For most of us school was about absorbing what the instructor was saying and being able to recall it for a quiz or a test. If you’re a quick learning, or have photographic memory it’s a great system. But if you take time to process things it can be a bit challenging. Let’s consider what it would be like if you had some say in the tools you used to practice your learning, or if you had some say in your learning career and the direction you wanted it to go.
What if in K-12 you had been set on a course to learn how to find your strengths and weaknesses, pinpoint what you were passionate about, incorporate your strengths, weaknesses, and passions into projects you were doing in conjunction with what you were learning about? Then, what if you were encouraged to think critically and collaborate with others, either locally or using technology? And finally what if all this included figuring out how to find the people who had the answers you were looking for, no matter where they were on the planet? And what if your instructor was the mentor who helped you accomplish all this?
Seems far-fetched? Actually it’s not, the pieces have been gathering for a number of years, and slowly they are being put into place. It’s no surprise that we learn and retain better when we are interested, passionate, and engaged. It is rather surprising that although we’ve known this for quite some time we’ve had the same teaching system in place for generations. Options for change were few, but with the dawn of Web 2.0 where discussions, collaborations, and sharing information across the world is now a reality new opportunities are realistically available. We just need to be open to and encourage the change. I had two very different children with two very different learning styles and if there had been a way to tap into their passions to engage them getting homework done would have been a much different game!
If you have younger children would this be something you would hope they get to be part of? Did you know you can help make it happen just by knowing about it, talking about it, expecting change, and supporting the change? All change done right takes time and evaluation, but I encourage you to educate yourself, collect your thoughts, then support change.
I find it interesting how the mind works, especially related to learning. We are all so different in so many ways and learning is no exception!. While preparing to write a review of a project for a class recently I was reading about learning and encoding new material into memory I came across the fact that we automatically store things in multiple categories. As Julie Dirksen explains it in her book Design for How People Learn, you can think of memory as categorizing things onto shelves you create over time through learning and experiences. The more “shelves” you have that you can use to store a word, new idea, or other learned concept on, the more likely you are to retain it. The human brain creates patterns and the more patterns you have to access the information, the more likely you are to be able to recall it when you need it!
As a music teacher my mind immediately went back to a teacher who taught me a learning concept that I’ve used regularly with my own students when helping them learn to practice. She would remind her students that looking at your music from multiple angles created different learning paths in the brain and the more paths you had, the better you knew your music, and the less likely you were to forget it or stumble under stress. First we would learn to read the music, hands apart, then put the hands together. After that we practiced by starting the piece wherever she would point on the music, then we memorized the piece, and finally we would work on playing it with our eyes closed. Once she mentioned this to me I always wondered how or why that would work, but it sure did seem to work.
When I look at the concept of shelves I can see how her method of learning music allows students to place the learned piece on different shelves. There are actually a few more they can place them on including genre, key of the piece, era, and so on. And, I can certainly say that the better I knew a piece and thought of it in different ways, the less likely I was to make a mistake or forget what I was playing. Well, it worked for me unless someone else was in the room at least. Stage fright has haunted me for a very long time and it seems that no matter how well I know a piece of music if there’s someone else in the room all the rules go out the window, but that’s a story for another time!