Learning = Remembering?

I spent last Thursday at an inservice where the presenter spent all of her time talking about brain compatible learning. She had some interesting thoughts and strategies for reaching kids.  A lot of small activities where she focused on the fact that when lecturing, we have about 5 - 7 minutes before we lose kids completely. She spoke about reducing anxiety and stress levels in the classroom and providing emotional security. These were all good things. But what I was troubled by was the fact that in her words, we had to use these strategies in order to "increase retention in our classrooms."

It was a large inservice with 100+ teachers in it so I decided it was neither the time nor the place to ask a lot of deep questions, but this is something that has always bothered me. After teaching for 13 years. I still really have no idea what it means to learn something. Are we talking about changes that happen in the brain? Are we talking about retaining facts to be able to spew them out later? Is learning a change in attitudes towards other people? Is learning having more skills and abilities? At different points, I guess learning is probably all of these things, but I was greatly troubled by the fact that this presenter equated learning with retention.

I equate retention with Google.

On the other hand, I would much rather spend the time that I have kids for in a classroom to work on projects and collaborations that push them to think about things in ways that are different. I would rather challenge kids, make them think, have them collaborate with others, and spend time thinking about their society's past and future. About their own future and about themselves and those around them as individuals, as connected humans.

While retention can be important, I would certainly consider it to be a side goal in what I do. I only have the kids in my classroom for X number of hours over X number of days. While it is certainly vital that they learn how to access information and how to learn the "value" that information has for them, I will not spend the majority of my time teaching them to memorize things that have already been written down somewhere else for them to find. These ideas bring me back to some of the core concepts of connectivism from George Siemens:

•    “Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
•  “Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.”
•  “Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.”
•  “Decision-making is itself a learning process”.
  

Christian Long wrote a Future of Learning manifesto that I still have pinned up in my classroom and many of his points revolved around this as well:

1.  "Playing Small Does Not Serve the World."
2.  What Would Socrates Do?
3.  Nobody Cares if You Walked Up Hill Both Ways Barefoot in the Snow.
4.  Got Passion?  If Not, I'll Tell You What To Care About. 
5.  My Memory Is Only As Big As My Heart.  Otherwise, I'll Stick with Google
6.  Look it Up or Die.
7.  Collaboration Ain't About Holding Hands. It’s about Going Cool Places Fast.
8.  This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record.
9.  It Ain't About the Technology.  It's About Being Inside the Story.
10.  Nobody Knows the Answer.  Get Comfy with the Questions.

Tags: connectivism, george siemens, christian long, think:lab, learning

Comments

[Wesley Fryer]

Good reminders from George and Christian, Clarence! I feel confident many people DO equate learning with remembering. Yet there is, as you point out, much more to the concept of a worthwhile classroom experience than being able to remember it. I've thought about several classroom experiences which I remember from my own educational past but do not necessarily seem to have particular value in terms of skills they helped me develop or even less direct benefit they seemed to have for me.

I think the heart of learning being real has to do with whether or not it is an actual experience. I think many classroom activities and ideas go in one ear and out the other of both those designated primary learners (the students) and the person designated formally as the teacher. I think part of the litmus test for an authentic educational experience is the visible manifestation of learning which remains after the "lesson" is over. This gets to the "permanent record" idea Christian wrote about, I think. I consider it a litmus test of a valuable classroom activity whether or not all the student assignments or "deliverables" look the same. Too often in school, we DO expect the student work to look the same. I've certainly been guilty of this. When we do, I think we're failing to provide an opportunity for a differentiated and therefore an authentic learning experience. It's much easier to provide a fake one for learners where all the "deliverables" look the same. That's so much easier to assess. But yes, those experiences are also so much easier to forget.

Thanks for the challenge today to consider whether learning is remembering. To a degree it is, but certainly there is much more to the puzzle.