(too) many of them don't...

It is the "OBJECTIVE" that matters......

Teachers can be broadly classified into two groups---1. Those who want to just complete their teaching job, 2. Those who want to learn and expand their knowledge frontiers.------there is also a third category----Now a days it is difficult to find teachers who teach as a social responsibility...----those who just contribute without any expectations (rare ones)....

The present question is applicable to the former two categories....Psychology courses for the first group who just want to do their job, serve like excursions, picnics or conference and gathering for gossips.....they have no great objective in attending such courses....the courses are a regular routine as are the lecture classes.....However, the second group is passionate about such courses....Its because of their objective....They want to improve themselves in their field....and the process of teaching serves as a platform where through interaction with students, a variety of perceptions about a single subject can be invited...analyzed..the harmonious ones integrated...spurious ones rejected.....and a bigger picture of the subject can be seen....The second category of teachers will exploit the methodologies of the psychology course to achieve this objective...and may very well develop their own ingenious techniques....

Vinay, I'm not inclined to classify teachers into so few groups.

I do wonder what we would find if we asked teachers: "What is your theory of learning? And how is that reflected in your day to day teaching?" I also wonder how often a teacher questions his/her own theory of learning and on what basis/" In my experience really good teachers are acutely aware of who and who is not learning in a classroom and they make adjustments to increase the amount of learning.

I am concerned that we are allowing "test results" rather than teacher expertise and observation to determine whether learning is occurring and what to do if it is not.

I agree there are some teachers who do not have an inkling about what learning is and aren't really bothered about finding out. They just go to work and wait for the salary at the end of the month. That is a negligible minority.

My issue is with the inspection system in the UK where observers monitor a lesson and make no comment about learning (from the student's perspective) but focus on a tick sheet about what has been met or not. Personally, I have been observed a few times and been given low ratings even though the observers agree every child in the class demonstrated great learning and achieved the learning objective and success criteria. In these instances whether I have a theory of learning doesn't seem to matter. It is what the tick sheet says at the end of the day. A lot of teacher colleagues are therefore focusing on the ticksheet (as I call it). It is therefore a game and those who can play it really well get outstanding teacher labels.

Gideon, It is sad to see such a complex task as teaching reduced to a tick sheet. I have spent many hours observing teachers and it takes 5-10 sheets of written comments to get a sense of what was going on. And, even at that, unless the observer is sitting close enough to a student to see how the student responds, it is difficult to tell what the student in learning.

When the world was flat, people saw a horizon and believed that if they didn't venture beyond that line, they would probably be safe. Dodgy boats in heavy seas didn't make it back. Steep mountains and avalanches killed off those who climbed to the sky. The wisdom of shared experience was such that it reinforced the belief. So an entire way of living, of being in the world, was shaped by the belief in the flatness of the world.

When people approach a new terrain, they often don't acknowledge or question the ingrained perspective and beliefs they carry with themselves. The assumptions of 'rightness' about their privileged, establishment, western-oriented belief systems are not usually the subject of reflection. They are like the flat earth of their previous experience, from which they launch themselves into enquiry which is self-reinforcing.

So learning is more than psychology. Psychology is more than deviations and mindfulness. Learning is more than teaching...

Words like chunking, successive approximations, and applied learning come to mind... But these are limited by the horizons of accepted academic behaviour... by the knowledge-literacy approach (in which some people claim to know more than others, so the others better listen up). Ok, so there's some legitimacy to that... but it's one way traffic. Which has all sorts of political/power aspects to the dynamic. What about two-way traffic? What about learning with, learning from, instead of just teaching to?

And then, as we discover the horizon has a curve and we haven't fallen off, what about sustainable learning? Where there are structures and processes in place which support and develop an expanded knowledge base into changes in attitude and perspective? Where there is scope to practice new skills? Where an organisation or sytem intends on utilising learning by implementing programs or initiatives that come from that learning? Where ideas generated by learning have currency? Where there are processes in place which sustain that momentum?

So perhaps you might put aside psychology for just a minute, climb the slippery walls of your professional miopia, sail the seas of inter-departmental currents, and perhaps actually begin by asking some teachers?

Harvey,

Not sure where you intended to go with your answer. But here are some thoughts it evoked:

1. To quote you:

When people approach a new terrain, they often don't acknowledge or question the ingrained perspective and beliefs they carry with themselves. The assumptions of 'rightness' about their privileged, establishment, western-oriented belief systems are not usually the subject of reflection.

My Q: Your data?

