Do we need to be taught how to learn?

nowldgeAll the way through my early years of education and college, I took to learning the material in my classes through repetition and rote memorization. After about a year and a half into my master’s degree, I realized I was never learning to understand but simply just memorizing the material. This was a huge detriment to my knowledge base because I basically memorized for an exam and subsequently forgot everything. Now that I am having to use some of the material from my undergraduate classes for my research, I am having to go back and re-learn “the right way”. I really began to see the difference in learning methods when I came to VT for my Ph.D. I had to take a few deficiency courses to graduate with an Engineering degree, which was mostly math courses. In undergrad, these courses were very hard for me and I just thought I wasn’t very good at math. But now that I had to go back and take additional courses, I tried actually learning the material by understanding. I was listening in class and actually taking the time to understand why something was a certain way The ridiculous part is that I was studying for significantly less time and doing really well in the class. There were times that I didn’t study at all and got a top score. It was amazing to me. After employing this new found method (to me, anyway) it was like a light bulb went off in my head.

Ellen Langer in “Mindful Learning” suggests that this phase I was in and broke out of may be rooted in the way we teach and are taught from a really young age. She states that being taught to repeat information to learn at a young age may instill in people that this is THE way to learn. I can attest that this was how I was taught to learn by both my teachers and parents. Probably the worst example of this comes from my high school biology class. The professor would give us a set of 150 multiple choice questions to study from and he would choose 50 to be on the exam. I was so good at recognizing patterns, I didn’t even read the problem on exam day and just circled the answer based on the answer choices and usually the first couple words of the question. I always finished first, usually in about 5 minutes, and always got the top score. But I didn’t learn anything, at least not for the long term.

How many people go through this and what does it say about our education system? To me, it seems that how we learn to learn is instilled in us at a very young age. If someone learns to learn by memorizing and are simply tested on knowing the material, that person may never break that habit. I was only able to break that habit by staying in school past undergrad. We need to make students think by challenging their knowledge base. Using exams to test their knowledge only enforces rote memorization.  Adding more and more exams further enforces that because they have so much to know for the next exam, they simply memorize to get through it and then forget.

 

 

Mind Your Own Basics

This week, the topic of mindfulness/mindless behavior in teaching provides an interesting, if somewhat obscured, understanding of how teaching can be developed. I say obscured, in this context, because in the critique of things like “basics” and knowledge transference, the text seems to be devoid of a mindful approach to understanding different disciplines. While I appreciate the critique that we shouldn’t be presenting everything as the right way or wrong way of looking a problem, most fields do recognize the openness for alternative ways of thinking. In my own subfield of international relations, professors often have a particular worldview or conception of how the world operates, but every class at the undergraduate and graduate level includes basics on the different approaches to IR scholarship and opens the path to alternative ways of viewing. In fact, in recent years large segments of professional conferences and journals have been given over to discussing how to further evolve beyond “-isms” and innovate.

However, this also obscures the fact that there is basic information that needs to be understood. Perhaps this could be called “the basics of IR” or in the case of one of Langer’s examples “the basics” of tennis or baseball. There exist key components of disciplines or activities that need to be understood in order to be able to excel. You can’t become a tennis champion, for instance, if you don’t know the basic rules of the game. In IR, you need to understand basics such as theories of statehood, concepts of power, even if you want to innovate beyond them – mostly because to be successful in any field you need to have a basic understanding of the common knowledge in the field if only to critique it. The same is true for other fields like History: even if you want to come up with competing theories of, for instance, the French Revolution you still need to know that it took place at a certain time, a certain place, and involved certain people and outcomes. Those are ultimately unavoidable.

This also leads me to a discussion of one of Langer’s potential solutions (side-ways learning) and its interaction with student multi-tasking and technology in the classroom. Just this week, in a class I was TAing for, the professor instructed the students to complete their own intelligence briefing on the subject of North Korean nuclear weapons. He set no guidelines, he set no standard method of delivery or information collection. Just that the students needed to address what they found most compelling and interesting. This would allow the students to engage in their own process and use their own methods, something that is supposed to help learning. Yet, even when put into groups and given leeway on the way to do things beyond simple lectures or being taught the basics, some students merely scrolled Facebook or texted friends all class.

