Our school has recently begun to examine how to teach students to learn. This means that while we teach our courses, we also provide tuition on the process of learning itself. So far we have come up with 5 words that we think may encapsulate the characteristics of a good learner. If we do this well, we believe that we may be able to teach specific strategies to strengthen these characteristics. What do you think? Is learning teachable? Do these words characterise a 'good learner'.
In fact, practice is the most important factor in learning. Let me cite an example.
The theory of swimming is very simple;
(a) to remain afloat, use your hands, and
(b) to move forward, use your feet.
However, just knowledge of this theory is not sufficient to swim! Try this, and see what happens!
Practice is highly necessary to learn anything.
The 5 words are:
Engage ... establish interest, desired outcomes, curiousity
Connect ... to existing knowledge,to possible ideas, to the world, to others for help, be open minded
Enquire ... ask, seek information, explore, research, analyse
Reflect ... on where you are in the task, on how well it links to criteria,on what needs to be done to finish, on whether it is a 'good job', on the information you gathered.
Persist ... see it through, do more than necessary, make it a good job, not just finised, if you get blocked seek help, don't give up have patience, be creative.
What do you think of these words?
Dear Mark, I think you can teach anybody to be better learner. Its something inside and you can make efforts in making them vigillant by giving different kind of tasks like creative and critical thinking on diversified subjects.
Yes, I think that we can teach students how to learn; it would be part of our main efforts. Sometimes they think that everything is ready for them just to be 'digested' and especially whatever they find on the web. I suppose that the five words work quite well. Engagement could be the starting point anyway. So, by writing a brief or assignment, this would be the driving force for us, as teachers. Connections with real life examples and ideas is also important. The most difficult thing at times is getting them to understand how they can explore and research, because they have got to learn how they support their own ideas by being supported from the efforts of others. Enquiry should not be just 'cut-an-paste'. This is because we teach them referencing. When they have to reflect, they may have to evaluate their findings first and then, they should plan the actions up to completion. Teaching them to persist should be seen mainly in the teacher's behaviour and feedback during assessment stages; we should have to increase our demands step by step without having to increase workload. Perhaps by helping them to select high standard research materials; students learn about it when they share research with you in some projects. It is a bit of influence from you directly to make them learn through our reflective practices.
Sure. There are several issues to consider: the object of teh diciplin, the student´s motivation, the course objectives, and so on. One very importatn issue to consider, I think, is to mo tivate the stident to pas away whta he/she have learned; to teach is one of the best way to learn.
I think you may need to define the word 'better' from students' perspectives. If 'better' for them means 'pass the course', then all of teaching will go for the tests. In contrast, if they say they want to speak English or use it for communication, forget about the tests and provide them with learning opportunities to be exposed to English in situation. Your five conceptual words are fine and can be realised in many ways, but I'd suggest you elicit their practices from the students. If your school is top-down management (like mine), this task needs to be accomplished by individual teachers, but if it is not, ideally, let the students take the floor.
Thanks Chongrak. That's a good point. We WILL ask the students to get more ideas. We aren't trying to find out how to get more passes and we are aware of different student perspectives. Our students are only 12 to 17 years of age so we are specifically interested in focussing on improving the students understanding of the learning process that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives. Passing tests will be a useful consequence of that. Refocussing students on learning rather than achieving is seen as having a psycholgical benefit, leading to greater self efficacy and resilience.
We used a focus group pf 20 students and 80 teachers to collect a large number of words, grouped and summarised those words to arrive at our 5. We are now at the stage of testing th words amongst ourselves and by me here on RG. If anyone else can give their opinion, we would be grateful.
I am going to explain my experience when I was a principal in a Public Secondary School, five years ago. I try to motivate to all teachers to work together to be a better learner because the school was in a poor area. We have a very big problem not all the teachers saw the education simmilar. We speak different languages in education. Not all the teachers wanted to work hard.
Then to get good resalts in your enterprise first all the teachers must be concienciates that the subjet is necessary for them because the teacher learn more than he teachs. Second the teacher need to learn about the theorical model in wich he will be use the 5 words. The teacher needs to produce process in the pupils. The teacher need to have metacognition and high control after ussing a strategy.