2. To quote you

what about sustainable learning? Where there are structures and processes in place which support and develop an expanded knowledge base into changes in attitude and perspective? Where .....

My observation:

I think there are many approaches to trying to do this...project based learning, problem based learning, authentic learning, emphasis on executive function...

3. To quote you

begin by asking some teachers?

My response: What makes you think I haven't asked hundreds of teachers....from preschool to graduate school contexts?

Excellent response. It's always good to have a previously undeclared rabbit to pull from the hat. Might I also recommend the bibliography by Smoller "The Eitiology and Treatment of Childhood" (Harvard).

Harvey, I am a teacher who is frustrated with the 'establishment' but I still can't agree with you. Teaching and learning has long moved on from the teacher as 'purveyor of all knowledge' days. As stated by Fran, enquiry and problem based learning tends to be the order of the day. My issues with the system are more to do with the problems created by politicians who haven't got a clue but pretend to be the 'saviours' of education. Psychology- cognitive, developmental, educational- in my opinion, deserves to be given a more prominent role than it is at the moment.

There is already a considerable literature on teachers conceptions of teaching, which may or may not have a parallel with their conceptions of learning. Teachers might have one conception of learning, but what they actually do when teaching does not match this. For example, in conditions of high accountability, they may teach to the test while believeing that learning is about developing a sense of personal identity and meaning.

What seems clear is that the range of conceptions of learning and teaching are relatively stable and come out as something like those below. ‘Range’ is emphasised because people may display different conceptions from the range at different times and in different contexts. – it is the range of possible conceptions that seems reasonably stable, not necessarily those that individuals hold over time and place. Many of the people in this line of research are concerned with how to encourage what they see as the higher, more advanced conceptions in educational contexts.

What is teaching?

Teaching is imparting information

Teaching is transmitting knowledge

Teaching is facilitating understanding

Teaching is changing students’ conceptions

Teaching is supporting student learning

What is learning?

Learning is getting more knowledge

Learning is memorising and reproducing

Learning is acquiring and applying procedures

Learning is making sense or meaning Learning is personal change

Derived from Watkins & Mortimore (1999).

Conceptions of knowledge are also part of the mix. The attached diagram might be a useful contribution to this discussion.

Entwistle, N. (2009) Teaching for Understanding at University; Deep Approaches and Distinctive Ways of Thinking. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Watkins, C. & Mortimore, P. (1999) Pedagogy: what do we know? in P. Mortimore (Ed.) Understanding Pedagogy and its Impact on Learning. London: Sage.

Colin, Where would you put the developmental concept of "metacognition" or "Executive Function" in your definitions of teaching and learning.

Do you have links for your references?

Not my definitions, Fran, but ones that people seem to consistently hold. I referred to them because the question was, 'How do teachers define learning? Not, 'what is learning? It might be none of these, even the top ones. Interestingly, if you show people these, they sometimes find them inadequate. Teachers do not always share the researchers" perspective that they are a hierarchy, but what people do at different times. No refs for that claim as just personal experience on a number if occasions. i have reported (Teacher Development article on my profile page) how teachers in my ex school came up with definitions of teaching and learning that incorporated all of these conceptions in integral versions. That itself raises interesting questions. For example, do teaching and learning become something different when people are given starter ways of thinking about them and direct their own behaviour - use them in meta cognitive or executive ways to direct themselves towards possibilities they previously did not consciously recognise.??

In answer to your question though, I suppose they represent the metacognitive or executive functions of the people that hold a particular conception on that particular occasion. They will behave according to that conception, but we must remember that the conception is not necessarily constant across contexts.

References are books, so no links. Will check for open access material when back at my main machine, but some names that might lead to material through Google scholar, etc are Entwistle, Saljo, Prosser and Trigwell. Approaches to learning literature following from Ference Marton is also relevant and related to this work.

Colin, Very thoughtful. Thank you. I'll check the Names.

Fran

Colin, found this

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ldc/development/pga/introtandl/resources/2a_deep_surfacestrategic_approaches_to_learning.pdf

Sorry Fran, I forgot that I said I would look for some readily available material that was not behind a pay wall. The material you have found looks generally fine to me with one exception. The description of the surface approach before it lists (accurately) the features looks a bit too much like the strategic approach for my money. Generally, as I understand it, one takes the surface approach when the learning activity is perceived as an externally imposed task and/or when one has a fear of failure. The student wishes to cope with the task. This is implicit in the description but not, I think anyway, made clear enough.

