It All Adds Up
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
For at least 40 years I’ve been on a quest to improve teaching in order to improve student learning. That started with reflection about my own short-comings as a teacher, but as I shared these with my colleagues, I found they were hungry for growth as well. Through dialog with my colleagues Tom Coss, Brian Vogt, and Bill Lovegrove, the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS) was born almost 21 years ago.
SITS is the required training ground for all science and engineering faculty at BJU. It takes 3 summers of 10 weeks each to complete the program.
About 10 years ago I realized that it was time to write a book that encapsulated what I had learned about learning. The result was Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning which was published in 2016. This book has served as the textbook for SITS, but it is intended for the much larger audience of adults who are tired of surface learning that is volatile—a frustrating will-o'-the-wisp.
Available through Amazon
About 5 years ago during COVID, I decided to try to reach a broader audience through podcasts and blogs. So many parents were home with their kids and pressed into the role of educators. How could I further distill the message of my earlier efforts in a form that would be immediately actionable? Now, 76 posts later, I think the resources I’ve created make the case for an approach to learning that respects the way God designed the brain. Fueled by curiosity; tempered by rationality, scripture, and natural revelation in the physical universe. I invite young and old alike to revel in the extraordinary opportunity we have to explore God’s creation inside and outside of us.
What follows is an approximate transcript of my final podcast episode, It All Adds Up.
Intro:
You’ve listened this season because you want your child to reach his or her potential as a learner. You want them to find joy and fulfillment in learning. You recognize that our God-given rationality is a gift intended to bless us and to help us glorify God as we encounter His wisdom exhibited in what He has made. Join me today for the final episode of this season as I sum up the essential framework for joyful lifelong learning.
Podcast:
If your child is in a school classroom, you recognize that on some level their individuality is at least sublimated and perhaps lost altogether. Your child’s classmates are a heterogenous group with different strengths and weaknesses, different interests, different levels of motivation, different backgrounds.
For learning to occur, students must be motivated. Within a heterogenous group only a subset of the class is in the goldilocks zone of curiosity and motivation. Your son or daughter might be an outlier because they are mentally quick or perhaps, they are an outlier because they are a dreamer and are often not focused on the classroom agenda (that would have been me through elementary school).
Even if you homeschool your child one on one, you probably have difficulty getting inside their head. Sometimes they are eager to learn and at other times they stubbornly resist. I’ve barely scratched the surface this season, but I want to end by offering some big picture perspective useful to any parent. You might even hear something that will help you grow in your love for learning!
Motivation and Pacing
Two of the major issues in learning are motivation and pacing. Let’s talk first about motivation. Children are naturally curious. Even before they express themselves in words, they explore. Exploration is an attempt to make sense of their physical environment. To make sense is to detect a pattern. Making sense of it is the early part of concept development. They put things in conceptual categories using information gathered through their senses. At some point the dominant sense is taste and they put everything possible in their mouths. Once children become verbal, they seek to make meaning by asking questions. The questions seek to enlarge and connect the concepts they began to develop through exploration. Curiosity and questions should be lifelong pillars of learning, but both are troublesome to adult managers. Teachers must manage a group of curious questioners. Even loving parents tire of the relentless curiosity that leads to messes and mayhem and then the eruption of “why” questions from their 2–3-year-old. Oh my!
Lest those of you who no longer have small children think your children have outgrown curiosity and questions, let me quote T.S. Eliot.
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring.
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.
Constant exploration motivated by questioning that seeks deeper understanding is the essence of lifelong learning. It is decidedly not simply a lifelong quest to catalog disparate facts.
Fanning curiosity is the essential prerequisite to learning. Sometimes this means helping your child explore their current fascination even if it means bringing insects or frogs into your home. They are curious and their curiosity needs to be encouraged and harnessed as a vehicle for as much natural learning as the child has an appetite for. This may slow down the pace of other learning for a time, but that will eventually rebalance itself. In the bargain you may discover something about your child that will enable you to help them maximize the gifts that God has given them. This is what I think Proverbs 22:6 means by “the way he should go.”
