As I go about planning next term, which begins in a week, I’ve been thinking about how to create experiences that make learning more relevant to students, that make connections between the literature we study and the world we live in. I have also been thinking about the difference between cognitive learning (e.g. teaching grammar, vocab, literary terms) and experiential learning (e.g Clay Burrell‘s Global Cooling Collective). The dearth of “learning by doing” in school is frustrating because we know there is more to learning than the abstracted, stimulus-response type activities that predominate. One of the problems with this approach to teaching is that students disengage from the process as they see it as meaningless and arbitrary. Learning by experience, in contrast, is characterised by personal involvement with, and confrontation of, practical, social, personal or research problems. Learning by experience means that students participate in the learning process, have input into the direction and where “self-evaluation is the principal method of assessing progress or success”. The question is how do we make this happen within the confines of what we are mandated to teach? Maybe the “teaching the controversy” approach advocated by Doug Noon is one possibility.
I also struggle with my deep-seated belief that writing is, in itself, a worthwhile, valuable activity that has concrete, real-world application but often students don’t see it that way. I hope that changing the focus and assessment may help me to address this. Helping students find their “voice”, providing them with the means for self-expression and to understand and articulate complex thinking are skills they need to help them to become active citizens and problem solvers of the future. I think deep thinking, understanding and communication (written, oral or multimedia) are the natural partners of action.
Jo McLeay has an interesting description of Year 12 persuasive writing task and how students see this as a “largely artificial writing”. I was heartened to read her comment that: “And yet I see this form of communication as an essential skill in order to be a person of influence and agency in our society.”
I have been thinking about this in response to Clay’s, Teaching Grammar on the Titanic, where he discusses “the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects.” Konrad Glogowski, in June in the Cruellest Month, talks about “how the desire to compartmentalize learning into neat chunks” and grades fades in comparision to being “engaged not as a teacher who needs to know what the students are doing in order to assess and evaluate, but as a human being whose thirst for knowledge was satiated by a group of fourteen-year-olds who set a goal for themselves – a goal of exploring issues they found relevant and interesting.”
He rightly says that: “I want my students to realize that learning is not about making your work conform to some standard imposed by the teacher. Learning is about creating your own standards and adjusting them based on your goals. Learning is about setting your own goals and monitoring your own progress. It is about having conversations with yourself and others.”
I thought of Foucault’s comment about criticism, which sum of the type of writing I mean; writing that “would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better … It would not be a sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”
Graphic from: http://www.youthchg.com/
Hi Cindy,
I really appreciate your thinking out loud on this subject. I can tell you that when I was in school, I was a good student but really the only thing that I loved was math. I did what I was told to do in all other classes, but most of the time it just seemed like teacher tricks to get me to write or speak in public, which I hated. Then you have to listen to teachers tell you your writing is average, or mechanical, or boring — well, duh.
I’m not sure what the answer is, because maybe it was good for me to stretch and be forced to do things outside my comfort zone, but on the other hand, it reinforced my certainty of my own lack of talent in writing and speaking.
Learning by doing is great, but does everyone have to do the same thing? I know when you are teaching a class called “English” the teacher don’t have much choice but to focus on written and oral communication. How do you balance the desire to teach students to communicate in authentic ways (obviously a good thing) with the widely varying aptitudes and inclinations of students to focus on their own interests and perceived talents?
So many questions…
Hi Cindy ~ There’s a lot here to think about, Sylvia’s response included.
One thing that comes to mind is obvious, but in my monomania about relevance and citizenship lately, maybe needs saying. It’s that our students are with us for nine months. Out of all that time, to find at least one project that students won’t see as “artificial” – or to try, anyway, and refine for next time – maybe that’s a start.
To connect further dots, the opposite of “artificial” is “real (world).” So to tie communication to something they care about in that real world seems a logical thing.
Next dot is the one that I don’t see included in most discussions: tying communication to practical action, beyond language. Wouldn’t a “Research – Communicate – Act” cycle add a vital layer of learning to the traditional “Research – Communicate” cycle? And wouldn’t the planning of strategies for the highest leverage approach to effecting change get those critical thinking juices flowing, and critical reflective writing as well?
