Nayla Zreik Fahed

Executive Director – Lebanese Alternative Learning

June 17, 2026

Among the most candid observations we hear from partner teachers and parents is one that might, at first, sound like a complaint, but is, on closer examination, one of the most important signals in contemporary education.

“Students are becoming harder to manage”.

Teachers report it. Parents echo it. Children today resist traditional instruction, disengage from rote tasks, and push back against rigid authority in ways previous generations did not (or could not?).

Before we rush to fix this, we should sit with it for a moment.

This is not a discipline crisis. It may be an invitation.

If children are increasingly unwilling to simply receive knowledge, to sit still, absorb, and repeat, perhaps the honest response is not to find better ways to enforce compliance, but to ask whether compliance was ever the right goal.

What we may be witnessing is not a generation becoming more difficult. It may be a generation becoming more honest about what learning needs to feel like in order to be real.

That signal deserves our full attention.

The answer is not chaos. It is ownership

One response to this reality is to place self-directed learning (SDL) not at the periphery of our pedagogy, but at its heart.

SDL is widely misunderstood. Critics hear the phrase and picture classrooms without structure, children doing as they please, standards abandoned. That is not self-direction. That is the absence of it.

Genuine self-direction demands more of a learner, not less.

It asks children to develop something that no amount of traditional instruction can build on its own: ownership over their own growth. Accountability. The understanding that their education is not something happening to them, it is something they are actively constructing, choice by choice, day by day.

Ownership

Each child sets learning intentions and tracks their own progress.

Accountability

Children reflect on what they have learned and take responsibility for their choices.

Purpose

Learning is connected to the child’s own questions, interests, and future.

“When a child chooses to learn something, they learn it differently. They defend it. They return to it. They make it theirs. That is not a pedagogical theory. It is something every teacher here has watched happen.”

Haigo Dolmayan, Lalmoudaress content manager-LAL

What this looks like in practice, without revolutionizing your school

A question we often hear from teachers is: “If I want to introduce SDL, how do I do it without turning everything upside down?”

The answer is: gradually, intentionally, and within what already exists.

At the start of the year

Before diving into content, take time to invite each student into a real conversation about their own learning. Not about their wishes, but about the curriculum, the books in front of them, the year ahead. Ask them:

•       Where do you already feel confident?

•       Where do you know you struggle?

•       What is one area where you want to push yourself harder this year?

Then go one step further. Ask if there is something outside school they want to learn or create, and find the bridge. A student who wants to make a film might connect that to a physics unit on light and trajectory, or use it as a vehicle for a classmate to develop communication skills. The link does not have to be perfect. It has to be real.

From this conversation, each student builds a personal learning plan: what they want to achieve, the obstacles they anticipate, the timeline they will hold themselves to.

During the year

The tools are simple: self-assessment rubrics, brief individual reflection moments, and collective check-ins where students report not just on what they covered, but on how they are progressing toward what they set out to do.

At the end of the year

Self-evaluation becomes as meaningful as external evaluation. Students are asked: Did you do what you said you would? Where did you fall short? What will you carry forward?

The real shift is not structural; it is cultural

Introducing SDL does not require a new schedule, a new platform, or a new school. It requires a shift in what we hold valuable.

When a student asks “why do we have to learn this?”, instead of hearing resistance, we can hear a question worth answering. When a student loses focus, instead of recalibrating their attention, we can ask whether the task was connected to anything they care about.

The generation in front of us is not harder to educate. They are harder to ignore.