Learning is a motivated process which involves updating/evolving structures to incorporate something new. This can include integrating new, strengthening existing connections, reconsidering or rerouting existing connections. Learning is an active, agentic process—not merely a process of obtaining.
Someone (or something) with a mind that updates itself in response to input is a "learner". A "good learner" is someone who steers parts of this process both when integrating new external knowledge and creating new knowledge from within. (Stems from the idea that learning is happening at both Amber Hill and Phoenix Park, even though it is a different mechanism and different things being learned.)
Learning takes place most often in an individual when there is some fit between that individual and their environment. Chang et al. call this belonging. Eccles et al. call this stage-fit.
Closely related is a learner's idea of themselves: can they do what they are attempting or being asked to do? Dweck calls this a learner's self-theory, and Markus & Nurius consider this a learner's possible selves—can they "see" themselves knowing or doing X in their future? Can they see possibilities for where their current work and actions lead them?
While distinct, these four theories on the conditions necessary for learning are closely related and many ways reflect different ways of looking at the same thing: all concern, in some way or another, the interaction between a learner and their environment.
More specifically, all call for some sort of harmony, some kind of positive rather than negative interference, between the learner and their environment. Does the learner belong? Do they fit their stage? Does their environment support them in having a positive, malleable self-theory? In seeing their possibilities?
These four theories also have in common that it matters greatly how a learner feels about themselves. More on this in coming weeks.
Well-developed interests drive learning (Renninger & Hidi, 2016).
From Brown & Campione:
- Modified jigsaw involving interest-based expert groups.
Problematizes content, gives students authority, holds students accountable to each other and to disciplinary norms, and provides relevant resources (Engle & Conant, 2002).
Effective students use examples to generate self-explanations that link specific processes to broader principles (Chi et al., 1989).
Effective learners seek help when needed and not when not needed (Newman, 2008).
In classrooms which support the development of positive writer identities, writing is not an object studied in itself, but rather a tool or vehicle for self-expression and interest-development/exploration. (Nolen, 2007).
From Boaler:
- No tracking (in Phoenix Park)
- Seeing math as a community of practice
Talk can be a powerful tool for learning when arguments built jointly across an entire classroom community over a prolonged period of time and upon shared premises, especially when such talk is accountable to (1) community, (2) standards of reasoning, and (3) knowledge (Resnick et al., 2010).
- A teacher makes sure to weave students' contributions to a discussion into a coherent whole, or better yet models this well enough that students begin to do the same.
From Yamaguchi:
- The teacher talks less than the students
- Engaging community
Strategies that have worked for both me and a classmate:
- Students talking more than teachers
What you believe you're good at strongly informs what you value being good at and subsequently invest into getting better at (Wigfield & Eccles, 2002).
Strategies that have worked well for a classmate:
- Teachers having high expectations because it's inspiring to know what's possible ("I must be able to do this if my teacher thinks I can")
Good goal-setting is a cyclical process that involves forethought, performance, and then self-reflection. Performance ("outcome"-oriented) goals are ineffective on their own; they are most effective when paired with learning ("strategy"-oriented) goals (Zimmerman, 2008).
Strategies that have worked well for me:
- Having an environment structured to support me in acting in accordance with my will and learning goals.
- Working on "strategy" goals, not just "outcome" goals (Zimmerman 2008).
Strategies that have worked for both me and a classmate:
- Feeling agency and the rationale for learning something—a sense of not just "why is this important to learn" (in the abstract) but "why is this important for me to learn." Otherwise requests for students' time and attention are easily (and not incorrectly) reduced to "how can I get this done [if it is being "required" of me] with minimal wasted effort?" Goals set for students by other individuals than the student themselves must be accepted by the student, and this is more likely to happen when the goal has a plausible rationale (Zimmerman 2008).
Is how to teach or how to facilitate learning.
"Good pedagogy" often consists of the following principles, even when it varies greatly:
- Involved: Active construction of knowledge. (Brown & Campione: students are "active constructors of knowledge"; Yamaguchi: "joint productive activity")
- Introspective: Students are using metacognition to recognize, and later improve upon, how they are learning
- "Smart": This is coming from Joe Alberti's frequent admonition to his students that they "work smarter, not harder", and Alfie Kohn's idea that "harder does not mean better". "Smart" pedagogy instead acknowledges that we have cognitive predispositions which make certain ways of learning easier than others (e.g. the number of distinct pieces of new information you can hold in your short term memory at once limits certain things, and our minds take all sorts of shortcuts, as per Ramachandran's Bag of Tricks), and takes advantage of these, working with the mind rather than against it.
- Social and communal: Learning often happens through communication, since communication forces ideas to become at least as structured as they need to be to attempt to communicate them. It also allows for misconceptions to be exposed and corrected, and for different perspectives or ways of looking at the same idea to strengthen a whole group's understanding of that idea. Learners can support each other. (Brown & Campione: "learning is social & situated in community"; Yamaguchi: "joint productive activity")
- Contextual: Learning is connected to the learners' lives and community. This does not just mean that "community issues" are sometimes discussed in the classroom—everything can actually be made relevant to the community. This is also not just about content, or what is learned—this is also about the ways of learning & interacting, or how it is learned. (Yamaguchi: contextualization [3rd principle])
- Stretching: Facilitating learning requires working in learners' zones of proximal development: what they haven't yet learned that is conceptually close enough to what they have learned to be able to learn it without undue difficulty. Working in this zone may look like posing challenging activities, that stretch what students think their abilities are. (Yamaguchi: challenging activities [4th principle]; Xu Coates & Davidson on scaffolding)
Across Brown & Campione's Guided Discovery Community of Learners and Yamaguchi's 5 Standards for Effective Pedagogy.