This is helping give me an idea. Nine months is a long time for a classroom. To structure the year with a beginning exploration, individualized, about what students wish they could act to change in our world (ideally locally); to encourage throughout the coming months a two-pronged inquiry consisting of 1) learning about the issue they’ve chosen, and 2) solving the “problem” of how they can most effectively use the tools at hand (like this one) to create change locally (and ideally, through networking, globally, if we could just get students connecting); then to end the year with enough time for them to implement their strategy to create change.
Real world project-based learning.
That’s really what we’re all doing right now, as we push at the limits of our thinking about this project of inviting our students into the adult world. We’ve got a project, and it’s magnetically pulling us back to our keyboards, back to each other, because we all share a common practical goal – making schooling relevant, making students world-changing adults to whatever degree. Who’s to say students couldn’t experience that same magnetism with projects of their own?
And an essential component of any student project is going to circle back to the traditional language arts focus on communicating powerfully with words and more, and to have our facts straight and so on.
I can’t wait to be able to distill this idea into a few simple maxims or principles…. 🙂
Gotta run. I’ve got some students coming over in two hours, and must clean house 🙂
I’m thinking that part of the “art” of teaching isn’t so much a matter of harnessing or exploiting student interests as helping them to broaden their interests and their range of concerns. I say this because I was a bit disappointed last term with the writing my students produced, and I’m hoping to find the missing pieces to this puzzle.
I think we should focus on the language of learning as an essential component of inquiry, and couple that with real-world projects. But this question of “how” is a big one.
Best of luck with your upcoming projects. The efforts we make and discuss are a resource for everyone’s benefit. Thanks.
Back for more, Cindy. Just a note that the Yahoo Project I assigned for our final project (much like your Protest one) did focus on writing skills.
After giving students a couple days to decide what Yahoo behavior in the world they wished they could mitigate, I had them do a “free” persuasive writing piece as their first draft of “sounding off” about whatever they chose.
Then I had them identify any figurative language in those drafts, suspecting (rightly, as it turned out) that they would find little or none.
So they revised (after watching the “Animal School” digital story as an example of an extended analogy), this time with instructions to include a hefty handful of figurative language specimens in their next draft.
I let them weed out any that felt forced for their last draft for the multimedia project.
I also had them reflect on the difference such language artistry made in the effectiveness of their work, comparing the first and final drafts.
Their reflections showed they got it, overall; and so did the contrast between their first and final drafts.
My point: yes, we should be writing/communication arts teachers. I fear I’m not clear on that. 🙁
I plan to read your entry again, click the links and learn more about what you’re saying, but I have to say that my first response is always despair when I hear good teachers suggest a conflict between cognitive and experiential learning. For me, they are two essential sides of the same coin. I liken it to the musician who learns to play music. Unless all he wants to do is be a happy, mediocre noodler, he must practice scales and longtones. Similarly, the writer or speaker who wants to move people must command the language, not merely use it. That means understanding the structure of your language, rhetorical devices, the use of punctuation and sentence length to create rhthym, etc.
Secondly, it’s nice to be relevant, but relevance is not the only issue. Especially if we want our children to be more than the sum of their current understanding. It’s always affirming to create work that children enjoy, but there’s no question that their reference points are limited. They need to be taken somewhere they haven’t been and they will sometimes fight you, because they can’t go where they need to go and still stay in their comfort zone.
Hi Audrey, thanks for your comment. Don’t despair at my post, I don’t mean to imply that cognitive and experiential learning are mutually exclusive concepts and I agree that they can be as you write ” two sides of the same coin”. My concern is that only one side of that coin, namely cognitive, predominates as we struggle to cram as much information in as possible (the tyranny of content over process) and students are not provided with enough opportunity to learn by “doing”. I agree that powerful learning can take place when students are pushed to move beyond their comfort zones but this can be done through experiential learning and service projects. However, it is vital that learning is relevant, rather than merely being “nice”. Student disengagement from school is of real concern – if they’re not listening then what we say is of little consequence…