Meaningful Activity

One thing I realized early on in teaching science was that it is misguided -- stupid even -- to invest a lot of energy trying to "teach" students things that they don't see any point in. Oh, you might be able to get them to remember stuff to pass a test -- if you structured the incentives that way and held a big stick over them. As a trick, you might get them to do it once, if by the end of the lesson they realized how wise you were in leading them down the path. Otherwise it's pointless: they'll forget it all as soon as they can, because there's rarely any point in merely knowing all that crap in the first place. You have to actually understand it, if it's going to be useful. And that requires real intention on the part of the students.

The idea of teaching people particular things has several bases, but none of them are valid any longer -- if they ever were. Modern public education was organized along the model of the assembly line, where students in cohorts move along a conveyer from one station to another having "information" added systematically along the way. It conceives of learning as laying courses of bricks and is grounded upon the assumption that students can't do anything interesting until they've assembled a critical mass of information to work with. Teaching has become a sterile activity where teachers use tricks to keep students "on task" doing drudgery that they generally see as pointless. These are all false, discredited models for how learning should be organized -- or should ever have been organized. And the testing paradigm, which is predicated on the notion that everyone must be taught the same things at the same time, has made this all much worse.

Educational testing is driven by the premise that finding questions that experts will answer differently than novices, and using those as an indicator of student performance, will allow measurement of student ability and teaching efficacy. This model is false for several reasons, but principally because expert performance is mainly due to how their knowledge is organized, rather than its quantity. Test questions rarely can address how knowledge is organized unless you can understand why someone selected the answer they did. This kind of testing, though possible, isn't cheap -- it generally requires trained people and individualized assessment.

The broad application of the testing paradigm has deprofessionalized K-12 teaching and shifted emphasis from what's important to what can be easily assessed. Teachers are becoming merely jailers who implement an instructional regime, created by bureaucrats, that's driven by assessments and bean counting. Students are rewarded for compliance, not for critical thought or challenging the establishment goals. Teachers are rewarded for avoiding schools with non-complying students. And Higher Education is now in the sights of the testing industry.

In higher education, I still have some freedom to try to deprogram the students that come into my classroom. I spend a great deal of effort trying to build in mechanisms for student activity to be driven by what makes sense to them. In different classes, I use different schedules for extracting myself from students' teacher-centered expectations about learning and seek ways to engage them with their own learning. Generally, I'm quite directive in the first few days (which is what college students depressingly expect) and then, little-by-little, I wean students off from seeking my approval to trying to satisfy themselves.

I am sometimes successful: in end-of-term reflective essays students often describe to me how they had experienced an epiphany at some point -- and its effect is evident in the subsequent work the student performed during the semester. What brings about the epiphany varies from student to student: sometimes it's seeing what peers are doing, sometimes it's something I say, and sometimes it just happens out of the blue.

I occasionally meet tremendous resistance from students. One student, after the first day, dropped my course saying that he could see that in the course students would have to think "outside-the-box". "I don't want to do that," he said. In another course, I had used the analogy of taking the students out to the middle of the ocean and asking them to pick a direction and swim. "I guarantee you'll get someplace interesting," I said. "But you have to pick a direction and swim. I'll try to make sure you don't sink and help you navigate the reefs and currents that you run into. But you have to swim." Some students just crossed their arms and refused: they were convinced that if they waited long enough, I would turn the assignment into a meaningless set of steps they can perform without choosing. In a chat-session with the students, one woman kept re-iterating reasons why she couldn't start her project until she received assurances that it was the right way to go until another student finally said, "Swim, Cynthia! Swim!"

It would be much better if students didn't need to wait until college to discover that learning works best when it's driven by self-interest and self-motivation -- and is self-directed. The internet, more than any one other single thing, now makes that possible. Not inevitable -- but possible in a way that has never been possible before.

The internet hasn't changed how students learn, but it has the potential to be an incredible source of student empowerment. Every student with a computing device and a network connection now has access to a greater library and source of information than any human being on earth has ever had. Much, much greater. Students don't really need textbooks. They don't really need teachers. What they need are reasons to delve into that stuff and take advantage of it. School -- most of our current formal educational structure -- is not good at providing those reasons. In fact, schools (and government) are generally afraid to let students have unfiltered access to the full world of information on the internet. Students that buy into the formal schooling program become rule-followers and get comparatively little real benefit from the "learning". What students need are engaging, authentic tasks that require learning -- and the freedom to pursue them.

Once students are liberated from the drudgery of menial schoolwork, they suddenly discover that the world is a fascinating place -- and there are whole communities of people who have been equally fascinated by it and have been trying to figure it out for ages. Instead of trying to drag students along by the nose, the teacher is liberated to help students accomplish their goals: they can become a genuine guide and mentor -- and not just a supervisor trying to trick students into learning stuff they have no interest in.

School -- and much of higher education -- as currently instantiated is a poor substitute for self-motivated learning. Most would get a lot farther fostering and pursuing their own interests. The tools for students and teachers to liberate themselves are there just waiting.