Insights on the article, "How People Learn".

There are three key findings that the research on how people learn that the article synthesizes:

1. Learners have pre-existing understandings of how the world works.
2. Competence as built on depth of understanding.
3. Metacognition ensures learning.

The illustration above summarizes my understanding of the big idea of the article.  As persons, we learn by way of the three interrelated circles of mental operation or thinking.  There is learning through teaching when it is effectively targeting the ways by which our brains or minds work.  When the school environment supports, connects or interrelates and “interlocks” effective teaching then you have a system that builds and nurtures learners for academic and holistic success.

“Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Teachers then have to draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them.” 

I totally agree.

Teaching is for learning.  I am reminded of the anecdote, I think it was from Snoopy, when Charlie Brown said “I taught this dog some tricks.  I taught it how to go fetch”. So Nancy dares and Charlie Brown throws the stick and told the dog, “Go, fetch!”.  Time passed and the dog did not return so Nancy says to Charlie Brown, “I thought you taught that dog the trick?!”.  Then Charlie Brown replies, “I said I taught it how to fetch, I didn’t say he learned it.”

To teach is one thing, to ensure learning is another.  Indeed, studies in Cognitive Psychology and the evolving science of Neuroscience tell us about how we humans learn.  I can connect this reading material readily to another book I have read, Brain Rules by Dr. Medina.  In the brain, information or learning is stored through a network of neurons or brain cells.  Different learnings have different neural networks and related learnings have interlocking neural networks.  It is through this networks that synapses or electric currents in the brain travel, and this is how the brain “knows” or processes information.  Learning is easier and lasting therefore if information taught is processed by connecting or recruiting similar neural networks for connected or related information rather than making the brain create new unrelated neural network for the information taught.  When we make it easy for the brain to function, we make it easier for us to learn therefore.

This research lays the bases for the evident practice of using diagnostic assessments, KWL-W charts and other forms of pre-assessments used in instruction.  Furthermore, the same research validates the time-tested IPP framework for planning lessons with its Context as part of preleccio.  There is indeed science behind the centuries old paradigm in Jesuit education and polishes indeed the wisdom of St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises which is the anchor of the IPP.

Context in the IPP should include unscrambling of misconceptions or conceptions in order to promote authentic learning.

Metacognition is a very important habit of mind that learners have to practice and develop.  Metacognition does not come to the learner naturally.  Effective learning must raise a level of awareness of this thinking process and repetitively engage the learner into this for him to have authentic learning and not just rote. 

Research defines metacognition as the students knowledge of where s/he is in achieving the learning objectives of the lesson; it is an “internal dialogue” that the learner makes regarding his/her thinking progress in the teacher-learner process.

In a series videos in  Youtube, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH95h36NChI,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xeHh5DnCIw) Prof. Stephen Chew of Samford University provides further clarification on what metacognition is all about and proposes to students several habits of mind that could help foster metathinking or what he calls deep processing, another name we can give to metacognition.   

The following are Prof. Chew’s strategies for metacognition:

When studying or learning content, it is helpful to guide one’s thinking process with the following questions:

1. Elaboration.  How is the concept connected to what you have previously learned?
2. Distinctiveness. What makes the concept distinct? How is the concept distinct from the other concepts being learned or studied?
3. Personal experience.  How does the concept relate to personal experience?
4. Application.  How will the concept be applied, as solution or answer to a simulated problem or to real-life conditions?

Metacognition reminds me of IPP Reflection.  When one considers Reflection as three-pronged being reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-for-action, the scientific bases or research base of IPP is further supported.  No wonder Jesuit education only continues to reveal its beauty for the last four hundred years beginning with the Ratio Studiorum, 1599 (Plan of Studies, the first Jesuit education handbook/guide on systematic education).

Knowing the value of metacognition to authentic learning, it is challenging for me to persist on creating the spaces, time and structure for fostering reflection in all aspects of instruction on all content or subject and all activities on formation.

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