The Language of Learning

I want to take a moment to reflect on my present state. In this moment, I am inspired. I am humbled. I am full. I thought there was a dearth of clever in education. I thought it was mostly misguided, well-meaning people all trying to do something in their own, independent silos. What I found was that is only partly accurate. Yes, educators exist in their silos and they generally stay there. But oh man, are they a clever bunch! They have come up with all kinds of ways to look at their silos and generalize the camps of others (as I do now). But there are moments when the cleverness of educators can be channeled. The final day of SXSWedu 2014 felt very much like one of these moments for me. Half of the attendees had stuck around. The stalwarts, the troopers, the ones who wanted to see it through to the end and were willing to brave the emptying hallways, the feelings of being left behind, and the pockets overflowing with business cards even as they tried to cram a few more in.

On this, the final day, I met a company that truly inspires me, a company that I would have gladly joined a year ago, and one that I hope to promote and aid going forward. I also met a teacher, turned entrepreneur, who incubated a learning game product in his classroom and is now successfully bringing it to deployment in hundreds of schools. I heard eloquent and meaningful dialogue from a professor of Learning Sciences that reignited my curiosity in working toward my PhD. And finally, I listened to Jeffrey Tambor speak about doing it "badly," going off script, and finding your genuine moments of bliss, in work and in life. 

Direct instruction has been taking some friendly fire lately from constructionism, embodied cognition, and other learning theories. But rather than discard instruction as an antiquated mechanism of facilitating learning, let's increase its value beyond repute. Back when I was teaching math and science to high schoolers, I came up with a brilliant idea. OK "brilliant" may be a bit of a stretch. Let's say it was a good idea. An idea that, when put into practice, yielded excellent results. And I've been applying this idea ever since.

Whenever I have to teach a skill, host a discussion, or provide direct instruction, I start with a presentation of the material. Perhaps it's a specific type of problem solving technique applied to a set of algebra problems, or a programming concept like for loops, or even a debate on the existence of learning styles. I would start with a demonstration, a walk-through, or a presentation of both sides of the argument. This is step one.

Step 1: Be the star. Be the guide that shows your learners the way. Be the trailblazer that lets them know what's possible or the set the direction along which you want them to travel.

I will follow this by creating groups of 4. I have each group continue from where I left off. Maybe it's a similar problem I have them solve together. Maybe it's taking sides in the debate. In any case a group of four can help individuals generate their own line of thinking as well as give them an opportunity to absorb and interpret the thinking I just demonstrated. That's step two.

Step 2: Form groups of four. Stimulate conversation, the exchange of ideas, and learner collaboration. Give the quiet ones a chance to listen a little longer. Give the vocal ones a chance to talk their thoughts out in a more intimate setting.

Now it's time to shrink the groups. Give Vygotsky's ZPD a chance to really take effect, and the quieter learners a chance to ask some questions or explain their understanding. Step three is all about the power of two.

Step 3: Create pairs of two. In pairs, the learners have one more chance to work through a problem or solidify their thinking. More experienced learners can lead less experienced ones to a deeper understanding and achieve one of their own along the way. Pairs also help learners identify their shared points of confusion and articulate them to the facilitator. It can also be a great way to help those in confusion not feel like they are the "only ones who don't get it." 

In order to give learners the chance to establish confidence and independence in the skill they are working on or the conversation they have been engaged in, we end with solo work.

Step 4: Establish the power of one. Have learners solve a problem on their own. Have them write down their opinions. Have them do any activity that gets them to reflect on their group work and the facilitator's instruction. Make sure it's an exercise they can keep working on if they need more time, one whose completion provides a clear indication to everyone (including themselves) that they have learned what you attempted to instruct them on.

That's it. Start with a "sage on the stage," move to groups of four, then two, then one. I call it *421, and it works for almost any topic, giving learners access to information, and a chance to practice applying that information multiple times. Use instruction to promote practice, and you'll never have to worry about droning on while your audience tunes out. 

**For bonus points, try *421 in reverse and let a learner be the star. Mix it up. Have fun. Just remember to dial *421.

Recently I had an "unpacking session" with an expert web developer. An unpacking session is when a learning expert and a domain expert get together and try to unpack the hard-wired skills and strategies that the domain expert does without even thinking about. The idea is to tease apart the steps of a process that is not obvious to beginners and has become a nearly invisible routine for the domain expert. Through dialogue, diagram, and concrete examples, the process is made more accessible to novices, in other words more "learnable." 