My point is to say that a lot of this literature, on multi-tasking, on mindfulness, on technology, misses the point that students often have vastly different priorities than instructors can possibly perceive and for which they can compensate or adjust. IF students are fundamentally uninterested, they are going to struggle. It may not matter to them if they learn “basics” or have the opportunity to find things out for themselves. Ultimately, I feel like a lot of this discussion denies agency to students, or to instructors. Perhaps mindfulness does increase student’s ability to do well at tests, but this denies the potential idea that people already do this and still people are failing even if the average increases. Perhaps some students simply do not want to learn particular subjects (even when given a choice of what major or what classes to take). Ultimately, I don’t think pedagogy is going to present us with blanket improvements for university courses, because even in discussing potential “bottom-up” solutions to learning we are instituting a “top-down” approach to “fixing” teaching, with limited input from students, who have agency of their own and responsibilities of their own.

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Does Higher Education Allow for Mindful Thought and Expression?

My mother always told to be "mindful" when I was younger. And to this day still tells me to be mindful. This concept of mindfulness is one that has constantly changed as I continued to grow and push my boundaries. To this day, I feel the idea of mindfulness constantly changing. This includes Ellen Langer's … Continue reading Does Higher Education Allow for Mindful Thought and Expression?

The hows and the whys of learning

Two concepts rose to the surface in this this week’s reading on learning; how we learn and why we learn. When one is taught the process behind a skill they are learning the how. Whereas, when one seeks the reasons behind that particular process they seek to know the why.

THE HOW:
Langer writes that “when we first learn a skill, we necessarily attend to each individual step” and the ways in which her process of learning differs around baking a cheesecake each year continues to bring delicious results. Additionally, many of our readings last week surrounding digital learning as well as Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think explores the paradigm shift of how access to information in our digital age has changed the process of how one learns. We are shifting from a place that sets computers and humans as opposites to a place where they are collaborating in order to “help us work, mediate and create.” Knowing the how helps create sustainability.

THE WHY:
Keeping one on it toes, the why is ever-evolving.  It incorporates the context found in oneself as well as the respective environment and to what degree that context affects one’s process.  Sir Ken expresses teaching goes beyond delivering information, teachers must also “mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage” to ensure that any real learning taking place. Real learning takes place when one has a curious mindset, when  we desire to look beyond the steps of the process and the how something took place and discover the why it took place. Knowing the why helps create adaptability.

I need to be mindful of both the how and why when creating a platform of learning for students. Being new to teaching, I aim to have a better understanding of ways to cultivate that environment and am open to hearing suggestions for developing these best practices.

 

You’ve Got to Know the Rules to Break Them!!!

Paying particular attention to the Langer article, what she terms mindfulness, I consider critical thinking.  However, I think the major differentiation is the “when”.  For Langer, she believes that starting with conditional learning opens up additional possibilities.  For me, I am a firm believer in “You have to know the rules to break them” philosophy in life and education. 

When I worked in the government and third-sector, one of my roles was updating and revising entrenched systems and procedures.  At the beginning of my career, I came in and began changing processes without learning the what and why of existing systems.  Not only was this not well received, but in many cases caused unintended consequences.  It was only in coming in assessing the existing structures, could I step back and look holistically and the systems, the steps and how they work together to meet an end. 

In Langer’s story, she talks of how she mixes up some of the ingredients/steps in her cheesecake recipe – add something here, take some away there.  However, in her story, she didn’t say that she tried to bake her cheesecake at 100 degrees for 3 hours, instead of 300 degrees for 1 hour, or that she put it in the refrigerator in hopes that it would bake in there, or added onion and chives.  Alternatives, which as a novice baker, she could have easily done. However, she doesn’t, because she knows the rules of baking – there are some things you can change and some that you cannot.  It is only with this knowledge, that she experiments.

The same applies to education.  There are (small t) truths and rote memorization that needs to happen in education, a child doesn’t need to know that two plus two could equal four, it is four.  However, coupled with this rote knowledge and behaviors, critical thinking and analysis are crucial, particularly the ability to step out of the system and think reflectively on the whole and the steps, add new information and respond – “to improvise, adapt and overcome.”

When I think of successful inventions in tech, apps, and other areas, it is because someone innately knows a process, routine, or system, is able to step out of it and analyze that system – someone says, “There has to be a better way!”   I have also spent much of my career in five- and ten-year-strategic planning. In the end, most strategic plans themselves are in and of themselves pointless, it’s the planning that’s important, particularly an assessment of (knowing) what is.  It is from that foundation from which you jump to where you want to be and work backwards.  Most of time the actual plans never come to fruition as laid out initially, but you know where you want to go, what you can change and shift and what can’t as things evolve in reality – like a cheesecake.