Questions—Not Answers
Sometimes the child doesn’t appear to be curious about something, but they need to learn it anyway. In that event, it is up to you to ask intriguing questions and help them realize they really do want to know the answers. I did this in a course I taught 50 times with college sophomores who were non-science majors. The professional education community has made learning all about answers; real learning is all about questions. The more proficient I and my child become in asking the right question, the more focused our exploration will be. Questions also help to achieve an especially beneficial mental clarity that invites further related questions.
Two Pillars: Curiosity and Questions
Curiosity and questions are two of the pillars of learning. You’ll note that we’re all wired from birth to pursue learning in this way. There’s nothing contrived about this approach to learning. What is contrived is the emphasis in professional education circles on forcing the brain to collect facts. The brain is not built to serve as a database. Even more important, curiosity is not satisfied by fact collecting. The questions that motivate exploration and cause students to persist even when the path to understanding is difficult are not “what” questions. The questions we’re born to want answers for are “why” and “how?”
Answering these questions of causality (“how” and “why”) requires much more than retrieval from memory banks. What is needed is an explanatory narrative connecting ideas in a logical sequence. If the learner is to be a knower, the narrative cannot simply be downloaded from some outside source as a fact. Instead, it must be painstakingly constructed by each student individually. This kind of thinking involves deliberation and reflection. It invites guidance and challenge by focused questioning. It isn’t quick. The time required to reach understanding varies considerably from one student to the next—another reason to question the batch processing of the typical classroom.
I referenced ideas and an explanatory narrative. I need to unpack these.
Learning Transforms Concrete Into Abstraction
An idea is an abstraction. The goal of learning is to create abstractions even though learners crave concrete examples. Learners don’t just file concrete examples away in a cerebral database. It doesn’t exist! Instead, we are wired from birth to look for patterns. Our abstractions are created from repeated encounters with concrete examples. Take milk for example. For children, milk is the first beverage they encounter. Infants are breast or bottle fed with milk. Weaned children are given milk to drink and this is usually (not always) cow’s milk. Two-year-olds view milk as a white opaque beverage perhaps delivered in a sippy cup. It has a particular taste profile. As they get older their repeated experiences with milk may allow for such anomalies as almond milk, oat milk, and soy milk even though no mammal produced any of these types of “milk.” The idea of milk has become increasingly abstract, the milk of human kindness being perhaps the pinnacle of such abstraction.
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
Explanatory Narrative
We have many orders of magnitude more concrete examples that we have encountered than patterns we have discerned. We don’t record the different concrete exemplars; we collect them into categories. It is economical for the brain to store our experiences in a smaller set of ideas. Another name for an idea is a concept. All our ideas are either concepts or logical connections between concepts. Concepts are not just physical items like milk. An emotional state like anger is a concept. A moral judgement like fairness is a concept. Envision a 2-year-old and a playmate of the same age on the floor together. One has a sippy cup of milk and the other doesn’t. The second child takes the cup of milk away forcibly. The first child clouds up and cries. The first child is building a concept of fairness and anger is the result when his sense of fairness is breached. What I’ve just outlined as the connection between the concepts of milk, fairness, and anger is an explanatory narrative. It explains in that it answers “how” and/or “why” questions. The benefit of an explanatory narrative is that it makes sense. As a result, it isn’t hard to remember. It plays to the brain’s strengths unlike fact recall which expects retrieval of factual items which likely have not been logically integrated into conceptual categories.
If you have the luxury of homeschooling your child, I’d sum this up with five practical pointers:
Determine the questions the actual curriculum should be focused on.
Help your child to be curious about the answer to these questions to motivate the hard work of reflection.
Determine where your child is on the slow thinking spectrum about each question to avoid: A) Making a big deal out of something your child already knows. B) Trying to engage with a question that your child hasn’t built the framework for.
Determine the ideas [concepts] that will be used in answering the questions and use questions to see what these concepts (patterns) look like to your child.
Help your child logically connect the ideas into an explanatory narrative by asking questions of causation all along the way.
