Is reading and acquiring knowledge really learning? That is what most adult do, so where is the creation, the higher-level thinking, the application?
That’s question I got out of bed to jot down last night, and it’s the question I hope this post begins to explore. Let me be the first to admit that I have not really thought this one out, and I hope that by the simple act of wrestling with the words I can pin down some direction to take with further. Feel free to read along, comment, and move forward with me.
There is nothing more deadening to education than the jargonization of ideas. And let’s face it learning ,seeing as it is at the core of what we do, has taken the most abuse. At my last school, we joked about looking for learning. Teachers would snigger in meetings where administrators would say with straight faces, “So what do you think learning looks like?” I get it. It is hard to define.
The term that seems to be perennially in vogue is the life long learner. We want to foster life long learning. We have teachers who are life long learners. Really? I guess I want to explore the idea that we aren’t and that we don’t.
It may look good on a brochure to say that a school’s staff is constantly immersed in learning, but the truth is most people are simply living their lives and trying to get by. Even those of us who champion the cause and bare the flag of the life long learner may simply be deluding ourselves. Are you feeling defensive yet? Good let’s get started!
I always start with Wikipedia, so let’s take a look:
Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines.
Okay, two words jump out and blip on my Bloom’s Taxonomy radar: Acquire and Synthesize. Is the amount of time we spend, acquiring new knowledge and skills, and the amount of subsequent knowledge and skills acquired in proportion to how we synthesize it? In short, what are most people doing with the raw data that pours into our readers and twitter feeds on a daily basis? How far up Bloom’s Taxonomy do most teachers take their learning? Is writing a blog post or creating a wiki enough evidence that you have learned anything? Or is it simply documentation of the data you have reattained?
I have been wracking my brain to think about the last thing I learned. The last time, I acquired new knowledge or skills, which I then applied and used to create something new. I can’t think of anything.
What’s the point you may ask? Well I want to learn something new, and I want a few of you to join me. I say I love learning, but have a hard time identifying anything I have learned in the last year. Maybe I am being hard on myself, but I would hope that if I had learned something it would have at least been exciting enough to register in my memory. No, I don’t want to read websites, or blogs and recreate the ideas in my own terms. I want to, “build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.” How do I do that? You are all teachers. Teach me something new?
If we are all life long learners then we need to be asking ourselves these questions. What is the last thing you learned? I am not looking for a set of data you memorized, or facts you are storing in your brain, I want to see proof. What did you create? Where is your evaluation? If you truly learned something you should have documented, created and evaluated your learning. Right? Share with me. We are all life long learners right? Show me. Teach me.
You raise some very interesting points and challenge the notion about being “life long learners”. You did make me think! I think that as adults, we are not necessarily producing a product that can be shared as a result of our learning like we did when were students. I’m in a new role this year for .4 of my job. I’m now a Teacher-Librarian and had to learn new skills and procedures this year in order to manage our school library. I also made it a mission to become a better collaborator with my colleagues in my building by learning new skills to work together in co-teaching situations. These are a few of the skills that I have learned this year. Some of these skills were taught to me by people in my division but others I learned or sought out myself in my ongoing process to become a better professional. My product would be in what my students have gained or learned in my classroom and can be measured by what they say and produce as learners as a result my teaching and guidance. My reflection and tweeking of my teaching is ongoing as I reflect on my practice and change how I taught something to make it better.
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I hear what you are saying, but why do we hold student to a higher level? Why do we ask them to “prove” their learning, but we can just say, ” we are not necessarily producing a product that can be shared as a result of our learning like we did when were students.”
I am not asking for a product per se, but if we look at Bloom’s Taxonomy, shouldn’t there be some kind of building and evaluation. I agree when you say, “My product would be in what my students have gained or learned in my classroom and can be measured by what they say and produce as learners as a result my teaching and guidance.” But shoudn’t even that vague picture be put in a frame?
Sounds strange to say that our students learning is evidence of our learning.