Now other would-be web developers can study and practice the craft of troubleshooting and debugging web development code. And it all starts with three little questions.

Question 1: What do I know?

Ask yourself this question to get started. As novice coders when we get an error message or we see a bit of code that doesn't make sense, we have the tendency to gloss over it, quickly hacking at a potential solution (without even diagnosing the problem), performing a GCP (google, copy, paste) or skipping it altogether and moving on to the lines of code we do understand. The problem with this strategy is it does not help us form connection between what we do know and the mysterious new method, message, or syntax.

We must pause and ask ourselves: What do I know about this line of code or error message? What references do I understand, what syntax is familiar? 

Question 2: What don't I know?

On the other end of the spectrum, we sometimes have the tendency to gloss over unfamiliar code and seek out only that which we understand. We slip past strange syntax and try to guess at what's going on from the keystrokes we actually understand. Unfortunately, this too can keep us from making connections that help us build on our learning. In an effort to learn from context rather than content, we find ourselves not truly understanding how a piece of code works very deeply or being able to replicate it on our own. 

The point of clearly articulating to ourselves what we know and what we don't know is to make a distinction between the two. We want to ADD distance in our knowledge gap so we can spend a little time forming a connection that bridges that gap. Like building a real life bridge, it helps to know where you're starting and where you're going, in fact, it's required! Give your brain two endpoints. Point A: what you know. Point B: what you don't. Then you're ready for question three.

Question 3: How can I connect what I don't know to what I know?

Once you have two points of knowledge (a known and an unknown), you can start working on connecting them. This is where we have to get super specific to the resources available to us and our particular domain of study. For the web dev expert I was unpacking with (@JeffCohen), the sub-domain (Ruby on Rails) was also important to his process. Here's what he offered…

Step 1: Default to IRB (Interactive Ruby Shell) Most lines of Ruby code can be toyed with using IRB and the learning experience (knowledge bridge) is much stronger than a random google search might yeild.

Step 2: If the unknown is Rails specific, try playing around in console. IRB won't help with Rails, but console will. Try inputting your mystery code and seeing what happens.

Step 3: If it's an unknown (or unfamiliar) method, Go to the guides. Ruby and Rails both have extensive online documentation. Other resources to investigate include gem documentation, gem code, your coding peers and community, and Uncle Bob. 

Only after exhausting steps 1-3 does he then go to Google or try to find something on Stack Overflow. So for those out there who are going straight to Google, you're missing all the valuable bridge-building, knowledge-making learning opportunities that an expert uses to improve his practice. Try making Google your LAST resort and see what connections you can construct between what you know and what you don't.

WARNING: After reading this blog post you will have no more excuses not to blog. DISCLAIMER: I'm writing this blog post so that I will have no more excuses not to blog.

OK now that that's out of the way…

The purpose of this blog post is to give you an understanding of what the science has to say about the value of blogging in the learning process.

The knowledge needed to understand this post:

A working definition of the term "blog"

Prior experience reading blogs

First, what is a blog?

Let's say a blog is a modern day version of a diary or journal. You write down your thoughts, you read them over again, you store them, you share them with others (or not). The difference between a blog and a journal is that with a blog, you're using computer software to keep track of certain attributes of your entries (called "posts") like the time, date, and the thematic elements (called "tags").

Second, if you haven't read some blogs, go read some now. 

Here's one: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/

Here's another: http://gawker.com/

Here's the one I can't stop reading: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/ 

Notice that you can skip around, read a post, read another post. Some blogs let you search by tag, others let you do a word search that will look at every post and return only the ones that contain that word. These features are critical to understanding some of the learning values of keeping a blog.

So why blog?

Well, whenever you're learning something new, (and if you ask a Learning Scientist like me, you're ALWAYS learning something new, whether you're trying to or not) blogging offers you the following advantages:

A blog represents your own personal learning map.

