Learn 'Em How to Learn

One day in class when we were starting up a course in philosophy, in the philosophy of education, I posed the question, "What does education mean to you?" Among the various answers that were given was one that went something like this:
 

Well, you know, I know how to fix carburetors. I know how to take them apart. I know how to clean them. I know how to rebuild them. Now no one ever taught me how to do it. I just learned it. You see, my father is in business as a mechanic. He fixes cars. He never had much chance to get an education but he knows how to fix cars. As I was growing up I would hang around the garage and get into things. Making myself useful when I could and staying out of their way if I couldn't. As I grew taller, stronger and more curious, I would watch my father work on the engines. Eventually I was allowed to do small sections of the jobs. As much as my father and I thought I could handle.

And now, many years later I can do the job. I can take apart and rebuild carburetors. Like I said, nobody taught me how to do it. At least nobody gave me any lectures or exams on carburetor rebuilding. I learned from the experience of doing it.

This answer got me to thinking in a fresh way about what I was doing in the classroom. Over the past twenty-five years my teaching style has evolved from straight lectures to a pattern that involved more discussion amongst the students. When I reflected on this story, however, I came to some form of enlightenment. At least on the intellectual level I knew I was changed. I realized that the students who spend time with us in the classroom, in a way similar to the young man watching someone take apart a car engine, are watching someone teach. If they are watching someone teach, then in the sense of the story, they are learning how to teach. They are learning how to do what we are doing.

Now if what we are doing is piling up in our briefcases all the facts and information that we want them to learn and then going into the classroom and presenting it to them so that they might understand it all and give it back to us in a test, then I have to acknowledge that I have taught them to do exactly what I have done. Which is to say, memorize facts and information.

The test format also reveals what we are teaching them. When I was teaching physics in high school I had always used a variation of the "objective" test, an exam including multiple choice, true false, matching, fill in the blanks and so forth. Was I testing to see if they could do physics? Certainly not in any practical or original sense. I was testing their skill at information storage and retrieval. At that time I had little sense of what it might mean to teach someone to become skilled at doing physical science, let alone test for that talent. At some intuitive level I think I knew, but the objective type testing I was doing was related only peripherally to doing physical science.

A colleague of mine passed along an old Chinese saying that is to the point here.

The master taught the disciples everything that the master knew.
The disciples forgot fifty percent of what they were taught.
And things went from bad to worse.

We have all experienced this falling away of all those facts and information we had at one point dutifully memorized. We may have even wondered to ourselves what may have been the point of memorizing in detail all of the mouth parts of the Apis mellifera (honey bee).

What indeed is the point? Well, some things do come in handy. Like long division when I do not have a pocket calculator handy. But then there are other experiences you do not expect to memorize, like a tour of a town or a visit to a museum. You certainly don't remember everything but often the whole experience changes you. The experience of being taught has some of these aspects. But I personally think that the heart of our task should be to share with them our learning skills, and not our memorization and lecturing abilities. In this way our students are not dependent upon the strength of their memories and things will not go from bad to worse.

So, how do I propose that we learn 'em how to learn? I will speak only for myself because we each have our own learning styles. The observations I make may give you some insight, but I think we each have to tune into the learning process we go through, the process we went through, in all its existential complexity. Out of this we, each in turn, may come up with some greater clarity on how we might proceed. I found that I was now focusing on different goals.

I started by getting rid of the "textbook." I took the risk of letting go of a type of control. From my experience these books had so often been a compendium of dehydrated abstractions. At other times they were made up of the tastiest bits from larger original works. Edited of course according to some editor's intellectual and ideological taste buds. Tidbits from Plato for example, or Kant. But these lack the personal fullness that exists for good or for ill, in the original texts. This personal fullness is something that any genuine student must come to terms with.

In addition to discovering the personal in the original documents, they encounter the personal in themselves. They are enabled to follow their own enthusiasm and begin to see the passion that inspires all authentic scholarship. The person meeting the person. This type of study may stray far and wide from the normal narrowness that necessarily comes from textbooks.

Some very bright students, raised as they have been on information storage and retrieval, object to a change in the rules of the game. The students themselves will ask how this can be graded. How can they all follow their own trails out of the cave of appearances and yet still be judged in common?

But the point is that they are not to be judged like robots, each interchangeable with the other. Each being taught the exact same skills and precisely the same information so that we can then chose from among the best of all the copies. Rather they are to be judged on their own efforts and development. They must be freed to reach for their personal best.

It is important to take the time to explain to them the shift that is being made. Without the steady diet of memorization and testing some feel that they are not learning anything. Some resent being deprived of their ego boosting high performance exam busting. They may be annoyed when they are challenged by the wit and wisdom of those of a more creative intelligence. Or they are bothered by the time taken with those whose hearts are bigger than their heads.