BTW Thanks for contributing. I am just thinking out loud here. Just seems weird that we ask our students to prove their learning, but it is okay for ours to be implied.
Jabiz, I learn something new almost every day. As the Tech Integrator, people come to me with all kinds of problems that I have never encountered before – So I click around, web research a little and solve the problem. I love learning new things … I get excited by that. My most recent atuff includes baking bagels, ePubs for iBooks, capturing atttention spans of 3 yr olds with Smartboard flash games, 90% of what I can do with Tech was self taught, creating groups in Studywiz so that using Studywiz can become student driven and not always teacher driven, painting skin tones for fair skin has rose and blue tones and Indonesian requires sap green tones …. the list is endless!! My mind boggles just to think of it all. Maybe it’s because I believe that I learned very little at school. I couldn’t read until Gr 3 … I kinda failed in the school system. Most of my learning came from Art with my mum and intellectual stuff from my dad. Official school for me was not a big learning place. Not inspiring.
Great points Jane. I guess, what I am trying to figure out is if solving problems is learning? Now that I write it out , of course it is, it would be ridiculous to say it is not, so then what kinds of problems are we setting up for our kids to solve? How do we motivate them to do so?
I know that elementary kids are naturally curious and work in this way, but once they hit middle school the fire dims.
90% of tech stuff I do was self taught too, but is that learning? Just trying to define it. Which I know is tricky.
I would say learning is impossible to measure or evaluate. What can be measured/evaluated is how we apply that learning. It is possible to learn something but never apply it, or maybe the application is delayed for a period of time.
The latest application of learning is the idea that my students need a small,stable learning community that lasts for an extended period of time. The learning came because of a conversation with Melanie McBride. The application hopefully will come with your class. I am not sure what it will look like yet, the learning and application isn’t complete yet. Actually, I am not sure this kind of learning and application is ever complete.
I speak to my students and their parents about learning being a process. Learning something isn’t a one time activity with a clear start and end point. Learning happens on a continuum.
Of course self taught is learning. Everything that I do to learn must have an element of self taught – even that delivered by a teacher. That’s my expectations from my students – inquiry based, differentiated and a lot is just in time student directed – gosh I miss being a class teacher now. I love not knowing where the inquiry will lead – that’s what makes it long lasting – cause I get to learn too 🙂 Once a PYP teacher – always a PYP teacher!
A very thought provoking post and some great comments too. I was especially struck by this section of the original post:
” …build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure…”
I suppose I started to think about that ‘creating a new meaning’ might be inside my own head or shared with others. In other words, being creative is not just about being ‘productive’ or being ‘constructive’. I think it might be about ‘the penny dropping’ for me about something with which I have previosuly struggled. In fact, shouldn’t learning be problematic? a perturbation? troublesome in some way?
So, do I learn a lot? Sometimes it’s just that I ‘reflect’ a lot – is that the same…..? Hmmm still thinking!
Do higher order thinking skills lead to greater learning? I think that’s the premise. The essential part of wikipedia’s definition is “Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences” since the presence of the word “may” weakens the clause that follows. When I memorize a new word and remember its meaning and when to use it, and use it correctly, then I’ve learned it. To me, if I learn something, it’s enduring (I remember/understand it for a long time). That’s most likely to happen if it’s relevant to me. In order for it to be most relevant to me, the learning should be authentic/contextualized. In the instructional design course that I am taking at the moment, some of the activities felt uncomfortable, like I was contorting myself through hoops for no real purpose. This difficulty was because I couldn’t contextualize the new information in terms of my experiences, interests, goals, prior knowledge; I had no connection. I haven’t learned those concepts.
“I want to, “build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.” How do I do that? You are all teachers. Teach me something new?”
GREAT questions…ART teachers spend their lives facilitating the environment for this but are the first to be cut from the curriculum.
Eisner always teaches me something new!
I heard Elliot Eisner present “What Education Can Learn from the Arts” at the 2008 NAEA in New Orleans; more ideas to consider…
http://www.artsedcalifornia.com/uploads/EisnerArticle0209.pdf