A blog can serve as a representation of the work you've done and the knowledge you've practiced using. It's like the ancient explorers who made the first maps. When you're learning something new, you're charting unknown territory, and writing a blog can give you, and others, an understanding of the landmarks, the features, and the terrain of the new world you're exploring. And, as mentioned above, you can search for these features on your learning map by simply typing a related word or phrase into your search bar. Like having a google for your own brain!  

A blog makes a great memory trigger.

Have you ever looked at a calendar and realized it's someone's birthday. You end up thinking about that person, maybe you send them a card or email, maybe you just reminisce about the last time you saw them. Suddenly you're feeling connected to them without even having seen them or talked to them. Re-reading your blog posts can trigger a reconnection between you and what you've learned. It can remind you of the things that you know and help you avoid forgetting them. If you read through your past blog posts every couple weeks, months, or even years, you can be instantly connected to the thoughts and feelings you had when you wrote those posts. The beauty about this is that you wrote it, so you're speaking to yourself. You don't have to try to interpret someone else's thoughts because you've already done the work to interpret your own. It's like keeping a calendar with the birth dates of your thoughts, all you have to do is scan through it and those thoughts are yours again to remember, reflect on, revel in, and build upon.

Articulation cultivates conceptual growth.

Have you ever thought you've understood something, then tried to explain it to someone else, only to get tongue tied and start feeling like maybe you don't really know it at all? Blogging saves you having to go through that while someone's watching. Instead you just do it on your own time as you try writing your blog. By trying to explain what you know and what you've learned, you will build a better understanding of it as you are forced to convert the thoughts in your head to words on the web. Forcing yourself to articulate what you're working on will also help you identify what you thought you knew but really don't.

Keeping a blog improves your ability to communicate with others in a new domain.

Just as articulating your thoughts helps you refine and build on them, it also helps you learn how to communicate those thoughts with others. As you begin to hear a new vernacular (or jargon) that has meaning within a certain context (or domain) you at first will feel unsure about the full meaning of some of these unfamiliar or altered words. For example, when you first hear about arrays, hashes, and persistence in software development, your depth of understanding is small and you may not use those words appropriately. However, as you begin to form sentences in which you put those words in context, often defining them in your own natural language, you become more skilled and confident in their use. Conversations with experts start becoming intelligible to you, and you can even start chiming in without fear of sounding foolish. 

Writing blog posts helps you identify effective strategies.

As you reflect on your learning process as well as the content of what your are learning, you will discover that the actions you take are appropriate under certain conditions and not in others. Looking back, you will begin to notice when a certain strategy was effective and when it wasn't. You may even be inspired to think up new strategies that you can apply going forward. In other words, by writing your blog you're becoming a wiser practitioner of your craft.

Keeping a blog helps you identify areas for growth and motivates you to pursue them.

Writing about what you're learning is bound to fill you with desire. New questions arise, sticking points become more obvious, and your goals for learning what you're learning are pushed to the forefront of your mind. This is your opportunity to inspire yourself to continue your development. Use your blog to seek out what your want to focus on and why you want to focus on it. The more you do this, the more you customize your learning path and reap the benefits of your own natural curiosity and insight.

So there it is. Six reasons to blog. Now I'm inspired. I think I'll start on my next post. How bout you?

:~A

One thing I wasn't prepared for when I took up learning how to code, was how confusing one simple letter would end up being. When defining a set of rules for the processor to carry out (referred to as a "method") whether you use the plural or the singular of your method title can make all the difference. Who knew that keeping track of that one little "s" would be so tricky.

What I discovered is that the computer trying to interpret your code sometimes understands the relationship between a singular and a plural instance of a word, and sometimes it doesn't recognize their relationship at all. This makes it very confusing for a human like myself who ALWAYS will connect a singular with a plural in meaning if not context. 

Take for instance the crafting of a list of train stations. If I define the singular "station" as one of my variables, then I have to be consistent within anywhere from 4 lines of code to 4 different files of code depending on what kind of variable I'm defining. However, if I then type the plural "stations" somewhere in the same code then I might think I'm telling the computer to simply consider all my stations, but most likely I'm simply defining a completely knew variable. The computer will not relate "station" with "stations" no matter how similar they seem to me. I might as well have used the words "station" and "weasels." 