I remember speaking after class to one of these high performance types. It was his habit to respond to issues raised by other students with flights of demonstrative reasoning, caring not at all if anyone else in the class understood him or agreed with him. He felt he had demonstrated it for himself and to himself and that was that. I appealed to his ego by pointing out Aristotle's distinction between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning. This youngster was of the type that believed only the most brilliant deserved the teacher's time and attention. In subsequent classes he took some faltering steps towards making contact with other people. This type are often quite spoiled by traditional classroom methods. This is perhaps one of the central challenges of combining pre-university and professional students in the same classes.

After ridding myself of the "textbook", the next point that came to me was how to let them see me fixing the carburetor. What would it mean in the classroom? The lectures stop. As soon as the prescribed technicalities and introductions are taken care of I engage them in the study of what is at hand. In a religion course, for example, rather than go on about the Big Five all by myself, I have them focus on their motivations, their objectives, their understanding and experience of the phenomenon of religion. This becomes the opening chapter of the "text" and the first "lecture" topic. There are, no doubt, some who are there to be entertained in a passive way. Who would wish that they could sit passively as one does in front of a tv. But I am there to introduce them to the study of religion. I am there to work with them in that study. The class becomes a team with a collective task. We are to study religion as it appears to us, as it reveals itself to us in our everyday lives.

Many of them have had a lot of experience with religion. Some of them have even been studying it in a deeply personal way. If I allow them to overlook this experience and practice, it would be to devalue their own personal experience and destroy the most solid foundation upon which any genuine study might be constructed.

If there is any religion it must appear to us in the room and that appearance must be accepted as real as any thing else. More real, in fact, than a thousand pages in a book about religion. Reality radiates out from our lives.

Even for those who do not know the first thing about their own religious heritage, they have some sense that they do not know. If someone of us says, "I am Presbyterian, but I have no idea what that means," this is where the study must begin. But we are often lazy. Why look up the spelling of a word in a dictionary if you can just call out to someone else, "How do you spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?" And how we are annoyed by the conscientious parent who answers, "Look it up for yourself."

So the course begins to be shaped by the class. It is shaped by me and my history. By me and my questions. It is shaped by the students, their history and their questions. I share with my students what I call a type of prepared spontaneity. What this means is that often in the class I will give an extended presentation as the need arises. These are most often a mixture of personal anecdote with some elaboration on the more technical point I mean to illustrate. This comes from all the material, stories, insights, guided reflections and so forth, that is part of my personal repertoire. These come out if the time seems appropriate and if the students seem receptive. As for example the whole host of experiences that I carry with me which are rooted in my Roman Catholic heritage with its unique Irish, Québecois, Scots, British, Prince Edward Island french Canadian, post sixties, ex-monk with ten years in the north eastern United states, view of things. These are the stuff of any person's study of reality. Our perspective on things has been shaped and we in turn shape the data we perceive into intelligible wholes.

Some find these presentations boring since they are not directed towards some test or exam. Or perhaps I have not been particularly effective at making my point. I do not expect to succeed all the time. Such an attitude would go against the project. I am, after all, up to my elbows in engine grease, so to speak. Failure and frustration are also part of the experience of learning. From time to time I have even seen the less motivated or more fatigued drifting off into reverie and sometimes sleep. I have had that happen myself back in my younger days when I was sitting in their place.

The set part of my teaching is more related to structure and process and less to content. I do not have a list of things I want to teach. But there are a number of things I want to have happen. I am very demanding that they become interactive with me, with their own history, and with each other. Without a doubt, by the end of the course we have covered enough of the textbook type material to fill several lists. Often we cover material that is quite exceptional, even profound.

I take this approach to teaching and learning, because this has been the essence of my own learning. I have been fortunate to have had very little in the way of the rigid lecture structure that so many of us recall with horror. Partly because of my experience of small classes but mostly because of my high appreciation of intellectual pursuits.

So my classes are more like workshops, labs, field work or hands on experiences than "classes". More personal, more open ended. I work on the carburetor with them. And most of them have had more experience with the carburetor than we normally give them credit. To fail to take account of this leads to a kind of mis-learning where the student's experience is being falsified. The message he or she gets is that what they think they know, they do not know. The schooling "system" is so locked into its strange way of seeing learning. Learning that is defined, described, and evaluated from the institutional perspective that it has, at times, little connection with the concrete and personal learning events that shape our understanding. The understanding that is part and parcel of our personal being. As real as the shape our faces assume when we smile.

My courses are intended to connect to something vital in me and in the students. Something growthful is being nourished. Something organic is pulsing with life. The Minister of Education in all her wisdom has directed me to teach the student, "to explore in a rigorous manner, the different manifestations of the sacred in the world." Even among the students there are those who think that education is a spectator sport. They believe that I get paid so that they can watch me present all the facts and information. But these so called facts and information are the fruit of a lifetime of study and reflection. I say lifetime because I can still remember lessons of faith and morality the I learned from my parents even before I started school. Stories of the birth of Jesus told to me as my mother set up the creche underneath the Christmas tree. Information on the types of things Santa Claus considered naughty and those things he considered nice.

