At the start of every school year, Beverly could hardly believe how little her new students knew and how little they could do. But at the end of every school year, Beverly could hardly believe how much her students had learned and how much they could do. Learning fascinated and enthralled Beverly. But as much as she studied learning, learning remained a mystery to Beverly. Yet the mystery of learning was also largely why Beverly found learning so fascinating and enthralling. If stimulating her students to learn was easy rather than mystifyingly hard, Beverly probably wouldn’t have found teaching and learning so gripping. Beverly marveled at these thoughts as she started yet another school year.
Goal
Learning, or stimulating a persistent change in student behavior toward the instructional goal, is a school’s core function. If a school’s instructors don’t know how to help students learn, then the school will underperform in its critical educational role. Obviously, teachers need to know how students learn and whether they are learning. But schools benefit when other members of the school community also know how students learn and whether they are learning. Administrators, for one, need to know how students learn, in order to recruit, orient, guide, evaluate, and support instructors. School support staff members also need to know how students learn, in order to monitor, guide, advise, and support students. Board members benefit by knowing how students learn, so that they can determine appropriate policies and evaluate and guide the school leader. And the students themselves, and their parents if the students are at the elementary or secondary school level, also need to know how learning occurs and whether they are learning. Knowing a thing or two about learning can help you participate effectively in your school community.
Approaches
Approaches to learning can vary. Instructors have more than one way to conceive of learning and its methods. A prior chapter already mentioned cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, experiential learning, social learning, constructivism, connectivism, humanism, self-directed learning, and neuroscience approaches. The challenge with understanding learning is that it goes on in the brain and body in largely unobservable ways. We can only surmise the mechanism of learning from outward behaviors because learning isn’t mechanistic. Learning is instead physiological, neurological, chemical, or something else hidden from view. Instructors and other school personnel must thus use models for learning, where those models seem most useful to describe what the instructors are observing as to whether and how students are learning. Don’t assume one model or instructional approach is right and others are wrong. We understand learning largely by models drawn from behaviors. Use the models only to the extent that they aid instructional enhancement and reform.
Stimuli
One way to approach learning is to examine the stimuli that promote it. Studies of learning suggest, for instance, that students retain more from a well-organized lecture with a well-designed slide show than from a lecture without visual images. Auditory stimuli combined with visual stimuli can enhance learning, but only depending on the design and coordination of the two stimuli. If, for instance, the instructor lectures while displaying distracting or conflicting images, the combination of auditory and visual stimuli may degrade rather than enhance learning. So, examine the quality and coordination of the stimuli that instructors are arranging at your school. Those stimuli can include lectures, slide shows, videos, readings, outlines, handouts, graphics, discussions, role plays, simulations, projects, and experiments, among other things. Focus the stimuli on the learning objective, and arrange, coordinate, and vary the stimuli to produce attention, concentration, and focused engagement.
Cognition
Another approach to learning focuses on student cognition, or what is going on inside of the student’s mind as the student learns. Cognitive approaches construe learning as involving structures, frameworks, or schema within the student’s mind. The goal of instruction is thus to build, connect, and enhance those frameworks. Instruction begins by confirming the relevant framework that the student already has in mind from prior learning. First, remind the student of what the student already knows related to the new subject because the student will build the new framework on the foundation of an existing framework. Once the instructor has anchored the new framework in prior learning, the instructor then incrementally extends the new framework from that foundation, first with an outline frame and then with the details hung from the frame. Learning involves moving in and around old and new frames, helping the student fill out the subject’s cognitive structure.
Psychology
Cognitive models for learning have a basis in brain science, psychology, and physiology. Neurons within the brain grow and extend dendrite branches to connect with other neurons and dendrites across minute gaps called synapses. Effective learning builds and strengthens neural networks into persistent structures that preserve and reproduce electrical patterns affecting mental images and motor responses. Brain science and psychology help instructors refine their cognitive models of instruction, with strategies like avoiding overloading, while keeping students in the zone of proximal development where they experience just enough challenge to grow the neural networks but not so much challenge as to produce only chaotic growth.
Memory
Another approach to learning focuses on student memory. Learning generally requires remembering. Instructors assign readings or give lectures and present slide shows, expecting students to remember what they read, hear, and see. Studies of memory indicate that students retain what they read, hear, or see only briefly in working memory or short-term memory before the stimuli dissipate. To remember, the student must move the short-term impression into longer-term memory. Doing so requires that the student repeat or rehearse the memory at gradually greater intervals. Asking questions through the course of a reading or lecture can repeat and rehearse the material just covered. Reviewing a reading or lecture at the end can repeat the rehearsal. Sending a student home with a brief review assignment for that evening can repeat the rehearsal again. Reviewing the material at the beginning of the next class can repeat the material yet again. Periodic reviews across a term can repeat material yet again. And so on, across a curriculum.