Lastly, I don’t know why, but “Sully” Sullenberger came to mind, and his (re)actions on the “Miracle on the Hudson.”  When I think of him I know that on any given day he could have taken off from LGA with his eyes closed – that’s what I, and most people want, in their pilots. The difference is the ability to be reflexive and reflective on top of that rote knowledge to know when something is happening out of sequence, discard the plan and improvise, adapt and overcome.   When training new pilots, the first simulator training isn’t one that gets geese stuck in the engine, it’s the basics and then build out, and then build in complexity.

Cindy’s Blog #2 Anti-Teaching & Mindfulness

While reading the piece by Ellen Langer, I immediately thought of how we traditionally have students pick the “one” right answer and how there is only one answer that can be correct out of the 5 choices on a multiple choice test. Given the “paradigm” shift referenced in the writing and the renewed emphasis on critical thinking, the Virginia State Standards of Learning tests have been changed to include Technology Enhanced Items, also known as TEI questions. Students now have questions where they must choose more than one answer, drag and drop selections to a chart, and fill in a Venn Diagram, to name a few. Although some students may struggle with these items which may in turn result in a lower passing percentage for the school, we should appreciate these items that are helping students to use higher order thinking skills to think critically. Most importantly, it reinforces the idea that there can be more than one solution to a problem. Developing this mindset in elementary school will help students apply problem solving skills to real world problems throughout their school career and later in life. A Langer quote that resonated with me was “what we teach” may be less important than “how we teach.” Students can google the content teachers are presenting and some of that content actually changes over time with new discoveries and different perspectives. This week I observed a 4th grade classroom learning about weather. The students viewed the “real” forecast on a big screen, looked at clouds outside, and then worked with partners to collaborate on a Kahoot game on weather related questions. The students were having a blast while incorporating some 21st Century learning skills. Allowing autonomy in the classroom so teachers can be in charge of the “how we teach” part will benefit the students (as long as they have outstanding teachers). I can appreciate many things Sir Ken Robinson had to say in the video we viewed in class. I also decided to watch some of his other videos and found them to be worth the time. This is how you escape Death Valley:

t.co/icFxgy5yL1

You let children do what they do naturally, solve problems and create!

Students collaborated together to solve a problem.

Mindfulness in Education

Ellen Langer explains beautifully why most of the human beings adopt mindlessness over time? She goes on to explain that we always take the safer route in life. We tend to learn things the way we are told. Take the example of school education. We learn things according to a set curriculum that a group of educators and administrators decided. Now think of a baby. A newborn baby who does not know how to stand, talk or even crawl on its own, learns to do so by observing at other people. A baby is not forced to follow a routine but is guided by the laws of nature. A baby falls, gets up and tries again until success. As babies, we are free to think, free to move, free to observe as well as free to take the risk. There is no feeling of fear in the mind of a baby. There is no past which guides life in the future. As the baby grows, there are increasing questions in the mind about the surroundings and life. There is curiosity. This is called Mindful Learning. Learning which involves being in present, engaging, observing and learning new things without the fear of past or the goal in the future.

But as one becomes a teenager, the rules and regulations in this world start to control the thinking. This is the beginning of the mindlessness. We start to follow a set routine of school learning, homework, exams etc. We forget to learn things innovatively and creatively. We do not question the set notions of the world. We start to lack self-esteem and self-satisfaction. It is important to live and focus on the things in the present. Future is unpredictable but that does not mean the easy safe way in life is the only way forward. The more one explores, the more learning and interesting it becomes.

Mindless learning in education is very common nowadays. Bookish knowledge is good but not everything. It is necessary to explore beyond the traditional classroom teaching. New teaching techniques which encourage discussions, activities, technology, different cultures, perspectives, and contexts are becoming the need of the hour. The students need to learn mindfully so that they incorporate skills like productivity, innovation, problem-solving and increased attention span. The teachers and the present education system which is generally slow in changing needs to catch up with the changing world for the betterment of human learning. What do you think are the different ways in which the teachers and educators can encourage mindful learning in the classroom?

“Anti-Teaching/Mindful Learning” or, psychometrically valid tips for being more mindful yourself!

