With instructionist education throwing up its hands in the face of the pandemic and the ‘education industrial complex’ peddling the same old information-centric instructionalism that drives home-bound teens to sedition and insurgency, it seems appropriate to ask “what should we build instead?”
Yet despite the itch to make something new, even our well intentioned first instincts are likely to point us in the wrong direction. As Paul Rand famously observed, “The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.”
This is just as true for education, as Paulo Freire cautioned. Ask most parents about their own experience with school (not with their pals or their favorite teachers, but their overall academic experience) and you’ll often get a tepid saga of boredom, frustration, irrelevance, and dissatisfaction. Yet ask those same parents about their kids breaking away from tradition to try something new, and you’ll witness suspicion, resistance, and a vindication of those ‘old ways’ likely to contain the phrases “I turned out okay” or “it builds character….” Many teachers and school leaders demonstrate this same cognitive dissonance.
In my last post, I described the ways the “cubic” model could be used to evaluate learning approaches and described a method for calculating “engagement and learning multiplier” (ELM) scores. If you aren’t familiar with these concepts, you might want to review that post before continuing…
Over the next several posts, I’ll perform cubic ELM assessments of several common learning approaches. For each, I’ll set the learning scenario and then present analysis about why that approach has a given “cubic” shape and why it receives a particular ELM score. Hopefully, these posts will provide useful examples and guidance as you evaluate your own learning approaches and as you make your own teaching and technology choices.
A traditional lecture course
Description
In this course, the teacher presents information most days through a combination of lectures and presentations — some conducted using an “interactive” white board. The teacher also incorporates materials from the course textbook in her lectures, highlighting the points learners will have to know for exams. Learners are expected to take careful notes, and exams and other assessments come largely from material the teacher has covered in lecture, though some also comes from exercises and readings in the course text. During class, learners are encouraged to ask questions if they don’t understand a concept, and the teacher organizes weekly discussions where she probes learners’ understanding of course topics. In addition to homework exercises, learners are expected to complete a major research project. This project is designed to introduce learners to important books and journals in the discipline, and they must use materials from the school’s library, including the library’s online, full-text database, to complete it successfully. Learners choose from a list of topics furnished by the teacher, who has ensured that library holdings are adequate to support each topic. Assessment of these projects (as with exams and homework) is completed by the teacher, who writes comments designed to correct errors, to help learners acquire disciplinary literacies and conform to disciplinary norms, and to praise particularly insightful or advanced responses. The teacher periodically presents exceptional or noteworthy homework exercises, exam responses, and final projects to the class, being careful to protect the authors’ anonymity, in order to encourage dedicated, thoughtful work. She makes herself readily available outside of class to discuss course concepts and encourages learners to come by her office or contact her by email if they have questions or difficulties. Continue reading →
In my preceding two posts, I’ve described the levels of two facets of a multidimensional learning model comprised of three: content, community, and context. If you haven’t yet seen those previous posts, you might want to review them before continuing here.
However, even though I’ve split this discussion across three posts, this model does not describe three elements that function independently; all three combine to create a single “cubic” learning experience. They’re parts of the same basic entity, facets of a single prism. Splitting them apart, as some learning models do, ignores the influences each dimension has on the others and elides the important ways they cocreate an environment for learning.
In this final post examining each facet’s structural progression, I’ll explore the levels associated with context. Then, in my next post, I’ll map specific teaching approaches onto these three dimensions, offering examples of how this “cubic” model can be used to assess and rate the efficacy of particular learning constructs. Finally, I’ll conclude this series by connecting our “cubic” model to other existing learning models and taxonomies.
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From an educational standpoint, context is at once both a simple and an incredibly complex concept. It’s simple because we’re very used to seeing our classrooms and their equipment as the “theaters” where learning happens. We even have a standard minimum expectation for such spaces: seating and work surfaces for learners, special demonstration equipment for teachers — including chalkboards or white boards, projection screens, and so forth. We know that if we want to do something special — display 3D models, organize work groups, conduct lab demonstrations or explorations, connect in real-time to far-away experts, or stage a performance — we might either need special equipment or we might need to move into some sort of special facility that makes these activities possible. But why would we want to do any of these special activities? The answer is simple: we know that they’ll amplify some portion of content or will enable some form of collaboration that we think will benefit our learners — or both.
And this is where context becomes complex. We instinctively realize that even relatively minor changes in the learning context — introducing new tools, a new space, or even a new classroom “culture” — can powerfully impact learning within our schools. But if that’s true for the few changes or additions we can make inside of a school facility, how many more contexts from outside the world of school could we leverage for learning? And what could we expect from our learners if we could integrate those contexts and opportunities every day and not just once in a while? Continue reading →
My previous post described the increasing levels of engagement and interaction in the content dimension of our “cubic” learning model. In this post, we’ll examine another facet — the levels of the community dimension — considering the different kinds of relationships learners can form as they learn.
