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The other day in our online class meeting in EDLD 5313 – Creating Significant Learning Environments course, one of the core courses in the M. Ed. in Digital Learning and Leading at Lamar University, one of my students asked me why this particular course that deals with learning theory and creating significant learning environments was not one of the first courses in the program. I explained that we run the learning theory course after EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education, the course in which the students research and develop a learning innovation proposal and plan, because 5305 creates a context for which you need to explore your beliefs about learning. Without having a context to look at how people learn, the work on learning theories is just theoretical. The genuine context provides the real world need or application where one needs to explore how best to design and create learning environments.
I am more than likely articulating this better in this post then I did in the meeting and as I thought about what I wish I would have said, Clayton Christensen’s perspective on learning came to mind. In a conversation with Jason Fried published in Inc in 2012, Christensen and Fried talked about innovation, the trap of marginal thinking, and learning. The perspective on learning that really caught my attention was the notion that someone can’t be taught until they are ready to learn. Christensen frames his perspective in the following unique way:
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
When viewed in this light the reason we run EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education first and get students to start the process of creating a learning innovation proposal and plan, is that 5305 disrupts students enough or disrupts their typical thinking about teaching and leanring enough, where they start asking the types of questions that will be addressed in EDLD 5313 and many other courses. Many students lament in the class discussions, class meetings, and in their reflections that this course and program has forced them to re-think many of their ideas about teaching and learning. Students often feel unsettled or uncomfortable because they may feel they have more questions then they have answers.
We have designed the DLL program and the courses to push students to start questioning conventional thinking about teaching and learning, the educational system, their schools and classes, and their process and methods so that their minds are opened up enough to the point that they want to know how to do things different. The program and courses are design to open up spaces in our learners minds for new ideas to fit and when we explore those new ideas in the next module or course many of those disconcerting questions or spaces are filled with the new ideas—only to have new questions that start to open up new spaces in their thinking.
In an age of standardized testing, of covering the content, of checklists masquerading as rubrics, and the need to regurgitate the right answer, getting learners to struggle with challenging questions is unfortunately a foreign concept. But learning has never fundamentally been about spouting off the right answer; it has always been about making meaningful connections and to make those meaningful connections you have to start with the questions. The type of questions that open up the spaces in our thinking and motivate us to want to know and to make those meaningful connections—only to have the whole process start over. This is learning—this is life.
References
Fried, J. (2012, September 25). A Conversation with Innovation Guru Clayton Christensen. Retrieved September 7, 2016, from http://www.inc.com/magazine/201210/jason-fried/a-conversation-with-innovation-guru-clayton-christensen.html
This post was very enlightening and I love Clayton’s concept that questions are places in your mind where answers fit. As it relates to the learning theory, after having the opportunity to develop my own theory I believe teaching supports learning, and therefore the classes should be structured to support that learning. The good news, Lamar’s Digital Leading & Learning program does a great job accommodating diverse learners through voice and choice. However, I now feel like its putting the cart before the horse to start school without knowing your learning theory! On the other hand, learning has been invoked and now the answer has a place because of the question, how do I learn and why?
Having taught more traditional courses on learning theory at other institutions I know from hand experience that when students are asked consider or define their learning philosophy without having a personal need to most struggle. The need, context, or in Christesen’s terms when the space is created for why a personal learning philosophy is necessary, students are then able to not only develop a well thought out philosophy they can then apply it to their real world.
It isn’t that we are putting the cart before the horse. Both have been their all along. It is only when you have the right context or the right space in your mind you can see the cart and the horse and understand why they are both necessary.