The same problems are evident in Higher Education and especially Year 1; students reaching us after secondary schools and A levels are not prepared for University level work; they think that they could be learning in a 'mechanistic' way; just by being 'spoon fed'. Unfortunately some teachers in HE keep going like this! No independent learning and no personal development which should be helped by very precise strategies set by their teachers (as Sagrario says above). What should be a correct strategy when your students' learning pace and abilities are so different?
In fact, practice is the most important factor in learning. Let me cite an example.
The theory of swimming is very simple;
(a) to remain afloat, use your hands, and
(b) to move forward, use your feet.
However, just knowledge of this theory is not sufficient to swim! Try this, and see what happens!
Practice is highly necessary to learn anything.
I guess there are different types of learning. I admit I was focussed on the conceptual learning that changes a person's way of seeing. I will have to reconsider to include these other types of learning.
Yes, practice could be included. However if conceptual learning is not integrated in the learning process at all, practice could not exist as standalone type of learning, because continuous practical repetition without 'surprise' elements from reflection and team evaluation could be extremely boring and not helpful at all.
We have reexamined the words and decided that practice fits under persist or connect. So the 5 words still stand. We have also begun the process of incorporating the words into our pedagogical processes. I am leaning towards an integrated approach, where I modify my language to include the words as and when they fit in discussion. We could however include special lessons where the words are unpacked to make them explicit to students. What do you think?
To teach someone to learn, means opening his/her mind to alternative ways to learn. Even something as simple as teaching students about learning styles helps them understand they have personal preferences but other strategies are available and may be more effective than the strategy you typically use in a given situation.
theoretical knowing and practical knowing are coupled. Students can't learn nothing about practical knowing if they aren't previously studied some basic theoretical concepts and vice versa, theoretical knowing is forgotten if it isn't accompagnied by some practical demonstrations.
Making the reflective process a habit of mind will also help learners learn how to learn. It is only by requiring students to continually justify their thinking, document their decision-making, assess what is and is not working, decide how to modify what they are doing so they can become more successful, revisit that modification, and practice the art of questioning what they are doing - that they can begin to realize how they learn best and how they can modify their learning strategies to be most successful.
Of course! learning is teachable - it must be tought!
To teach a learner would require to give him/her as much assistance he/she needs but not too much. This reduces the complexity of the learning process (i.e. Collins' Cognitive Apprenticeship).
There are many learning theories. All the theories have advantages and disadvantages. According to the (modern) motivational theories it would be advisable to integrate the three elements of Decy&Ryan's intrinsic Motivational theories (1985).
Supporting learners and fading the assistance may help the learners to internalise the process of learning and (as Margaret Plack mentioned before ) the metacognition without reducing motivation. From my point of view, learning could be fostered in a well scripted (!) (dyadic) learning setting (via CSCL). The main thing is: self monitoring is a complex, heavy-to-learn activity. This could be fostered by distributing the tasks on two (more?) learners. But this will not happen automatically. Scripted collaboration is a successful way to foster this issue. Please refer to Fischer, F. et al. (2013), Kollar, Fischer, Slotta (2005) and issues about fading the instructions Wecker & Fischer (2010) or Wecker, Kollar, Fischer, Prechtl (2010). But: there is NO common recipe for teaching learning.
Cooperative Language Learning (CLL) is suggested which in fact is a learner-centered and group (Panel)-based approach to learning which appear to be a kind of collaborative learning, the students of the class are divided into four or five groups (Panels) with almost 6 members, varying between 4 to 6 members depends on the number of students. Each group is released with a subordinated taught topic. They discuss what they have learnt from past sessions. At last, each group would publicly report the outcome by the circulatory coordinator and ultimately all students would involve in topics and outcomes of other groups as well as their own and accommodate in the process of learning. Throughout this process, the teacher plays only the role of a director by calling at each groups and giving clues and making certain that they are in a right direction. In fact, the key role is incumbent upon students. This process enhances all students’ learning performance and their general achievements. For further study, the book written by Richards et al. (2001) is suggested.
Richards, J. C., Rodgers, T. S. 2001. Cooperative Language Learning. Approaches and methods in language teaching. 2nd-ed, Cambridge University Press, UK. 192-204.
@ Hossein Mohammadi : What does the book have to say about Assessment of this teaching & learning approach? Teaching and Learning without adequate Assessment (of some form) is less than half the demands for effective education. I don't mean, to be sure, a proof of the effectiveness of Cooperative Learning (that's food for educational researchers, but I don't believe that it will be generally possible to confirm its effectiveness). No, what I mean is Assessment as part of the Teaching-Learning-Assessment Cycle in the classroom itself. See my pubs.
