The Things That Linger After They’ve Forgotten Everything You Taught
by Terry Heick
Learning has little to do with content.
If we’re talking about learning as a personal manifestation of some kind–the two-way flow of referential schema in a fluid act of recognition and sense-making–then learning is something that happens completely inside the mind, and is its own kind of illusion.
In education, we try to make this learning visible through assessment, observation, dialogue, and other cognitively jarring acts meant to shatter that privacy.
But ultimately learning is about the learner themselves. Content never changes as a result of the student-content interaction but content itself is not useful without a learner.
Learning need learners.
Formulas in math or theories in science or essays in literature are each mindless and neutral; students are–like everyone else–mindful and biased.
We look for patterns and see what we are used to seeing and that familiarity makes thing easier. It takes less effort to simply see.
To understand requires that you find and see a new pattern, and finding new patterns takes effort.
It’s much easier–cognitively–to see what you want to see.
Learning is a deeply personal act of framing your own experience on some foreign thing–like trying your own hat on a mannequin. Your hat is your sense-maker, and the mannequin is what is being made sense of.
Ideally, you understand both better as a result of the interaction.
The Things That Endure
As an educator, you have likely been trained to think of teaching and learning as a standards-backward process.
And this training was necessary because it doesn’t come naturally for everyone; it required you to unlearn old habits—starting with a book, project idea, or video for example—and start instead with a clear learning goal, and then establish what you’d accept as evidence of having met that goal.
At this point you’d have at least the outline of an assessment, and you’d halfway to having a full lesson plan.
Content –> standard –> acceptable evidence of learning –> learning objective –> assessment designed to evaluate a student’s ability to provide that evidence –> activity/activities to help students improve that ability (know or do, concept or skill, etc.)
or maybe it’s:
Content –> standard –> learning objective –> acceptable evidence of learning activities/lesson –> activity/activities to help students provide that evidence –> assessment.
It depends on how backward or forward you’d like to be.
You could have a test and have students study for the test and help them when they have questions and then give the test.
In that case, it’d be: Assessment-as-content –> practice –> Assessment-as-evaluation.
Teachers would: Teach content –> ‘give’ the test –> grade the test.
This, more or less, is how the planning of teaching and learning goes.
This is not to say we should rethink that approach. Rather, the idea is to look instead at other factors that tend to linger long after the test has been given and the grades have been give and the content has been forgotten.
In any of the above tangle, where are the children? How will we know if they’re not just learning, but doing?
Where are the patterns?
Critical Abstractions Of Learning: The Most Important Things Students Learn At School
- How they relate to others
How do students feel after a conversation with you? Curious? Enthusiastic? Uncertain? Brow-beaten? Corrected? Inspired?
Tired?
And what about you? How do you feel before, during, and after these conversations? How you experience things impacts how they experience things, and the other way around. That’s a pattern.
When they read learning feedback from you, what does their internal voice say? Yes, this has as much to do with their personality as it does anything you say or do, but it’d be helpful to know.
Doesn’t how you make students feel matter? Can you promote high levels of understanding and inquiry if they’re constantly looking to align and comply rather than inquire and self-direct?
And further, how you can leverage your personality as a teacher–your natural gifts as a communicator, motivator, or content expert–to be intentional about the way you make them feel.
2. Self-Image
Prediction
Dove-tailing nicely behind how you make them feel are the discoveries they make about themselves under your guidance. Key strategies here are prediction, reflection, and metacognition.
How might it go? How might I learn? What might I find?
Reflection
What happened? What did I see? Where did I see it? How did I respond?
Metacognition
How did this event change my thinking? What were my sources for creativity or curiosity? When was I at my best?
How students feel about themselves–and what they sensed that you did accordingly–will easily outlast any bit of content they take from your class.
3. Compelling tools & community
Networks, communities, habits, and tools matter greatly because within each is a kind of self-sustaining system that whirs on without you. These are things that, with your guidance, can be set into motion and then left alone to build on themselves endlessly or topple over on themselves and crash.
In your class, in the very base cases, a student ‘learns content.’ They get tested and move on and teachers give those tests and move on (what else are we supposed to do?)
Meanwhile, everything–from the curriculum to the teaching to the testing to the lesson planning to the classroom management to the meetings and more meetings all repeat–the same pattern over and over again.
Patterns can help structure and frame and facilitate, but if our minds–our literal brains–aren’t pushed to break those patterns, the learning is, at best, diminished.
And none of this is humanizing at all.
There is teaching and planning and studying and even learning, but where are the teachers and the students themselves? Where are the patterns?
Where are the people and where is the disruption of patterns?
Ideally, these are among them:
1. How they see themselves as learners
Not the simple cognitive actions like ‘analyze’ and ‘evaluate’ that function more like assessment tools, but rather literally figuring out how to learn.
How to identify, follow–and then break–patterns.
What’s worth understanding? What useful things do others around me create? What sense of purpose do others around me live by?
You can call it a self-directed learning model, or simply strategies that students use to learn, but the result is the same: Lasting processes that students can transfer on their own, endlessly, independent of content forms or application.
We want students to learn? To grow? To make their lives better? To help their minds become better places to be.
They need the ability to break patterns in their lives.
2. How they see themselves as readers (and writers)
Reading and writing habits have inertia–they are hard to start and hard to stop.
Do they learn to love reading? Dislike it? To believe they’re good or bad at it? That is is or isn’t worth doing? They learn this at home and it can be reinforced–for better or for worse–at school.
We read to know and write to disrupt.
3. How to sustain–and avoid–effort
Based on their own motivations and goals–what they want, whether good grades, approval from parents and teachers, praise from peers, fulfilled curiosity, etc.–students will give the amount of effort and motivation they feel is necessary to reach their own goals (assuming they have them and see that relationship).
Learning how to give enough effort to achieve specific goals or avoid specific punishments is one of the earliest lessons students learn in school.
Helping them learn to see new patterns, then break them all again as they grow.
And that’s how you’ll know they’re learning.
