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.