Can effective learning strategies be made overt?
I have been experimenting with teaching He 5 words and found them unnatural. They heeded a ' frame' to work. I was explaining to my15 year old students why a piece of work one of them had do he was so excellent ( it was a set of 3 essays on the topic 'do we need more laws to control genetic technologies? ') I found myself saying that the student:
l. knew what the job was.
2. learned what was needed to do it well,
3. completed the job, and
4. Reflected on it.
I then found the 5 words fitted neatly under these 4 descriptors of success.
Is it pure coincidence that the initials of the five words together with an 'I' (for Integrate) make up the acronym RECIPE?
Dear Paul Vossen,
Assessment is not the matter of the most importance in teaching approaches. Something which is of the most significance in this regard is how to make students get involved in the process of learning. Participation is the primary goal in teaching methods; in fact, teaching approaches are designed to figure out how is it possible to change a passive listener into an active learner in the class, along with how is it possible to facilitate information sharing among students and how to learn this. Having learnt this process, students ultimately would bring about what you consider as effectiveness. The amount of information shared together with the extent of participation could be two indices measuring effectiveness.
Dear Hossein Mohammadi,
I humbly disagree, however, let me add immediately, this may be due to accidental differences in our different teaching contexts, which I can't infer from what you tell me. Let me further give some reasons why I disagree.
Reason 1: Core methods versus enabling methods
Although I fully agree with you that participation is (one of the) important criteria for effective teaching, it is in itself not a goal or method of teaching. Also, we should be more precise here and distinguish between (at least two) kinds of methods:
--- Core (or substantial) methods, which have to do with the subject(s) and object(s) of teaching and learning, which by definition will differ from course to course
--- Enabling (or facilitating) methods, which are to a large part independent from subject(s) and object(s), but which purpose is to create a context in which the core methods can flourish so that teaching and learning will be near-optimal.
In my view, core methods are the primary ones and enabling methods the secondary ones. Without core methods, there can't be any teaching or learning; most of the time, they will be quite explicite. Enabling methods have a stealth character most of the time, or they will be absent, in which case teaching and learning can occur but at a high price and low chance of success (only the better students will survive).
As a matter of fact, I have seldom experienced problems with student's participation, cooperation, information sharing and things like that. For one thing, that is surely caused by the kind of teaching-learning in the course: PBL (problem based learning) in teams. If students would not be active listeners and doers, they would completely fail and they know it. I remember one case of a very stubborn student; so I tried to motivate him, without success; and his own fellow students said to me something like: leave him alone, he is always in this mood. That's what I mean: they know very well what is at stake.
Funny to say, assessment in a broader sense (which is far more than measuring things) has a high potential of increasing participation and hence engagement, because most students infer from assessment that something important is at stake for them.
However, measuring such enabling factors isn't always easy: e.g. how do you faithfully measure the effectiveness indices "amount of information shared" and "extent of participation", which you mentioned in your comment? Easier said as done, unless you confine yourself to holistic assessment ("thumbs up" or "thumbs down") or start reading books on psychometrics or edumetrics.
[continued on next contribution]
[continued from previous contribution]
Reason 2: Assessment-driven Teaching and Learning ("ATLAS")
Assessment can be and should be the motor and driver of the entire TLA-process, as it defines in precise terms what you want the students to understand and to be able to do - "precise", because otherwise neither you nor your student can focus on what is really important and stay on track.
That also implies that assessment should be continuous, or at least iterative, as long ago proclaimed by formative assessment-evaluation. Waiting with assessment until the very end of teaching-learning and not giving feedback to the students is no less than a crime.
Assessment-driven Teaching and Learning is feasible: I have explained in another RFG discussion that it is just the application of a practice well-known in Software Engineering, called Test-Driven Development (TDD).
Reason 3: Assessment informs both students and teachers.
Some people may think that assessment is only done to judge and grade students' learning, and perhaps - in some cases - to give them adequate feedback so they can improve their learning. This however is a very reduced, impoverished form of assessment, (sad enough when it is practiced).
On the contrary, assessment is the critical process which closes the loop between teaching/teachers and learning/learners. Without it, teaching and learning are blind (almost literally so).
