Quest for better learning

Learner-centered practices have been validated with years - no, decades! - of global research in education and psychology. Why are the authoritarian practices still so widely used in classrooms? I wish I knew!

I often admit to my own students (teachers and trainers pursuing their graduate degrees) that I am on an ongoing mission and my goal is to corrupt a teacher a day into learner-centered practices.  It usually makes people laugh, but I am dead serious: the only way we can spread the use of learner-centered practices is to use them in our own design and instruction.

Learning happens everywhere, all the time, and school learning is just a specific type of learning we do. Supporting students individual interests and personal strengths makes school learning easier and more intrinsically interesting.

American Psychological Association publishes excellent materials. Please check the Top 20 Principles for K-12 and Learner-centered education!

Learning and teaching philosophy

Every teacher has a teaching (and learning) philosophy they follow, either knowingly or being unaware of the beliefs that have an impact on the daily practice. I tried to trace back the steps to the most influential points in the development of my teaching philosophy.  

It all began when I had to read Berger & Luckmann’s book about social construction of reality for my M.Ed. studies in late 1990’s. It was the hardest book I ever read – when I got to the end I couldn’t understand what I had just read, so I reread it. And then again. But, that book taught me how we actually do construct knowledge in everyday life situation (and while studying, too, of course, but learning is NOT limited to the classroom).  And as I don’t actually believe in unlearning, I became very conscious of what my kids and students are exposed to, and very, very curious to hear how they interpret what they see and hear.

Well, then there is the Hidden Curriculum (Broady, 1987).  What a gem!  What all lies behind our curricula? All our traditions and practices and words carry a huge load of unnecessary items (i.e. unnecessary or even harmful for learning) – and especially our words do that (Bernstein, 1971) because they can so easily be used to wield unnecessary power over others. And words can be interpreted in so very many ways! I should know, as a non-native speaker I have sometimes weird connotations for words… not to talk about pronouncing them weirdly!

I learned about the theories of Ziehe in nineties as well, and in 2008 he talks about normal learning problems in youth. I am so very opposed to the deficit-based educational model, because it labels and categorizes students, and at worst makes them believe in these tags attached to them. Schooling, or formal education, is just a continuation and specification of already initiated “natural” learning process.  Students should be empowered to become life-long learners! This is why I think agency is such an important thing while discussing or thinking about curriculum. 

Students' agency is seen as students intentionally influencing their own learning behaviours. Much of our self-regulation is based on the positive learning outcomes during the early childhood experiences of self-efficacy (Bandura 2006).   Students’ agency, according to Bandura (2006, p.164-165) is a construct of four different components: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness. In the classroom these components apply straightforwardly to students’ learning and academic performance. It really is a shame is a curriculum is so prescripted that there is no room for students to learn how to make good choices! This is also where my current work on my doctoral dissertation focuses: Students' perceptions of their learner agency. Very exciting!

Of course I have assimilated and accommodated all wonderful theories from Bruner, Engestrom, Ericson,,  Illeris, Kegan, Kolb, Mahler, Mezirov, Piaget, Vygotsky, Wiggins and beyond… but my core belief is in cognitive approach being combined with constructive and cooperative practices to enable effective lifelong learning.

Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), 164-180.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. T.(1966). The social construction of reality.

Bernstein, B. (1971). On the classification and framing of educational knowledge. Knowledge and control, 3, 245-270.

Broady, D. (1987). Den dolda laroplanen [The hidden curriculum] (5th ed). Lund: Acupress.

Ziehe, T. (2008). ‘Normal learning problems’ in youth. Contemporary theories of learning: Learning theorists... in their own words, 184.

Meaningful Learning

What makes learning meaningful? And how could we increase the meaningfulness perceived by students?

We already know from research how much easier is to deep learn anything that makes sense and piques interest, so just utilizing that basic understanding about learning fundamentals would help schools achieve better results. Of course it is ridiculous to assume the same things interest all students, so introducing choice would be a good place to start.

