Things that linger after they’ve forgotten everything you taught them
go through Terry Heck
Learning has little to do with content.
If we think of learning as some kind of personal performance—the bidirectional flow of referential schemas in fluid acts of recognition and sensemaking—then learning is something that happens entirely inside the mind and is an illusion of its own.
In education, we try to make this learning visible through assessment, observation, dialogue, and other cognitively conflicting behaviors designed to undermine privacy.
But ultimately learning is about the learners themselves. Content never changes because of student interaction with the content, but without learners, the content itself is useless.
Learning requires learners.
Formulas in mathematics, theories in science, or papers in literature are unconscious and neutral; students, like everyone else, are observant and biased.
We look for patterns and see things we’re used to seeing, and familiarity makes it easier. Requires less effort look.
arrive understand Ask you to find and see new patterns, and finding new patterns requires effort.
Cognitively, it’s much easier to see what you want to see.
Learning is a deeply personal act, putting your own experience on something foreign—like trying on your own hat on a mannequin. Your hat is your meaning maker, and the mannequin is the thing that is given meaning.
Ideally, through interaction, you can better understand the two.
something that lasts
As an educator, you’ve probably been trained to think of teaching as a process that’s behind the curve.
This training is necessary because it doesn’t come naturally to everyone. It requires you to unlearn old habits—such as starting with a book, project idea, or video—and start with a clear learning goal, and then build evidence that you accept as evidence that that goal has been achieved.
At this point, you have at least an outline of the assessment, and you are halfway through the full lesson plan.
Content –> Standards –> Acceptable evidence of learning –> Learning objectives –> Assessments designed to assess students’ ability to provide evidence –> Activities that help students improve that ability (know or do, concept or skill, etc.)
Or maybe:
Content–>Standard–> learning objectives –> Acceptable learning activities/course evidence –> Activities to help students provide evidence –> Assessment.
It depends on how far behind or ahead you want to go.
You can give the test, have students study for the test, help them when they have questions, and then give the test.
In this case it would be: Assessment as Content –> Practice –> Assessment as Assessment.
The teacher will: teach the content –> “give” the test –> grade the test.
This is more or less how the lesson plan goes.
This is not to say that we should reconsider this approach. Instead, the idea is to look at other factors that tend to linger long after the exam is over, the grades have been given, and the content has been forgotten.
Where are the children in any of these tangles? How do we know if they are not just learning, but doing?
Where is the pattern?
Key abstractions for learning: The most important things students learn in school
- How do they relate to others?
How do students feel after talking to you? Curious? Passionate? uncertain? Eyebrows punched? Intimidated?
What does their inner voice say when they read your learning feedback? Yes, it has to do with their personality, as does anything you say or do, but it would be nice to know the same thing, right?
How do you make students feel unimportant? Can you promote high levels of understanding and inquiry if they constantly seek coordination and compliance rather than inquiry and self-direction?
Additionally, how do you use your personality as a teacher—your gifts as a communicator, motivator, or content expert—to optimize how you make them feel.
2.Self-image
prophecy
Perfectly aligned with how you make them feel is what they discover about themselves under your guidance. The key strategies here are anticipation, reflection, and metacognition.
How might things be? How do I study? What can I find?
reflection
what happened? What did I see? Where did I see that? How do I respond?
Metacognition
How did this event change my thinking? What is the source of my creativity or curiosity? When am I at my best?
How students feel about themselves—and correspondingly how they feel about what you do—can easily outlast anything they learn from your class.
3. Compelling tools and communities
Networks, communities, habits, and tools are important because inside each one there is a self-sustaining system that operates without you. These things, with your guidance, can start up and then build themselves up no matter how much they do, or collapse on themselves and collapse.
In your classroom, at its most basic, students “learn content.” They take the tests and move on, the teachers take those tests and move on (what else should we do?)
Meanwhile, everything—from curriculum, instruction, testing, lesson preparation, classroom management, meetings and more meetings—is repeating itself—repeating the same patterns over and over again.
Patterns can help structure, frame, and facilitate, but if our minds—our actual brains—are not driven to break out of those patterns, learning will be diminished at best.
None of this is humane.
There is teaching, there is planning, there is learning, there is even learning, but where are the teachers and students themselves? Where is the pattern?
where is people where is the interruption pattern?
Ideally, this includes:
1. How they see themselves as learners
Rather than simple cognitive acts like “analyze” and “evaluate”, which function more like assessment tools, they literally mean Figure out how to study.
How to recognize, follow and break patterns.
What is there to understand? What useful things are being created by the people around me? What is the purpose of life for those around me?
you can call it Autonomous learning modeor simply strategies that students use to learn, but the result is the same: an enduring process that students can transfer on their own, endlessly, and independently of content form or application.
What do we want students to learn? growing up? To make their lives better? Help their minds change for the better.
they need to be able rest patterns in their lives.
2. How they see themselves as readers (and writers)
Reading and writing habits are inertial. It is difficult to start and it is also difficult to stop.
Have they learned to love reading? Don’t like it? Believe they are good at it or not? Is it worth doing or not? They learn this at home and it can be reinforced in school – for better or worse.
We read to understand and write to disrupt.
3. How to sustain and avoid effort
Based on their own motivations and goals—what they want, getting good grades, approval from parents and teachers, praise from peers, satisfied curiosity, etc.—students will put in the effort and drive they think is necessary to achieve their goals (assuming they have it, and see the relationship).
Learning how to put in enough effort to achieve a specific goal or avoid a specific punishment is one of the earliest lessons students learn in school.
Help them learn to spot new patterns and then break them again as they grow.
That’s how you know they’re learning.