So if you're ever learning to code and you find yourself struggling to match the labels you're assigning to each of your variables, remember NOT to think of two things as similar just because they share every letter except that pesky little 's.'

Whenever you're learning something new, it's not just about picking up new knowledge, new skills, or new mentors. There's also a subtle, but important shift in how you process words.

Take the word: "class" 

The first time you heard this word it might have been in reference to a classroom. You may have even been sitting in one when you learned it. As you got older, you discovered other meanings of the word class. There are plenty. Economic class is different than Econ class is different than Kingdom, Phylum, Class,..., which is different than the stylish, polite kind of class a gentlemen shows when he opens a door for a lady. And all of these are different than the class of stars in Stellar Evolution class. 

When learning to program in Ruby, there is apparently a new definition of "class" that one must now learn in context. As far as I can tell, it's a type of container for instructions (called "methods") and is meant to give programmers the power to make up their own sets of instructions to assign to a computer processor. 

So why do I bring up all these classes? To talk about context.

Learning is not always about discovering something new. In fact more often than not it's about reshaping something old. Like adding to the multiple contexts in which the word "class" has meaning for you, learning is about taking what you already know and reworking it until you can comprehend something you didn't.

Our brains are designed to "build" (programmers might say "stack") content, context, cognition, and understanding on top of what we've already learned. We can help ourselves with this process by using analogies, stories, and abstractions to take what we understand and reframe it to understand even more. It's like building a house, then adding another wing, then adding a roof deck, then a patio, etc. And just like that ever-expanding house offers increasingly varied opportunities to entertain and shelter people, one's ever expanding learning offers increasingly varied opportunities to entertain and shelter thoughts. 

So now I'm in class with the rest of my class, learning about how to construct a class to help me develop a new class of web application. 

Recently, I visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It was the first time I had been to the museum in twenty years. The last time I was not much taller than the turn styles I had to pass through to gain entry. Back then I was visiting on a school field trip to learn about the wonders of natural history. This time I was on a school field trip to learn about the design of exhibits meant to engender that wonder. I had read Oppenheimer’s description of the design practices he and his colleagues had picked up while creating the San Francisco Exploratorium. I had studied both Diamond’s and Falk’s research on the learning outcomes that emerged from people’s exposure to museums. Therefore, in my mind two different voices politely debated  with each other. One voice (Oppenheimer) spoke of the necessity of designing exhibits that anyone could interact with in a multitude of ways (like making a meal with many complex tastes which everyone, including vegans, can eat). Another voice (a mixture of Diamond and Falk) spoke of the inability to design for the idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences that people bring with them to the museum. If exhibits are supposed to be deliberately inclusive, how can designers account for the myriad social and cultural histories of museum patrons? 

As I pondered this question, I began constructing my informal ethnography of the visitors. I had been tasked with observing museum patrons as they interacted with the very same exhibits that had so enthralled me two decades ago. What I learned was realism matters.  On my childhood visit, the things that fascinated me most were the lifelike representations of animals in a re-creation of their natural habitat. I would stare at the scenes, imagining I was really there. Apparently, I was not the first, nor the last to do this. On my return visit, I noticed many children (of varying ages) pause and gesture to their friends, “look, she’s bringing a rabbit to feed her babies.” Many younger kids would try to speak the names of the animals, sometimes referring to them as the more familiar Disney characterizations (“Neee Neeee Neeemooo”). Even the adults (myself included) would pause and stare at the scenes, working our eyes back and forth over little details and then zooming in and out as if we were vacillating between wanting to notice subtleties and wanting to take it all in.

Eventually, patrons would come to a video (usually of an old white man talking unenthusiastically about history) and they would immediately turn away. Or they would discover some element that was meant for them to interact with (like a button that would play a bird call). They would perform the indicated action and then they would move on. It was as if by trying to install media and interactive buttons or levers, the designers had actually interrupted the intrinsic curiosity with which patrons were exploring the museum and replaced it with external stimulus. This stimulus, once initiated, seemed to distract and disconnect viewers from their original interest in the  exhibit. When I try to explain this, all I can come up with is that buttons, levers and videos of old white men are not real. Nature doesn’t light up at the push of a button. Turning a lever to reveal a fact or figure isn’t natural. A man I don’t know reciting awkwardly to a camera is not captivating. But give me a stuffed Tiger stalking an unsuspecting deer, and I’m hooked.