Meaningful learning[1] allows students to acquire knowledge in a way that is useful for them. When you can use learned information easily, this often means that you have stored it in several different places in your mind, and you can also access that knowledge in different contexts - this is what we refer as transfer in the teaching jargon, but it actually is the natural or original way of learning.  Several contexts equals multiple connections and these multiple connections mean the objective is deep learned, because it is integrated to everything else we  know, so well that it cannot be separated from them. No learning loss happens to this knowledge - but then again it requires the content to have personal value to the learner, to be meaningful.

Learning is highly individual and takes anything between 2 milliseconds to 25 years to happen, yet in educational systems we often expect students to complete learning tasks within a certain time frame. Why? Wouldn't it be better to allow some flexibility and let students learn in their own pace? We already have the necessary technology to do provide highly individualized learning, but are still somehow stuck in the cohort mentality. We should more diligently use tools for learning facilitation instead of sticking in traditional teaching and lecturing, because the time needed for learning is different for each student. Acquiring knowledge requires individual amount of interactions between the student and the material to be learned. These interactions can vary from reading to discussions and projects, and from lecturing to engaging students in a learning game - and the guiding principle should be meaningfulness for the learner, because that guarantees better quality learning.

Meaningful learning is also competency based, so that regurgitating same content for umpteenth time is understood and accepted to be unnecessary. This is also the basic recipe for truly diverse classrooms: students get to learn what they need to learn, not what their peers need to learn. Facilitating self-paced and autonomous learning would be extremely easy with existing technology, so why don't we use all our tech like that? I am afraid the answer is quite ugly: we want to control what our students are learning, and how they do that (and also measure their performance). So we are asked to teach everything and everyone in the same way, and wish our students would miraculously deep learn it all, and even find it meaningful. Then we reprimand students for not being happy and enthusiastic to learn, or at least work hard to memorize all the (unnecessary) information we pour onto them. I know there are too many details in any given curriculum, and not enough higher level concepts - but there are many daily choices for teachers to either teach those details or facilitate students learning about them.

While discussing with the teachers I mentor there is one common theme they highlight about their work: the blissful feeling of being successful in teaching when a student has an "a-ha!" - moment. In that moment learning is extremely meaningful for the student, and it often has been described like windows suddenly opening and seeing the world/ the problem with new eyes. What happens in reality is brain creating new connections and applying knowledge in a new context. The extreme case of this is a flow experience, which can be quite addictive, actually.

Empowering students to learn helps them to like learning - or even crave  for more knowledge and understanding. This means they are learning for life not just for school. We can change the future world by choosing to provide meaningful learning experiences for our students. How do you choose to teach today?

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[1] http://www.theideacenter.org/sites/default/files/Idea_Paper_34.pdf Retrieved 1/7/13

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Teaching How to Choose

Making good choices seems to come naturally for some students while others need some coaching in order to become successful learners and be able to navigate with more ease within the educational systems. By allowing choices we also communicate our confidence in our students as learners – it is about letting them know we believe they can do it, without necessarily saying it aloud.

There are things in the classroom that must be done without getting into negotiations about how and why, and we truly cannot let students rule and do whatever they please in the classroom. However, allowing certain amount of choosing makes it emotionally easier for students to agree with the mandatory things. But this is not the only benefit of teaching how to choose. Only through our own choices we create accountability for our own learning and also train our executive functioning. Learning to make good choices is a skill to learn and it highly contributes to our higher level thinking. We should not deny that opportunity from our students by having too rigid rules that allow no choices.

How to add more choices into your classroom? During a regular day we have many opportunities to allow choices, starting from choosing whom to work with. By asking students to choose a partner who can help them in this assignment you are also encouraging students to recognize the good study habits of others. Giving younger students a package of content to be learned by the end of this week communicates your trust in their ability to choose the best pace for their own learning, and providing a timeline about how big fraction of the content should be finished by each day helps them understand the percentages, too. By letting students choose which assignment they want to start with helps them understand their personal preferences. Also, having a strong structure in the assignments allows the content to be more individualized. I think the ways of introducing more choices in learning environments are virtually infinite, if there is the will to make the change to happen.

My personal credo about best teacher being the one who makes herself unnecessary by empowering students become autonomous learners carries my values within it. I believe, that only by allowing students practice making good choices in an emotionally safe learning environment where their opinions or beliefs are never ridiculed, we can help the next generation reach their full potential and become critical thinkers. There is no shortcut to wisdom.