Last but not least assessment also informs the teachers about any mistakes they have made, so they can immediately react e.g. rehearse or improve their recent teaching. Waiting for the next course next year is - again no less than a crime.
BTW: in China and some other Eastern countries there is - since a couple of years - a strong movement to regularly assess teachers for their teaching knowledge and skills. And the results of such assessments have consequences, e.g. for promotion or salary. Whether you like it or not, it may open the eyes of teachers for the importance of assesment as part of any goal-directed human activities. I am pretty sure, that in the not too distant future such teacher assessment will swap over to Western countries, too. Politicians and educational policy-makers will find the arguments to do so.
Dear Paul Vossen,
Like you, I agree that assessment is supplementary to learning process, this is taken for granted, but my scope of argumentation falls into that how what is being learnt appears to be the core, even the “assessment” come to help and revise this part in the form of feedback.
Learning theories are mostly concerned with the process of learning, even not with the value of what is being learnt, of course it is of immense significance but in a networked world, the very manner of information we acquire is worth more attention and exploration. Even new theories such as Connectivism are an attempt towards forming connections among people. A limitation to most of learning theories such as Objectivism, Pragmatism, Interpretivism is that they all has focused on learning that occurs inside a person and do not address learning that occurs outside of people through connections, sounds better to say “the process”. In all of these theories, experience was the core to learning. But the question is “can we experience everything? We can no longer experience everything especially in a world in which the amount knowledge is doubling in every 18 months. This is what being of most importance in the today world, the “process” of learning. Here we have to use other people’s experiences and store our knowledge in our friends’ and collecting knowledge through collecting people; In other words, making more connections among people and getting them involved to get the most out of learning process which is what is being tried to communicate with you.
Yes, indeed, assessment (should) result(s) in feedback, but the proponents of assessment-based teaching-learning go a decisive step further: they propose that assessment comes (also) in the form of feedforward. This is IMHO the decisive distinction between assessment-as-an-afterthought and assessment-as-a-commitment.
As to your remakrs about learning theories: I absolutely agree with you that there are types of learning which are not well or not at all covered by the traditional (psychological) learning theories (which BTW come in quite different flavors: some are well worked out in form of a falsifiable theory, others are just nice generalisations without specific claims which can be tested).
From what you describe I infer that you are thinking of a branch of modern Knowledge Management, a field I have just completed a course about with students of Business Computer Science. And yes, there is a big troubling problem of information overload without a sustainable solution around the corner. Shall we call the process of learning you depicted so vividly: "social learning", in much the same way that learning can be attributed to organisations (organisational learning, already a research topic in the 80es, I remember)?
Please keep talking Paul & Hossein, the conversation is fascinating. You both seem to be talking mainly of motivation and process, rather than the learning itself. I'm not complaining. As I said it is fascinating. My personal -. Opinion is that the difference between your views becomes moot if there is a conjunction between assessment FOR learning and assessment OF learning.Assessment is both a motivator and part of the learning process.
Dear Mark Gloud,
To answer your question explicitly, I need to take help of Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.
As you see in the picture within twenty minutes you are likely to forget approximately 40 percent of what you hear or read, and by the time twenty-four hour have passed, you may have forgotten almost 70 percent. It is frightening to think that half of what you have learnt will disappear in one day. To address this problem, some good study skills need to be taken to reverse this forgetting trend. Learners have to acquire these skills including:
Note taking which is the difference between passive listener and power listener. For that, leaner need to be ready to write and edit what you have taken, together with asking question to ensure its correctness.
Strengthening the power of reading. For this, learners have to find the main idea in every paragraph they read which may not always being stated explicitly and sometimes learners need to imply the main idea of it. Then the main idea in longer reading should be uncovered, in other word, the “thesis” of the peace or writing. Major and minor supporting details based on which the reading is based need to be paid attention. Visual aids of the peace of writing involving graphs, tables, diagrams should be carefully paid attention.
Studying should follow a rational process including: a simple review, read and mark, and review by reciting that transfer the information into long-term memory.
Learning occurs when one take in information by sight, sound, or touch. Visual learners prefer to see information, auditory learners prefer to listen to information, and tactile learners prefer hand-on experience. These also should be addressed in teacher’s style of teaching.
Teacher’s style of teaching should be adapted to classroom settings and mismatch cannot be used as an excuse for not learning, even such differences can seen as opportunities to develop a nonpreferred style. Therefore, based these differences one of these can be taken: teacher-centered, student-centered, or project-centered style settings. The last are almost always labs that students have specific project snad tsks to complete by themselves or with partners.