The kids that ran around snapping pictures and sending MMSs on their cell phones (something I didn’t have when I was their age) already carry far more engaging interactive devices. Compared to buttons and levers and static videos, their cell phones easily dominated their attention. Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium was built on interactivity, where patrons can actually manipulate the exhibits themselves. By trying to force interactivity on already engaging exhibits, I think designers have reminded patrons that these exhibits are not as technologically “cool” as their iPhones. You can have realistic scenes that depict actual animals during a “snapshot” in time. You can have interactive objects that create a real sense of impact and feedback. But from my limited observations: when designers tried to combine static scenes with interactivity, regardless of the media or the medium, they ultimately lose their audience.

You've probably heard your teacher, your boss, your spouse, your coach, your friend, or your personal trainer say at some point "you're just not motivated enough." If you're lucky, you instead heard them say the slightly more supportive: "you just need to get motivated." But the idea that one can be more or less motivated, or that you can actually lack all motivation, is a false one. I would like to examine motivation through a much more useful lens. Let's assume everyone is motivated. Yes, everyone, all the time, is motivated. Some of us just happen to be motivated to sit on the couch and watch television while eating tasty snacks from Trader Joe's. Others may be motivated to cure cancer or acquire the latest iPhone. Motivation is a constant, a fact of human nature. What is neither constant, nor universal, is the direction of motivation, or what I will call motivational alignment.

Have you ever wanted to work out but felt conflicted about actually going to the gym or hopping on your bike? Have you ever been part of a workgroup that was trying to get things done but in which no one seemed to agree on how to proceed? Have you ever heard of the phrase "too many cooks in the kitchen?" All of these are examples of a dearth, not of motivation, but of motivational alignment. And if there's anything I've discovered about learning, it's that learning requires motivational alignment. The student and the teacher in any algebra classroom are both motivated. Maybe one wants to improve and the other wants to hop on facebook (notice how I didn't say which was which). But unless their motivations are in alignment, the student will not learn math and the teacher will not learn how to teach. If your boss is motivated to get you to fill out your TPS Reports and you're motivated to discover your life's purpose, not much is going to be learned in any interaction you two have. However, if you both become motivated to understand each other's perspective, you two might find some traction and learn to work together.

Anyone who’s had a chance to play around with magnets has felt that wonderful mystery as two pieces held apart suddenly move towards each other, or that strange repulsion they have as you flip one around and try to push them together. Human beings are not much different. We've all felt drawn to someone or what they were saying. We've all felt repulsed by someone or by their ideology. Magnets in the physical world result from the alignment of the magnetic properties of neighboring atoms. Each atom individually is not very magnetic, but align billions of atoms and you get that powerful effect of attraction and repulsion. This serves as a pretty good analogy for motivational alignment. Groups of people working together, motivated by a common vision have a certain magnetism to them. Some of the most profitable and fastest growing companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) all have that aura of being culturally aligned. As a result many of us want to use their products, many want to hear about what they are up to, and many want to work for them. Whether it's observed in organizations or individuals, alignment is magnetic. When students and teachers share motivational alignment, their classrooms are dynamic, engaging, and you want to participate. When a corporate training includes several people worrying about the differing ways they can apply the powerpoint slides to their daily jobs, and a trainer who ignores their motivations in order to fulfill his obligation to the agenda, it's dull, frustrating, and you want to sneak out to the nearest happy hour.

If we're willing to recognize that everyone is motivated by and towards something, that those motivations may differ in direction but not in potency, and that motivational alignment is key to learning, we can begin asking the truly meaningful question. Instead of asking how do we motivate our children, our students, our employees, our co-workers, or our spouses, let's begin to ask:

How do we achieve motivational alignment to become more magnetic people and organizations?

Metacognition, glossily described as "thinking about thinking," has recently entered the conversation on teaching and learning in a rather sizable way. First there was Alan Schoenfeld's Cognitive Science and Mathematics Education that passionately illustrated the value of learning to think like a mathematician. Then came a series of similar works that championed the teaching of "expert thinking" to students in many more subjects, from science, to history, to jazz piano.