Now I am fifty and as I begin again the dialogue with each new group of students I hope to engage them in the dialogue with truth, to connect with their spirit of learning and nurture it.

"Ah yes, but how are you going to evaluate them?"
The question must be responded to but I do not want to accept a defensive position. "What," I would ask, "has evaluation got to do with learning?" In my own experience of being educated grades meant very little to me.

Perhaps this was because out of my five siblings that were in school during the same time as I was, I was the one that had no trouble performing on the tests that were given to us. My exam performance was never an issue for either of my parents. In addition to that experience, I had the good fortune, during my first four years of college/university to be part of a program where we were not informed of our grades. Neither from the separate exams and tests nor from any reports of our grades each semester. If we did have any difficulties that our professors noticed, we were simply assigned to tutorials until we were able to hold our own with the rest of the group. I spent many happy hours doing "over-time" in latin.

Was I fortunate to be in a privileged position and escape the pressure and the insanity of the grading system or was I simply lucky to be so intelligent as to not have to worry about such things? Is it appropriate to engage in a critical challenge of grading at the college level or is it one of the fundamental premises of the entire project? Is it a conditio sine qua non of schooling?

In this context I had an experience related to grading analogous to the one I had related to teaching, learning, and carburetors. I was watching a documentary on the life and thought of W. Edwards Deming. He is a man concerned with the theory and philosophy of management. The person responsible for the Ford "Quality Is Job One" quality control project that was to make them more competitive with the Japanese auto makers. He was also the one who taught the Japanese about quality control in the first place.

When asked, "How has prevailing management crushed innovation?" he answered, "By ranking people. It starts with grading in schools and saunters on up through university. Grades, ranking people, making top people scarce. Only so many A's allowed.
This is not a game. In playing tennis, a beauty contest, a horse race, playing poker, it's a game. Somebody wins. We knew that before we started. Perfectly all right. I have nothing against it, but management is serious, education is serious.
....
Our education is failing."

Q. "What are we doing that we shouldn't be?"

"We just don't educate people, youngsters. We grade them, but we don't educate them, don't teach them to think. Leaders don't recognize the problem with our schools is systemic."

(Broadcast October 17, 1993, at 8:00 pm, over WCFE, Plattsburg, N.Y.)

Until I heard him speak I thought my college experience was simply an aberration. No grades, but if you are having trouble with some learning task you got tutorials. Simple, everybody is taught. It seems to me that this is exactly what the man who taught quality control to Japan might be suggesting for our education system.

What sense was I to make of my own, more or less traditional, grading procedures? I have always felt uncomfortable with grading.

When I started teaching in 1967, there was a reform going on in Québec. One of the principles of that reform, as I understood it from the documentation, was that of continuous progress. A student would no longer be considered to have failed all of their subjects because they had failed one of the more important ones. It seems unimaginable now, that it could have been like that at one time, but it was. I was teaching fourth grade at the time. A class of forty-four boys in a gender segregated school. I felt that much of the failure that was experienced by the students was the direct result of the fixed velocity at which they were required to learn the material. Or more precisely, the fixed velocity at which we, the teachers, were required to teach the material. If you didn't catch on to the material fast enough, even if it was only in math, you were condemned to repeat all of your courses for another year. I had seen this happen to three of my siblings. In each case with very painful emotional distress.

Teachers are at the front line of the process of triage. Or perhaps, more accurately, a type of reverse triage, in that we are engaged in "...making top people scarce. Only so many A's allowed." as Mr. Deming says in the quote above. My class averages have always been "too high". It could be that I am in fact a good teacher, and the students I work with give it their best, but since the class average is "too high" our achievement is devalued. This is tautologically true since the pedagogical professionals committed to the validity of the bell curve could at any time design and administer a test that would effect the appropriate triage and prove us wrong. But I am not at all interested in an academic olympics.

What I am interested in is to help the students develop their learning skills and to help them develop their analytical and critical skills. Of course part of this process entails evaluation of their work. When I was teaching my child how to ride her bicycle I "evaluated her work" but I wasn't interested in beginning a training program prepping her for olympic tryouts, I only wanted to give her access to the fun of riding a bicycle.

A student, what one might call an academic olympian, once said to me,
"You seem to suffer fools gladly."
What was being referred to was the fact that I addressed myself to all of the students in the class regardless of their level of "academic gifted-ness". The comment came from a attitude of snobbishness, or at least of elitism. This was a student who was impatient with some of the "intellectual riffraff" one had to share classroom space with. Still, the student who made the comment, wasn't sure whether it had been intended as a compliment or an insult. What had happened was that the student had finally realized I was not some naive idealist left over from the sixties but someone who was quite thoughtful, clear eyed, and purposeful about his methodology.

It is not my task to run a competition that leads to a reverse triage. I am in the classroom to learn 'em all how to learn, including myself, while accepting the limits implied by "our personal best". After all education is not a game, it is serious. And, who knows, if we do our work conscientiously we might all get A's.