As a retired academic, I must admit that I miss doing research. There is a certain agency, a sense of control, when you are investigating problems that you believe need solving. What I have decided I get in return is more time to think. Research tends to involve you in the demands for generating money and counting publication frequency which I have decided cut into important time for thinking.
So, I have been thinking about teaching and learning and how these processes fit together. It might seem that I as an educational psychologist should have been thinking about this before and to some extent I did, but I now have time to spend on the big picture. I am trying to build for myself and hopefully others a way to understand how teaching and learning fit together. All explanations and the related applications do not work at least in optimizing the experience for learners. Any teaching approach likely works to some degree. We have the capacity to make meaning from pretty much any life experience as long as we make some effort to think about the experience. The problem with this reality is that those on the teaching side can come to believe any approach that is in vogue works great. This is where the way learning works should be used to test such beliefs.
One approach I have been exploring as a way to communicate about teaching and learning focuses on the resources learners access. I describe what I see as an important difference in contrasting information and learning resources. I am attempting to differentiate these resources and to connect insights I think are there to how learners might benefit from what they can find or are assigned online.
I have found it helpful to interpret information in the way historians use the concept of primary source. Historians work with such primary sources, photos, news accounts, diaries, interviews, etc., to build a model of history. The methods resulting in the conversion folks who teach history describe as the “historians craft”. These are rules of thumb for avoiding bias in seeing what is really there and for combining what is really there with their existing knowledge to understand and share. The tactics they apply allow historians to make meaning from information.
I believe cognitive psychologists think about learning in a similar way because learners do pretty much the same thing. They take inputs (informal experiences in the world and formal experiences in the classroom) and act on these inputs to build personal models. Educators cannot do this for learners, but they can engage learners with external activities that potentially change important internal behaviors. The cognitive psychologists help at this point because they offer insights into what these important internal activities are – e.g., activating existing knowledge, connecting important elements from external experiences with this activated knowledge (models of how the world works), and testing whether these connections make sense and have been accomplished (most call this metacomprehension).
Educators might not think in these terms, but they have tactics for encouraging these important internal learner behaviors. They might encourage learners to consider a common experience or provide a common experience in order to encourage background activation. They might ask questions to encourage processing of inputs. Questions of a different type might be used to help learners self-test their understanding.
What teachers do during their time with students might be thought of as encouraging productive processing of carefully selected information, but it probably also should be thought of as developing productive, self-imposed learning tactics. I believe this role is often overlooked and I use the infrequent effort educators make to help students learn to study as an example. As adults independent learners, we learn best when we perform the same cognitive tactics and we may even use similar external behaviors. We may highlight to identify key ideas. We may take notes to process information. If our efforts at notetaking, maybe even in the margins of what we read, are unsatisfactory, we may realize that we really don’t understand and respond by rereading or seeking a different perspective from a different source or a more knowledgeable person.
So, I believe it helpful to attempt to understand the learning processes that are important and to consider how we as learners or we as educators might encourage these processes WHEN NECESSARY. This “when necessary” thing is very important. These add-on activities can be required when a learner does not need them to do important cognitive things (activate knowledge, identify important ideas, connect important ideas with the activated knowledge, etc.) and then the add-ons become busy work that just wastes processing capacity. It is always important to understand that learning is an individual thing and it is performed by the learner and not the external helper no matter how motivated this external person is to help.
To make this thinking I have been doing useful to myself and hopefully to others, I have attempted to identify a body of information (content) and to then explore what external tactics might be applied independently or encouraged by educators to facilitate learning of this information. I describe the combination of content and tactics as a learning resource. The body of information I have decided to focus on is online information in the form of web pages or video. I believe educators are using such content in place of traditional textbooks more frequently and this shift requires educators to do some things that were not as necessary when assigning content from textbooks. I have decided to focus on online tools that can be added to this online content to encourage effective cognitive processes. This focus has resulted in a Primer to provide an explanation of specific tactics and the rationale for these tactics and online tutorials for tools that learners can use and educators can assign to encourage these tactics. The Primer costs a few bucks and the online tutorials are free. If any of this interests you, I would suggest you take a look at the video tutorials and these tools seem to offer possibilities for your classroom to then put down your $3 and purchase the Primer.
