We Need to Focus on the Why and How, Not the What.
It’s Saturday morning. Instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons, I am at Chinese school, falling asleep to the droning of the teacher. I would tell you what was the lesson of that day, but I would by lying. I have forgotten. In fact, I probably forgot that same day. Today, this sort of behavior is not a surprise to me. I had no idea was I was learning. The characters I wrote a thousand times or the story I recited a million times, I did not remember. Why? I had no idea what I was writing or saying. This is the singular problem with rote learning. It’s meaningless. You can’t take the information and extrapolate it to even slightly dissimilar situations. And here is the sadder part: a lot of the Mandarin I learned was from adulthood. I was either taking private one on one lessons or learning from historical Chinese dramas, something I intrinsically love.
My educational experiences along with accompanying scientific research have sculpted my teaching doctrine. It has lead me to declare rote learning as an enemy. We learn best if we see the value of what we are learning; however, much of modern teaching skips over this, giving students a feeling of unsubstantiated air.
Let’s examine the effectiveness of including relevance in teaching. One of the most well known teaching methods is the Feynman method, named after the Nobel Prize winning physicist. The gist of this method is to teach what you learn. In order to teach effectively, you need to be able to deconstruct the concept at hand and communicate it clearly and simply. This is not easy to do; you need to deeply understand the knowledge/skill. It forces you to reexamine your understanding of the field at large. If you cannot pass the first round of teaching, you go back, identify the specific areas of weakness, and try again. So why is this effective? Two reasons. It compels you to do active recall. What if a student has a question on the technical aspects of the topic. As a teacher, you should able to reasonably recall information and form an answer. Those questions also serve to test your level of understanding. Second, to effectively communicate the material to the student, you need to tie in context and relevance.
There are other ways to integrate relevance into teaching. In my pedological view, emotion is a necessary to communicate relevance across. Let’s start from the big picture. Why do humans have emotions? Emotions teach. Fear is our natural instinct to sense danger. Anger signals a need to overcome an obstacle, giving the person an emotional boost to do so. Joy reinforces the benefits of an accomplishment or an activity. We need to teach our students how to hone, control, and direct those emotions, so we learn from our experiences and strengthen our learning as well. Think about it. When you meet a stranger, you remember more details of that encounter if that experience was more emotional striking. Learning new material is the same. Boredom kills learning. We need to make learning emotionally relevant.
What is more emotional relevant to a naturally curious creature than a novel thing or idea? As large brained mammals, we are naturally inclined to explore a new environment, a new challenge, a new feeling. Unfortunately, we are not doing enough of this in our schools or in our extracurriculars. Take a look at sports. How many coaches and programs have you do the exact same drill over and over again. In time, you will acclimatize to the drill. More often than not, you will not transfer those skills over to the real game or situation because you practicing for the drill, not for the sport or discipline. Further, adding novelty into your practice regimen can improve your rate of improvement. In fact, a highly cited study by Shea and Morgan (1979) demonstrated that random practice produce better and sustainable learning results. The authors add, “This effect (transfer of skills) was most notable when transfer was measured for the transfer task of greatest complexity.” Yet, so many classrooms including those in the tutoring sector give the same lesson over and over again. You take a SAT class one period, and the next period, you discover it’s the same curriculum. I am not sure if parents know this is happening, but I suspect many parents do not mind that their son or daughter is experiencing the exact same lessons in the same format in the same manner. No “randomness” to be found!
What better way to learn from randomness than to add failure to the mix. We learn best from experimenting and failing. I have already discussed this topic before, so I will be brief. The most sensitive aspect of learning from failure is the blame game. Due to the psychological negatives, modern organizations have shied from “assigning blame.” Consequently, both organization and individuals have not learned from failures. The key is to create a culture in which it is acceptable to admit and even assign blame responsibly. What can be more relevant than taking accountability?
A good way for students to take personal responsibility for their learning is to have them use what their learn. Embrace the “use it or lose it” philosophy. And no. Doing math worksheets is not using math skills. In the case of math, why not do more project based assignments? How about having your students create a statistical survey gauging the popularity of certain beverages at their high school or having a middle schooler build a small dam, which can be later converted into a pond for the backyard? These encourage our pupils to use what have their learn. Maybe, they will have that epiphany moment and realize exactly how those skills can be applied in the real world.
And of course, the real world works on teamwork and cooperation. But our schools pride individual accomplishment. Bezos or Musk did not build Amazon and Tesla respectively all by themselves. They had support from family members, asked capital from investors, communicated with shareholders, directed their employees, and worked with their executives. We need make learning socially relevant.
The educational landscape from schools to tutoring need to embrace relevance or else, education itself will become irrelevant. The ongoing COVID pandemic is already having young scholars check out of school. Here’s the thing. They were already doing so before. The pandemic just accelerated the trend. The ultra wealthy knew the irrelevance of the system a while back. Why do you think Musk established a school, Astra Nova, for his kids and the kids of his employees? He and others knew the rot in the system. He knew the system presses kids to think: “What is on the test?” and “What is going to be on the final?” Instead, we should nudge our youth to ask, “How are we going to learn the concepts of genetics and use them responsibly?” and “Why does electricity flow in this manner?” No more what. How? And Why?