Schoenfeld went on to suggest the the role of a teacher (or master) is not only to train the learner (or apprentice) on certain skills, but also to initiate them into the culture of their craft. In keeping with the habits of expert thinkers in my field (Learning Sciences) I decided to give this practice a fancy name. I call it metacognitive enculturation, or in other words, the initiation into a culture or community by learning to think like its leaders.

What does that mean specifically? Well let's dive a little deeper into the concept of metacognition. Yes, we're going to go meta meta, but it's worth it, so bear with me. Metacognition, as defined by Schoenfeld (1987), refers to three characteristics of each individual. First, how accurately does one describe their own thought processes? Second, how practiced is one’s ability to self-regulate, to observe themselves and adjust based on those observations? Third, what are one’s beliefs and intuitions; what filters color and shape their observations?

If a teacher’s goal is to train a learner to think like an expert, then their methods must include making adjustments to how the learner sees the world, reframing his or her students' beliefs and perceptions while inviting them to adjust their behavior through self-regulation. From this perspective, I would argue that the goal of learning is enculturation. Or, to put it another way, metacognitive education shapes culture. 

So in observing a culture you're noticing the impact of the learning experiences people within that culture underwent in order to join. Looking at American culture, our educational system begins to make sense. There are some people whose skills are valued and who receive many rewards, there are some people whose skills are not and who receive very few. Some are ignored, some become the center of attention, and most struggle to fit in. This is not the “human condition.” This is simply what our schools look like and so it is was what our adult communities become.

How do people learn? How is it that some children can do algebra at nine, and others can't do it at nineteen? Is it a matter of intelligence? Do some brains simply soak up knowledge and skills like a sea sponge while others perform more like a Brillo pad? Or is one's ability to learn based on his or her environment? It's the same old question of Nature vs. Nurture applied to learning.

According to Jean Piaget human brains are mostly all the same. Other than acute trauma and certain forms of mental retardation, we all generally develop similarly in our ability to perform motor tasks, acquire and use language, and reason our way through operations both concrete (counting to 100) and deductive (testing a hypothesis). So why are things like academic achievement and employee performance all over the map?

Well according to Piaget, once our brains develop to a certain point, the rest of learning emerges from equilibration. Which is a fancy word he uses to describe our need to make new things fit into what we already understand, assimilating them for future use. Anything we can't fit into our existing thought patterns gets ignored or discarded. So for some of you reading the word "equilibrate" at first meant nothing and you moved on to my next sentence (ignored). Others of you may have tried to guess what I meant using your understanding of the words "equilibrium" or "calibration," but then gave up and continued reading (discarded). And some of you knew exactly what I meant by the word equilibration because you'd already encountered it and assimilated it into your general working knowledge. 

What are the implications of equilibration on our debate over the nature vs. nurture of learning? Or asking it a different way, how does our need to assimilate new thoughts into what we already have going on upstairs effect our ability to learn?

If we expose a kid to algebra before he has already established the constructs needed to assimilate it, he will reject it, resulting in struggle and frustration. If we tell a new hire at the office to perform a task for which he has no existing behavioral framework, he will inevitably misunderstand and underperform. No amount of natural ability is going to help these two unfortunate people achieve at the level they are expected to. But if they had come to their assignments fully nurtured to the point of being able to assimilate them, they would rise to the top of their peer group.

Basically, if Piaget is right, the only way to learn something new is to ascertain your current framework and thought process, then take the right steps (small enough to equilibrate the whole way) to get to your learning goal. If I was going to teach a kid to drive, I would first start with an understanding of what they might already know about driving from video games (you have controls that adjust the car's speed and direction) and make sure they assimilate each lesson before moving on to the next one (the wheel controls direction, the pedals control speed, etc.). But if you put a kid behind the wheel without any context, he will just turn it wildly or randomly play with the shifter, nothing about the vehicle's actual operation sinks in.

And what about those kids in my Algebra class who, long before they got to me, needed to assimilate fractions before they were ready? They just put the pieces together in the wrong context. They created a mental model of mathematics that just doesn't work. But it's how they achieved equilibration so now I have to not only teach them something new, but also reprogram and rewire their misconceptions. And what if I haven't yet learned to do that as a math teacher?