After doing the readings for this week for Contemporary Pedagogy class, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about for this blog post. I wanted to do something a little different. Rather than just reflect on what the readings revealed to me about pedagogy, I wanted to offer an activity to my readers and classmates! Both the required readings about mindful learning and the optional readings about attention and multi-tasking cited many studies from psychology, which just happens to be my research area. Several of my labmates and colleagues are actually specifically interested in mindfulness and use a self-report questionnaire called the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) to assess it. Hence, for this blog, I wanted to give you a link to the MAIA with scoring instructions to give you an opportunity to assess yourself on the key facets of mindfulness as identified and validated by psychologists.

The developers of the MAIA determined these facets to be:

  • Noticing (awareness of uncomfortable, comfortable, and neutral body sensations)
  • Not-Distracting (tendency not to ignore or distract oneself from sensations of pain or discomfort)
  • Not-Worrying (tendency not to worry or experience emotional distress with sensations of pain or discomfort)
  • Attention Regulation (ability to sustain and control attention to body sensations)
  • Emotional Awareness (awareness of the connection between body sensations and emotional states)
  • Self-Regulation (ability to regulate distress by attention to body sensations)
  • Body Listening (active listening to the body for insight)
  • Trusting (experience of one’s body as safe and trustworthy)

As you can probably tell, most of these have to do with your ability to accurately detect and assess the state of your body. This may seem silly, but failure to properly interpret bodily signals and sensations is related to greater risk of injury, stress, and psychopathology (especially anxiety). Interoception, and treatments that increase interoceptive accuracy are a major tenet of my advisor’s research career and the work of the Mind-Body Lab of which I am a member. Seeing how these practices and ideas relate to education is particularly exciting to me. The body and its physiology are a complex system, but understanding yours and its cognitive and emotional responses does lead to greater attention, and through that attention to all the different variables you can appreciate, you learn better and enjoy the experience more as described by Ellen Langer. So, I hope you enjoy filling out the questionnaire and the self-discovery that comes with interpreting your scores. Once complete, you can use the items as tips for how to become more mindful about your body, how it learns, and how you can inspire students to do the same.

P.S. I also had to give a book recommendation. I went to a Catholic University for undergrad, so of course, Theology courses were a requirement. The book chapter “Embracing Change” reminded me of the book On Religion by John Caputo. Here is a brief description from Amazon:
“John D. Caputo explores the very roots of religious thinking in this thought-provoking book. Compelling questions come up along the way: ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ and ‘What can Star Wars tell us about the contemporary use of religion?’ (are we always trying to find a way of saying ‘God be with you’?) Why is religion for many a source of moral guidance in a postmodern, nihilistic age? Is it possible to have ‘religion without religion’? Drawing on contemporary images of religion, such as Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle, Caputo also provides some fascinating and imaginative insights into religious fundamentalism.” But as to why this book relates, Caputo discusses how and why it is necessary to embrace change to be good, productive people who love our neighbor. So yes, it’s “on religion,” but mostly on how to live life and be comfortable in an age where everything changes so rapidly.

How do you anti-teach anti-learners?

This week, our reading discussed embracing change and allowing students to learn through play and imagination.  The whole theory of anti-teaching seems to center around inspiring students to ask good questions instead of conveying useful information. It seems, though, that our education system has produced students who ask only the worst question: “do we need to know this for the test?”

How do we engage students who have been trained in this way? It seems like some students are happy to go through life and education like this fish from Spongebob:

How do we teach students who are so entrenched in this mindset that they don’t want to embrace change? This is especially relevant in many of the general education courses that are required for students. Many students come to class and are uninterested in the subject at hand; they’re more interested in getting in, passing the test, doing a core dump of the information, and then getting out and moving onto the next semester. They’re anti-learners.

I was struck by this quote from the reading:

Historically, the pattern has been that as children grow up and become more proficient at making sense of the environment in which they live, their world seems to become more stable. Thus, as a child grows and becomes accustomed to the world, the perceived need for play diminishes.

When we’re in the classroom, our role is not just to convey information, it’s to introduce students to a new environment and allow them to ask thoughtful questions which in turn guide our teaching. The problem lies in anti-learners who have lost the desire to ask questions and just want to receive the information and then give it back to you in the form of an essay/short answer/fill-in-the-blank. We can talk all day about changing the culture as a whole, but when it comes down to it, we’ll have the students that we get and those students will have already been shaped by their educational experiences. They will likely have an expectation that our class will be similar to most of the classes they’ve taken – their ability to memorize but not understand, they think, will get them through. When we require more of them, some may grow and learn, but some won’t want to rise to the challenge.

