contemporary research from around the world as well as candid interviews with educators in my own learning community, Canada, and other regions in the United States, I address both the challenges and successes teachers have experienced while attempting to guide students toward self-directedness.

After establishing the relevance and need for self-directed learning in today’s educational context, I explore recent research on the subject that challenges outdated notions and calls for more relevant and contextualized, transformative iterations of it. Interviews with classroom practitioners reveal the need to address the foundations of social-emotional learning, intentional academic purpose, and sustainable structures of support before facing the daunting realities of contemporary education while helping students become people of inquiry.