The majority of my listeners probably have their kids in a school classroom. Your situation isn’t as different as you might think. Although someone else is determining the school curriculum, you should still be focused on articulating questions that the curriculum will answer. These questions should go beyond the fact level (who, what, when, where) that the school will ask. These questions should provoke your child’s curiosity and motivate learning. By focusing on “how” and “why,” your child will also have the logical pegs that will allow them to answer fact questions. In addition, they will be building a framework of concepts and connections that will help them make application to real world problems. That kind of practicality will motivate them for even more demanding learning tasks in the future. It is a salutary infinite loop!
Through the use of questions and scenarios you can also intentionally help to develop your child’s conceptual categories and the way they connect with other concepts. Questions can help move your child to a satisfying explanation narrative. The intentional development of concepts and their connectedness is a major missing ingredient in most educational environments. The brain uses this method of learning and cataloging exclusively and it should take center stage in both teaching and learning. By the way, when I encourage parents to use questions with their kids, I don’t mean what you might be thinking. I don’t mean an interrogation. I don’t mean a question demanding an immediate response. You should think in terms of a good conversation. A good conversationalist is someone who encourages you to talk; to tell your stories; to explain why they are important and what they mean to you. Think of the person who has most put you at ease in that way and use them as a model. Your questions should do that for your child.
This season I’ve been using cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s 10 principles of the mind, although I dealt with only 7 of them explicitly. I often disagreed with Willingham as you know if you listened to the previous 7 episodes. As I conclude the season, let me offer my 10 principles of the mind as a summary of this season.
Image by Abby Haukongo from Pixabay
1. The motivation to learn originates in curiosity and curiosity originates with a question.
Comment: I think I've illustrated that already. But the idea is that a question to be answered piques curiosity and curiosity to be satisfied motivates learning. This is the general dynamic of learning, and it can't be violated and still have motivated students.
2. Humans are bombarded by more sensory information than we can process. As a result, filters are imposed that privilege new information. To maintain interest requires intentional focus to override these filters.
Comment: This is simply a recognition that we can easily be overwhelmed by our senses, and so we're designed to look for things that are changing in our sensory channels.
When instruction just drones on and I can't perceive immediate benefit and I don't know how we're actually moving in a positive direction to answer questions—somewhere along the line, even unintentionally, I zone out (and admit it, you as an adult, zone out periodically). Maybe you've done so even during this podcast and brought yourself back because you reminded yourself that you wanted to listen and that you were learning something.
So, a recognition then that change to gain and regain attention is intrinsic to the learning process is significant. That means variety in the way we approach the learning tasks. And even for adult students, kind of the rule of thumb is change up every 10 minutes to a visualization or to a new question, or to a need to get with a group of students to come to some consensus about where we are in the learning process.
Change, intentional change in the learning environment is crucial to maintaining attention and motivation.
3. We only learn through sensory input that conveys information, but the most effective sensory channels depend on the particular learning task and not on personal preference.
Comment: This, of course, addresses the myth of learning styles.
Perhaps your student has definite strong preferences for certain kinds of sensory input, and that's fine. You can use those periodically, but you should not depend on those as a means of motivation and as a privileged way of delivering instruction. Rather, the nature of the learning task—what it is the student is needing to learn—may require an emphasis on sensory channels that are not preferred. I'm thinking mathematics for instance, and very often what the student needs to do to calculate or to decide how to calculate a result is not privileged by the visual channel, for instance, for a so called visual learner, or aided by bodily manipulation, as in the kinesthetic learning concept.
So, use them all, use all of the sensory channels, customize them to the nature of the learning task.
4. Concepts are produced by recognizing patterns in objects or causes.
Comment: And again, I'm just recognizing the brain does this from our earliest days. Perhaps concept formation even occurs in the womb, although that would be hard to determine for sure. Our exploration is in the service of seeing patterns. And those patterns then help us to simplify and gain some level of mastery over and comprehension of the physical environment and the people who interact with us—our parents and siblings, for instance.
