The things that remain after they have forgotten everything you taught them
from Terry Hayek
Learning has little to do with content.
If we’re talking about learning as a personal manifestation of some kind—the two-way flow from a frame of reference into a fluid act of recognition and meaning-making—then learning is something that happens entirely inside the mind and is its own kind of illusion.
In education, we try to make this learning visible through assessment, observation, dialogue, and other cognitively disruptive actions designed to disrupt this privacy.
But ultimately, learning is for the learner. Content never changes as a result of student-content interaction. It is meaningless and neutral; students are – like everyone else – careful and biased.
The
Simply put, learning is a deeply personal act of framing your own experience on something else—like trying your own hat on a mannequin. Your hat creates meaning, and the mannequin is what makes sense. You understand both of you better as a result of the interaction.
The things that last
As an educator, you’ve probably been trained to think of teaching and learning as a process that is backward in standards.
And this training was necessary because it does not come naturally to everyone; it required breaking old habits—starting with a book, a project idea, or a video, for example—and instead starting with a clear learning goal and then establishing what you would accept as evidence that you had achieved that goal.
At this point you will have the grading scheme and are half way to getting a unit. This is more or less how planning for teaching and learning goes.
This is not an attempt to make you rethink that approach – not today, anyway. Rather, the point here is to look at what other factors tend to linger long after the content is forgotten.
Critical abstractions of learning: The most important things students learn in school
- How they treat others
How do students feel after talking to you? Curious? Enthusiastic? Not sure? Crushed? Scared?
When they read learning feedback from you, what does their inner voice say? Yes, it has as much to do with their personality as anything you say or do, but it would be nice to know all the same, right?
Doesn’t it matter how you make students feel? Can you encourage high levels of understanding and inquiry if they are constantly seeking to align and conform instead of inquiring and self-directing?
And beyond that, how you can use your personality as a teacher—your natural gifts as a communicator, motivator, or content expert—to optimize the way you make them feel.
2. Self-image
Forecast
Behind how you make them feel is the discoveries they make about themselves under your guidance. Key strategies here are prediction, reflection and metacognition.
How can it be? How can I learn? What can I find?
Reflection
what happened what did i see where did i see it? How did I answer?
Metacognition
How did this event change my thinking? What were my sources of creativity or curiosity? When was I at my best?
How students feel about themselves—and what they felt you did accordingly—will easily outlive any content they take away from your class.
3. Engaging tools and community
Networks, communities, habits, and tools matter a lot, because in everyone there is a kind of self-sustaining system that works without you. These are things that, with your guidance, can be set in motion and then left to build endlessly on their own or roll over and crash.
In your class, a student discovers a MOOC that explores the evolution of viruses and meets scientists, students, doctors, and field workers from global organizations who do this work every day.
It could be an app or a related tool—expert, informed use of Google, skillful organization of games, or music, or apps, or art, or some other piece of technology that they’ll take out of your curriculum and use everywhere.
Or maybe they come across a subreddit that hosts daily discussions about how technology is changing culture. And in this subreddit, they encounter questions, people, theories, texts, videos, and ideas that are a kind of ecology to stimulate learning so nuanced and varied that you couldn’t reproduce it on your own.
Communities and compelling tools continue.
4. Learning strategies
Not the simple cognitive acts like “analyze” and “evaluate” that function more as evaluation tools, but rather literally figuring out how to learn.
What is worth understanding? What useful things are others around me creating? What sense of purpose do others around me live by? What nationalities am I a member of and what does it mean that I understand?
How can I use existing, inspirational role models that are already all around me to drive my learning?
How can questions lead to understanding? And how can I formulate better questions myself without being constantly criticized?
You can call it a self-directed learning modelor simply strategies that students use to learn, the result is the same: enduring processes that students can transfer on their own, endlessly, regardless of content or application forms.
The abundance or lack of accessible learning strategies will forever affect your students.
5. Reading habits
Reading habits have momentum—hard to start and hard to stop.
Are they learning to love reading? I don’t like it? To believe they are good or bad at it? Is this or is it not worth doing without prompting? They learn this at home and it can be reinforced – for better or for worse – at school.
6. How to make and avoid effort
Based on their own motivations and goals – what they want, whether good grades, approval from parents and teachers, praise from peers, fulfilled curiosity, etc. – students will exert as much effort and motivation as they deem necessary to achieve their own goals (assuming they have them and see this connection).
Learning how to exert enough effort to achieve specific goals or avoid specific punishments is one of the earliest lessons students learn in school.
The things that remain after they have forgotten all that you taught; flickr user to attribute image woodleywonderworks