Community is a dimension many of us think about very narrowly, if at all. We might understand that there are various people associated with the learning process — teacher, learner, co-learners — but we rarely move beyond our classrooms to consider community more broadly. True, from time to time, we might feel compelled to organize “group work” with the notion that students could benefit from working with peers. Others might feel some sort of social or institutional pressure to prepare students for the collaboration they’ll be expected to manifest “out in the real world.” But as teachers, our embracing of community often doesn’t go much beyond these limited rationales and practices.
However, as Lev Vygotsky and generations of later theorists and neuroscientists have shown, collaborators and colleagues can enhance learners’ levels of engagement, their attainment of expertise, and their resilience within a field of study. As Vygotsky argued, in contrast to Piaget, all learning is fundamentally social, and working in collaboration with others can enable learners to make important cognitive and functional leaps beyond what we might expect if they were working on their own. More recently, Henry Jenkins‘ research on “participatory culture,” extended by danah boyd, Mizuko (Mimi) Itō, and others, has shown the ways that digital communities drive engagement, learning, and expertise, fueled by new technologies and new participatory forms of media. That we should treat this critical dimension of learning so superficially is therefore surprising and unfortunate. Community deserves a more thoughtful and thorough consideration.
But where should we look as we explore the community dimension more deeply? After all, students can work with all sorts of people — those within the classroom or school, learners and teachers in other schools, interested parties in local or distant communities, experts and practitioners from around the world, and people who broadly constitute an “audience” of outsiders to whom learners can demonstrate their learning and growth. The diversity of people we might have to consider in evaluating this dimension seems so large and complex as to be completely unmanageable. However, it’s less important to consider who these others are than to explore how intensively and productively they collaborate with learners, how their collaboration impacts the agency of learners, and how that collaboration fuels learners’ discovery, internalization, and growth.
Once again, the last thing I’m trying to do by focusing on the role of these others in learning is to diminish the need for teachers. Teachers’ productive work and relationship with learners is even more necessary in this model. However, just as we saw with the content dimension, this model necessitates that teachers move beyond delivery of data and information (where many of us are most comfortable) to a construction of knowledge and wisdom that is inherently social and frequently connected beyond our classrooms. Having to adopt this uncomfortable new role can be intimidating or disorienting for some teachers, and that discomfort can discourage them from embracing community. But ignoring this vital learning dimension robs their classrooms of enormous opportunities for discovery, engagement, and growth — and often makes the work of those teachers less likely to persist and less relevant for their learners. What we really need are teachers who can not only design productive engagements with content, but also productive communities for learning both within and far beyond their classrooms. In a world where the ability to connect productively across many kinds of boundaries is an increasingly valued skill, teachers have to function as connectors and social designers, helping learners develop the network of collaborators, promoters, critics, and spectators who will undergird and extend their learning and prepare them for the world outside of school. Continue reading →
In my previous posts about “natural” learning and “formal” learning, I sketched out a multidimensional learning model comprised of three facets: content, community, and context. In this post and the next several, I’ll move from overall structural considerations (posts on the community and context dimensions) to some of the pragmatics for applying and deploying this multidimensional model. How does this “cubic” learning approach apply systematically to various learning situations? How can we measure particular pedagogical approaches in light of these three constituent dimensions? How does this model integrate with other existing learning models and taxonomies?
For most of us who have worked as teachers — and this is certainly true of those in secondary and higher education — the majority of our training has come in a particular content area: math, language, science, art…. For those of us outside of primary education, it’s far more likely that we’ve been trained to serve as content experts than to serve as creators of learning opportunities. I think this is the reason so many academics are distrustful both of emerging technologies and the emerging collection of more collaborative teaching practices. Their resistance is understandable. In both cases, teachers can feel they’re being forced to embrace elements that they see as undermining or even antithetical to their very existence. As one former colleague put it when we were discussing how mobile technologies and student-led discovery could redefine the learning environment: “you’re trying to put me out of a job.”
It’s true that many emerging learning models challenge some of the learning constructions teachers have traditionally known and used, but the last thing I’m trying to do is get rid of teachers. In fact, if anything, my model requires teachers even more — but also even more from teachers. It necessitates a move up the DIKW pyramid from data and information (where many of us are most comfortable) to knowledge and wisdom. Of course, moving up the pyramid can be intimidating and even disorienting for some. Rather than focusing on the transfer data and information, this move toward wisdom requires teachers whose knowledge of their subject allows them to see (and often to generate) chances for exploration and application and to exercise and demonstrate how wise practitioners evaluate both opportunities and products within a discipline. So teachers are absolutely necessary, but less as “conduits” and more as designers.
But designers of what? How do we design within these three dimensions and what does such a “cubic” learning environment look like? To begin, let’s consider each of the dimensions separately, starting with content. Continue reading →
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