A Queen Mary teacher let her 17 pre-sessional students choose what to investigate

Practitioner research means the teacher and the researcher were the same person, and Salvi says so among the study's stated limits ^[10]. Language teaching has an established tradition of that, and it does not disqualify the work. It does shape how to weigh the feedback. The students who said they valued making decisions about their learning were saying it to the person who handed them those decisions ^[7].

The cohort was 17 and the course ran four weeks ^[2]. The account carries no test scores and no measure of language gain over that period ^[15]. There was one class, and the author writes that the findings give insight into that particular classroom and not evidence that the approach will produce the same outcomes everywhere ^[10]. Ranking student-led inquiry against teacher-led teaching would need a second group taught the other way and one outcome both groups were measured on ^[16].

What the study does document is which questions students picked. Three are quoted: "Why are we here?", "Why is it hard to find accommodation around the university?" and "Why is it hard to come up with a good idea for our library project?" ^[4] Two of the three are about arriving and living in the university city; one is about coursework ^[14]. Salvi reports that the approach brought academic learning together with students' wider experience of living and studying in a new environment ^[13].

The work itself was ordinary research training. Students looked up their questions in academic literature and on the internet, talked their findings over with classmates and presented them ^[5]. They reported learning how to formulate questions, collect and organize information, interview people and work with classmates from other countries ^[8]. Some said that keeping a daily learning diary helped them reflect on what they had learned and decide what to do next ^[7].

Autonomy here meant structure. Salvi's reading is that pedagogy for autonomy gives students a frame in which to plan, carry out and evaluate their learning, while Exploratory Practice pushes them to ask questions and work toward understanding a puzzle instead of closing it out ^[12]. The study explicitly does not recommend leaving students to learn on their own; students named the teacher's guidance as valuable, and some said they would have welcomed more of it when making decisions or working in groups ^[9]. One student, a year after the course, said: "Questions are always the best teacher." ^[11]