Rehearsal
Instructors dedicated to enhancing student memory can do more than the above traditional approaches to preserving memory. Methods to help medical students pass arduous step exams and law students pass arduous bar exams have helped to refine techniques using physical or virtual flashcards. Properly designed flashcards, properly deployed, can produce vast increases in fluent and accurate recall. A first key to enhancing memory has to do with defining and limiting the triggers for memory, while precisely articulating the desired recall on presentation of the trigger. A second key to enhancing memory has to do with rehearsing a limited number of triggers in succession, while gradually changing the triggers to other subjects as the student develops fluent recall. A proper flashcard deck, used properly, can quickly enhance student recall of key subjects until assembled into the full knowledge base that the learning objective requires.
Engagement
Experiential approaches to learning focus instead on engaging students in their learning. The lecture classroom can appear stultifying, with students sitting passively, trying to keep awake enough to take notes. The experiential classroom can, by contrast, appear to be a hive of student activity. Experiential instruction may deploy a series of progressive activities in which students engage first alone and then in pairs and teams, drawing ever closer to the final activity that the learning objective articulates. Students may read, research, write, discuss, advocate, choose, prioritize, propose, pilot, experiment, analyze, and discern, all at once or in quick succession before reiterating their active processes. The instructor’s goal is to coax the students into performing the desired objective in the classroom. Instructors may thus “flip” the classroom, having students watch lectures on video and complete long readings outside the classroom so that they come to class prepared to engage the subject experientially.
Social
Another approach emphasizes the social and emotional aspect of learning. Social-emotional learning focuses on developing student self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills, while making students more responsible for deciding how to study and manage their own learning. Social-emotional approaches may assign students to teach units, placing students in positions of responsibility, accountability, and authority over their own instruction and learning, and in different roles and relationships to one another. Students may study and work in rotating, assigned, or self-chosen teams, each team making presentations to other teams on assigned subjects. Students may evaluate one another’s work in pairs of their own choosing or whom the instructor assigns based on the needs, talents, and personalities of the students. Even assessment may be group or team based. Social-emotional approaches can stimulate energy and engagement, develop personal identity, confidence, and social skills, and help students build support and accountability networks.
Assessment
Assessment approaches can also be effective at enhancing learning. Assessment approaches emphasize the positive testing effect, helping students practice the course and learning objectives’ final performance with frequent quizzes, tests, and practice exams. Instructors may share scoring and grading rubrics for papers, problem sets, and other assignments and examinations, while helping students use the rubrics to understand the unit and course expectations, and to meet those expectations through frequent practice. Students may self-score using the instructor’s rubrics and may swap papers and other assignments for peer scoring, all designed to have students evaluate their work and the work of others to discern and meet performance standards.
Choices
You can see the wide variety of instructional approaches that different theories of learning can generate. All or most of these models may be at use in your school or available to your school’s instructors. Your school’s instructors are likely using a combination of instructional methods, whether or not they recognize the model of learning from which the method draws its design. Effective instructors are generally aware of the variety of methods at their disposal and have familiarity and facility with multiple methods, varying their deployment depending on student needs and instructional goals. Appreciate the power of learning theories for generating instructional options and approaches to enhance learning.
Reflection
What model of learning predominates at your school? Or do you see multiple learning models at work in your school’s varied instructional approaches? Do some instructors at your school vary forms and methods of instruction more than other instructors? Does your school’s faculty have leaders who are especially knowledgeable about learning models and instructional approaches? Does your school support instructors in their professional development around instructional approaches? What is your favorite or most familiar model for learning? Can you picture a different student who would benefit from each of the above instructional approaches?
Key Points
A school’s goal is to influence learning in positive ways that persist.
Instructors have multiple learning models to generate approaches.
One approach examines the quality and coordination of stimuli.
A cognitive approach seeks to build frameworks around prior learning.
A psychological approach pursues a zone of proximal development.
Memory approaches seek to move from short to long-term memory.
Rehearsal approaches may use refined tools like flashcards.
Experiential approaches promote hands-on activities for learning.
Social-emotional approaches foster self-awareness and social skills.
Assessment approaches promote the testing effect and rubrics.
Effective instructors vary learning models and approaches.