Maybe there is also an issue with words like learning which have so many different but overlapping meanings (semantics) and uses (pragmatics). This certainly applies also to our previous discussion. Examples abound:
learning to solve an urgent problem or make a pending decision [which is information acquisition for the short run, no need to memorize]
learning to be able to think, reason or talk about daily matters [which is vocabulary and concept building, often meta-knowledge, memorization required]
learning to be able to do something for the first time [which is motor learning, behavioral training, control learning, with distributed memorization also taking place in motor nerves not just brain]
learning in the sense of modifying existing structures and patterns [which may be on individual and/or organisational level, re-memorization for optimisation of information retrieval or behavioral competence (skills)]
etc. etc.
No wonder that we often keep talking across each other or even contradict ourselves from time to time, because at the moment of talking our focus is a little bit different, and not always are we clearly aware of that.
It would be tempting to try to categorize all those types of learning, to build some sort of taxonomy built for one thing on linguistic meta-categories (like I did in the beginning: semantics versus pragmatics), for another thing on cognitive categories (borrowed from psychology), and probably on a host of very specific application contexts. The result would be a thick book I guess, or a huge semantic network aka mind map. I'm not sure however if that would pay off enough ...
If you want to learn [in the sense of know, perhaps in the mode of see-and-forget ;-)) ] HOW COMPLEX such a semantic network might become, have a look at
Taxonomy of Human Elements in Endeavour (THEE) of Warren Kinston
I have to admit that I don't yet fully understand what kind of a model this is, because it is indeed very unusual, but ... fascinating. So I set myself no deadline for understanding, and I will come back regularly to it, reading here and there, looking for serendipitous insights or just wandering around in this newly created world ...
It's not just a digital book, it's not pure hypertext, it's not a simple concept map, it's not mathematics, it's not a theory, .... What is it? What makes it fascinating (for me at least)? Or is it a little bit of all and am I just blended by the unfamiliar medium- framework?
Up to you to decide for yourself. Guess, some crazy people like me will love it for its obvious non-utility yet-creativity, many people can't probably do anything with it. Like modern art: you love it, or you hate it.
http://www.thee-online.com/
Paul you never cease to amaze me with your insights. It is of course obvious in retrospect that what you say is true, that how we learn will depend on the purpose & nature of the learning. Now I want to know more about the possibilities so will look into the Warren Kinston material.
It may very well be possible to teach someone to be a better learner but that is not the main issue. To teach anyone anything they have to wish to learn and the motivation to learn must come principally from the learner. We can teach research methodology and we can direct students to sources of quality literature but they must desire the outcomes of the endeavour.
I am not remotely interested in Cricket. No amount of applied pedagogic theory would make me want to learn anything about the game. The greatest Cricket teacher in the world would 'fail' if they tried to teach me about the game and all the tea in the cricket playing world would not make me interested in Cricket.
I have several students every year who make it plain that they feel the same about the subjects I teach. To them I have a simple answer, I would keep away from Cricket games by choice, perhaps they should be more discerning in the courses they elect to sign up for.
So Barry Turner, the question is how could we motivate students towards what is being taught. Have you ever tried new methods to evoke students' arousal towards what you instruct?
Have you ever tried some methods like CLL?
CLL helps students to be more engaged in the process of learning so is PBL. Dear Barry Turner make sure that these methods would be helpful.
Barry, i accept your point completely, but I guess I have to assume an interest in learning, engagement as a precursor to my question. I also think that success, through understanding the learning process can aid engagement.
Mark I have only found your question today, and see that the responses are 18 months ago. So how far has this project progressed since then? Teaching the specific skills to learn science is something I want to know more about. Is there anything published by now?
Sheelagh, This idea is part of a very broad project to influence the mindsets of our students. The ideas have been embedded in what I would describe as the total learning environment we attempt to create. Our students fall into 2 main categories of mindset. Some value school learning and some don't. Those that don't are affected very little by this idea. Of those that do, some benefit and some don't need it. In truth, I don't think there has been much gain, which is why I asked the question. Specific description of learning skills doesn't seem to have nearly as much impact as creating good relationships and good curriculum, except for those few students who not only value learning but are deficient in enough skills for this to change them.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Education