A few points seem worth making.

The strategic approach was introduced to explain observations in those contexts where there are formal assessments in which some students focused on the assessment requirements and adopted features of either the surface or deep approach to get the best possible grades. Hence, researchers tend to see assessment as crucial in encouraging the deep approach.

Much of the research is concerned with how to ‘engineer’ contexts in which students take a deep approach or adopt the higher conceptions of learning. As I hinted above, it might be better to share the possible conceptions of learning and the concepts of approaches to learning with the students in the hope that they might make adjustments themselves to how they learn and, perhaps, play a role in helping to make the contexts more favourable for the deep approach. If anyone knows of research that has tried this, I would be interested. If not, it might be worth someone trying.

That said, we need to be careful about language. In part of the world, it is common to refer to learning tasks, and to say to students, Your task is….” This seems to me to be the wrong sort of language to use.

Here are a few more resources that a quick search of Google scholar (conceptions of learning) showed up. There are many more relevant references there, some of which are accessible directly.

http://www.learning.ox.ac.uk/media/global/wwwadminoxacuk/localsites/oxfordlearninginstitute/documents/supportresources/lecturersteachingstaff/resources/resources/Student_Conceptions_of_Learning.pdf

Not found through Google Scholar but through a simple Google search. Opened Ok initially but link now seems broken. Seems pretty accurate though no references. Series of which it is a part may be worth looking at. You might need to go through http://www.learning.ox.ac.uk/ and search from there, if the link is indeed broken.

http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/11958 New to me, but looks an interesting approach to integrating various influences on learning.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/12038/1/12038.pdf Provides an interesting cross cultural look.

http://maaikerotteveel.pbworks.com/f/Entwistle%2Bapproaches%2Bto%2Blearning%2B1991.pdf Although an introduction to a special issue, this makes some points about approaches that are still relevant.

http://www.tlrp.org/pub/acadpub/Entwistle2000.pdf Attempts to develop the concepts further. I find the diagrams useful, so hope others do as well. Entwistle also, includes his own work on conceptions of understanding that may be interesting.

Noel Entwistle, Ference Marton and Mike Prosser are on Research Gate, so you might find material on their pages, or want to contact them.

Hope this helps.

Colin, I am very much in favor of students taking a more active control of their own learning. One tool for doing that is metacogntion/executive function. Several models of learning, I believe, also focus on student control. To mention one, Authentic Learning.

I've posted a few relevant sites below:

A “Metacognition” Board

http://www.pinterest.com/digin4ed/edu/

My own version of a “Meacognition” Board

http://www.pinterest.com/franvt/empower-learning/

My blog which focuses on learning to learn/metacognition

http://wanttolearn.edublogs.org/

Authentic Learning

http://authenticlearning.info/AuthenticLearning/Home.html

With a background in developmental psychology, I am always looking for ideas and research that helps kids become better learners.

Fran

Thanks for this Fran. Your work, from your board, looks interesting. 'Authentic Learning' is a new concept for me. I will look in to it. There is also self-directed/self-regulated learning (e.g Zimmerman http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Zimmerman-Becoming-a-self-regulated-learner.pdf ) with which I am sure you are familiar.

We may be moving away from your starter question though. It looks to me, if the conceptions of teaching and learning do map out the full range that occurs in current educational contexts, that, for your sort of work, teachers need to see learning in terms of the conceptions of:

•Learning as making sense and meaning and

•Learning as personal change.

If so, a problem in many countries (certainly the UK) is that curricula, even when they have a rhetoric supportive of learners taking control of their own learning, seem actually to be designed around the conceptions of:

Learning as getting more knowledge

Learning as memorising and reproducing

Learning as acquiring and applying procedures

Colin, Yes, my "work" does take a wide range. Right now I am interested in how teachers see "learning"--their own as well as their students' learning. Perhaps because I am working with a wonderful Kindergarten teacher, I do see her defining learning as "making sense and meaning: and "personal change." At the same time, while schools, in general, may advocate "personal learning plans" (here in some schools in Vermont), I think all teachers haven't quite figured out the relationship between "common core standards", "accountability" and allowing students to make their own plans for learning--admittedly a real challenge.

PS: Yes, I do know Zimmerman's work

Thanks for adding your comment Krushna. I believe strongly in teacher accountability, but I doubt that any teacher can ensure learning outcomes--try as we might.

Krushna, Yes, the combination of collaboration, formative assessment, and individualized goals within group work certainly helps to increase the likelihood of student success.