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Knowing how students learn and solve problems informs us how we should organise their learning environment and without such knowledge, the effectiveness of instructional designs is likely to be random.
—John Sweller (Instructional Science 32: 9–31, 2004.)
I've written in the past about the things we want students to learn, how we help them learn, and about resistance (mine and virtually everyone else's) to change. In this issue, those concerns converge. Determining what we want students to learn is the amazingly difficult first step in developing assessments of that learning, as the article by Dary Erwin and Joe DeFillippo demonstrates. And Marc Chun talks about linking teaching, learning, assessment, and the ultimate use of higher-order thinking skills by both teaching and assessing those skills through tasks that mimic how they will be used in “real life.”
But what particularly intrigues me is the connection between cognition and change. Educational psychologists have developed a number of constructs to explain how the mind works. In this issue, David Feldon suggests that a familiarity with cognitive load theory can be a big help in developing effective pedagogies, for example, a framework we see invoked in Carl Wieman's attempts to improve science instruction. But there is other knowledge about human cognitive architecture that can also be useful as we think about teaching and learning.
For instance, the human cognitive default is to solve problems with as small a mental investment as possible; we typically retreat to earlier mental models and quicker and less effortful automated problem-solving strategies when new information threatens to overwhelm us. So as Feldon suggests, teachers need to find some way to keep the investment low enough and the cognitive load light enough that those mechanisms don't come into play. We can also exploit the fact that we're more likely to try to solve problems in areas that are important to us by showing students the relevance of what we're teaching to their lives and concerns.
But given the fundamentally conservative nature of human cognition, perhaps the question should be, why doesn't the whole learning system grind to a halt? In a way, it's remarkable that we ever learn anything at all. I remember that when my son was about a year old, he developed the locomotive strategy of scooting around on his knees (it beat crawling, since he could carry things). Once he had built up calluses thick enough to protect those knees, it was a remarkably efficient way to get from point A to point B, and it halved the height from which he would fall if something went wrong. I remember thinking at the time, what will ever motivate him to get up on his hind legs and wobble around when a misstep would cause him to fall from twice the height? What will prompt him, in short, to face the perils of change when things work so well and comfortably for him as they are?
Come to think of it, our bipedal walk is a great metaphor for our alternation between imbalance and stability. The act of walking, researchers have discovered, is a continual falling forward, regaining our balance, then falling forward again. Something impels us to lift that foot and risk the fall, then we consolidate our new position momentarily, then we lift that foot and fall again, and so on.
At the species level, there are clearly advantages in the impulse to generate, test out, and practice both old and new survival strategies (e.g., bipedalism) that can give one an evolutionary edge. But what lies on top of that drive for individual students? How do we motivate them to lift one foot and put it down a little ahead, let us help them organize and consolidate their momentary new equilibrium, and then lift the other? I think the answer can be found by looking not at learning in school but at spontaneous learning, particularly during play.
When they play, children seem to be motivated by several things. Curiosity, for one. Another stimulus is wanting to master the environment (a bone-deep tendency, crucial to the human race's survival, that is as dangerous as fire when out of control but as just as life-giving when contained), which is why children need plenty of free play where they make up the rules (as opposed to playing board games or participating in sports). A third stimulus may be the desire to imitate and take one's place among trusted and admired others, either peers or adults. Those tendencies don't need to be lost as one ages, as the success of Elderhostel attests to, although Grandgrindian schooling can certainly grind them down.
So our job as teachers may be to stand in what Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development,” the stage in their cognitive growth that students haven't quite gotten to yet, and beckon them forward into what for them is uncharted but possibly alluring territory (the ending of Huckleberry Finn floats into my mind, where Huck tells Jim that it's time to “light out for the territories,” or the song by Jacques Brel in which he mentions his childhood longing for “le Far West”). We motivate students to make that leap by stimulating their curiosity about the subject; by showing our own passion for it; by lessening the dangers of the move as we, knowing what their current maps look like, show them the path from there to here and how to organize their understanding of the new landscape; and by giving them as much control as possible over the learning environment.
But more: I point you to Matt Procino's account (in the “Listening to Students” in the previous issue) of taking over a class in child development. He modeled for students the very behavior he wanted them to exhibit in life as a result of what they learned in his class by soliciting sometimes uncomfortable feedback as he learned how to teach. Similarly, he had earlier let his Outward Bound students see that he too was afraid of the challenges he was asking them to take on but that they could summon the courage to do so because—see?—he was doing it. From the point of view of the students, an admired other gave them two things to imitate: not only how you scale a cliff but how you deal with the fear of scaling a cliff.
People generally can't be dragged or whipped into forward movement; they'll run back to their earlier spot of equilibrium the minute the threat (of bad grades, for instance) stops. I know that I plant my feet stubbornly whenever I feel bullied (leading one professor—who tried to argue me into liking Wordsworth's “Michael,” a poem I detest to this day—to say to me in exasperation, “Miss Miller, why are you sometimes so dense?”)
But I'm apt to leap joyfully ahead when beckoned by someone I trust and admire into knowledge that he or she is passionate about. And I want to be among the people who inhabit that new zone. That's why, at the end of a successful dissertation defense, I always say to the newly minted PhD, “Welcome to the community of scholars.”
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