I’m reminded of a history class I took my freshman year of college. HI 210 – History of Modern Europe. When we went to class on the first day, the professor handed out the syllabi and told our class “This won’t be like a normal class. There are no tests… no quizzes… all I expect is for you to interact with the readings, write an essay each week on what you found, and come to class prepared to discuss with other students.” When I went back for the second class, half the class had dropped.

How do we respond? How do we engage the unengaged, the students who are happy in their stable environment who don’t want to change? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Flipping the Script on Teaching and Learning

One of the most tried and true ways to generate support for change is to identify a crisis that threatens the very foundation of a society.  If the crisis isn’t averted or somehow mitigated the results will be catastrophic.  At least that’s the message that needs to be believed for the change proposal to receive widespread support.  In 2001, education changed as a result of federal legislation titled, “No Child Left Behind (NCLB).”  The messages of NCLB were that education is failing our students, teachers aren’t teaching the content they should be, too many students are dropping out of school, and students who did graduate weren’t prepared for the demands of college or the workplace.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time the US was facing a “crisis” in K12 education.  Some argue that NCLB was as much a response to a dubious report published almost twenty years previously as it was to anything in the current educational landscape.  That report was titled, “A Nation At Risk.”   The report warned of the potential end of American economic prosperity and the possibility of the end of American democracy if student achievement didn’t improve.  Nothing short of our way of life was at stake.

We’ll never know what would have happened if NCLB had never been passed, or if “A Nation at Risk” had never been published.  Maybe we would have lost the Cold War?  Maybe we would no longer be an economic world power?  Both of those things seem highly unlikely, especially in hindsight, but maybe.  My opinion is that we were trying to address a problem that didn’t exist, at least not in the size and scope NCLB felt it did.  Education was doing a good, not great, job at educating students.  There was room for improvement, especially in low-socioeconomic schools and communities, but the answer should never have been to create a highly-standardized model that treats students as parts of a machine as opposed to the unique human beings that they are.  As with most things in life, the answer was to find a balance between what all students need to know and be able to do and with encouraging students to pursue their individual strengths and talents in meaningful ways.

The standardization approach to K12 education has done some good things to help raise the floor but has also resulted in fewer students reaching anywhere near their ceiling.  When you set a minimum expectation that tends to become the only expectation that students pay attention to.  So how do we go from standardization to engaging students as individuals?  That’s a tricky question.  The nature of individualization (born of the constructivist paradigm in education) is that students choose at least some direction for their educational pursuits.  This is more than selecting electives.  It can be selecting content and/or selecting projects that demonstrate learning.

One approach that can allow for this is using a “flipped classroom” model.  In this model, students are expected to prepare for class by reviewing some basic material before class.  Class time is then devoted to working with the content in a deeper way.  This changes the role of the teacher from being responsible for providing content to being responsible for helping students process that content in a meaningful way.  This allows for more flexibility for students to work with the content in a way that is meaningful for them and changes the educational goals from rote memorization to the application of content.  In theory, this should improve student motivation.

I think this change in educational goal setting is really important, however, it is not without problems.  The biggest issue I see is the change in expectations for students.  In a flipped classroom students must take responsibility for learning outside of the classroom.  Some students simply aren’t willing to do this while other students are so involved in other things outside of school that doing homework simply isn’t an option.  Homework has and continues to be a source of contention for many reasons, including important ones such as access and equity, so it is a consideration that needs to be thoughtfully considered.  Another issue that arises from this model is when student motivation isn’t improved.  In this model, an unmotivated student gets zero benefits whereas a classroom working towards proficiency with rote memorization at least offers some form of low-depth learning.  It’s not ideal, and not particularly good, but in the absence of anything else it’s something.

I think the reason we adopted the standardization approach was that the public didn’t trust that what teachers were doing was really beneficial to their kids or to society.  There was a sense that students weren’t doing anything of value in school.  Maybe they weren’t.  If not, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed with the teacher, school administrator, or school board.  However, and this is what I believe to be the case in most schools, maybe what students were doing in schools was valuable all along and students were learning without realizing they were learning.  That is, after all, the best way to learn.

In reality, we were probably somewhere along the spectrum as opposed to being at either of the poles.  Unfortunately for those in positions of authority, the need for slight adjustments doesn’t produce the kind of crisis they need to push their agendas.  Hopefully, we can get to a place where education can be viewed through the perspective of growing individual human beings to reach their fullest potential as opposed to a political issue used to solicit donations and votes.

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