"We learn more from the people who are different from us than ones who are the same."
- Andy Hargreaves
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Recently I read parts of the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000) by the National Research Council and learned a great deal about learners and teachers. First and foremost, it became clear quickly that this book argues that we should move away from simply memorizing facts as learning, to actually applying learning to real world situations in a broader context. Chapter 2 speaks on experts, and what experts know and do not know about their subject area. The National Research Council claim that an expert's knowledge is "not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or "big ideas" that guide their thinking about their domains" (National Research Council, 2000). We are constantly expecting our students to memorize a list of facts and regurgitate those facts later on an exam to show their learning. We ask our upper-elementary students to memorize a list of multiplication facts. Although the multiplication facts might make some math easier to do, it is simply a string of facts that have no connection to how math works. Instead, we could, as educators, lead our students in number talks, in which we discuss how we can solve these multiplication facts and the many connections there are to other math concepts, like repeated addition. The How People Learn book asks teachers to move away from a list of disconnected facts into knowledge that is connected and organized around more important concepts (National Research Council, 2000). Rather than asking our students to memorize the important dates of the road to the American Revolution, we could ask our scholars to connect one event to the next and learn how each event was important for the American Revolution. Learning is more than just a string of facts, instead, it is a growing bubble of knowledge that contains big ideas about a concept.
According to this book, students also learn best when they are connecting their learning to past learning and beliefs. The National Research Council suggests that "new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge" and that we must "pay attention to incomplete understanding, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject" (National Research Council, 2000). The book goes on to explain that as teachers, it is our job to build upon students past understandings and beliefs in order for development of learning to happen. This part of the text brings me back to a time that I was teaching a unit on the book Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, a book about a 10 year old child growing up during the Great Depression that follows his journey to find his father, who he has never met. I had a class full of 26 5th grade students, all of whom did not know a single fact about the Great Depression. How was I to have them read a story about an important event in history without having any schema on that event and then expect them to understand and comprehend the story's full context? In order to help them learn, we spent 3 days building our background knowledge on the Great Depression by focusing on Who, What, Where, When, Why Questions from news articles and informational texts about this historical event. After this, we listened to the music of the Great Depression and collected and analyzed our data that we had found. We then were able to read Bud, Not Buddy and build upon our knowledge of the Great Depression and make connections to past information we had learned.
Overall, as I continue to grow as an educator, I am constantly reminded to stay up-to-date with recent findings about the ways in which we learn as humans. As teachers, it is important that we understand not only how to teach, but how to learn.
References
National Research Council. 2000. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: expanded edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
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