5. Curiosity is satisfied through building conceptual frameworks which link concepts in logical relationships.
Comment: So, this is simply recognizing that concepts do not stand alone. That as I recognize patterns and build concepts, I'm also working to connect those concepts in some kind of logical way to concepts I've previously erected through recognizing patterns. So, that's what I mean by a conceptual framework, a group of concepts and the way in which they're linked to other concepts.
6. Increasingly deep understanding of an idea (an abstraction) occurs only through repeated wrestling with a wide variety of concrete examples and related ideas.
Comment: So, we're moving from concreteness to abstraction here. And the more experience the student has with examples, with context. Where examples and modifying circumstances that address concepts they previously created, the more sophisticated their conceptual frameworks become, the more cross linked, in other words, they become more helpful in working with future learning challenges.
7. Conceptual frameworks are remodeled through questions. Learning is conceptual change!
Comment: So, my conceptual frameworks are not static. They're not something I create at some point in my development and never revisit, at least not in a healthy individual who really wants to learn. Because my concepts need to continually interact with reality, with situations that I haven't yet experienced or haven't previously experienced. Change should be inevitable. I should not resist this modification process.
8. We construct new concept categories by looking for concrete instances that show a pattern that doesn’t fit our existing concept categories.
Comment: So, periodically we find we don't really have a concept for some experience that we're encountering—that it doesn't match any of our existing categories. And yet there seems to be a pattern that we're detecting. And in that instance, at least provisionally, I construct a new conceptual category. I may over time recognize that it can be actually folded into one of my previously constructed conceptual categories. But I'm also open to the idea that I learn new ideas and experience may move me to create those new categories.
9. Critical thinking is the construction of new concepts as well as recognizing additional logical connections between concepts.
Comment: I would just add here that through the process of questioning, I may not simply add additional logical connections between concepts, but I may prune back some of them. I may clarify what the nature of the connection is, but this is part of the constant reorganization that should take place in the mind of an active learner.
10. Memory is a byproduct of understanding.
Comment: That's important because memory is what's emphasized in most professional educational environments. The ability to retrieve (to recall), and we previously commented that that in itself is not an indication of real learning. Going for retrieval as an indication of learning is misguided. Focusing on that output may mean that the student engages in some kind of drill process to create the ability temporarily to retrieve the desired items. And that tends to be what testing is about. But memory is not something we look for in and of itself.
In my model of learning, memory comes about because something makes sense. Because I understand, I remember well.
I'll post these 10 principles on the accompanying blog post so that you can look at them and perhaps copy them down in a form that'd be helpful to you. I know listening to them verbally is not the ideal way to assimilate the ideas that are incorporated in these ten principles of learning.
Outro (my swan song):
If you’ve found these podcasts helpful to you in some way, I’d appreciate your sharing the podcast and rating it. I’d also love to hear from you!
As I mentioned at the tail end of the previous podcast, I am putting the podcast to bed. As far as I know this episode (#76) will be the last. The service hosting my podcast is paid through July 18, 2025. All episodes of the podcast will be available through that date. If you’ve missed a previous podcast or want to download an episode, please do so by then. As I understand it the podcasts will remain available indefinitely on my YouTube channel where the podcasts were uploaded as sound wave videos—please subscribe! Recently YouTube started releasing my podcasts from an RSS feed in addition to the video channel. The RSS feed will disappear at the end of the day on July 18.
My blog will remain active at DeepandDurable.com at least until July 11, 2025, and possibly for a year beyond that. Details are still be worked out. Presently I’m not planning on any new blog posts.
My email address podcast@deepanddurable.com will operate at least until July 11, 2025. After that date you can reach me at michaelgray1950@gmail.com. Yes, that email address means I’m 75 now!
I want to assure you that I have not lost my passion for teaching and learning. I wish I could continue biweekly as I have since Sept. 5, 2021, but other priorities, especially at my church really need my increased attention. So here 3.5 years and 76 episodes later with about 7,000 downloads in many different countries, I bid you goodbye!