It's About Learning

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with my boys and their friends at a biking industry party at a local bike shop that sponsors my boys and other professional racers. I took advantage of this time to ask a racer who my older son raced with earlier in the year in the Enduro World Series (EWS) races in Chile, Columbia and Whistler… what was the biggest lesson he learned this year on the EWS circuit? He stated that he the noticed that fastest racers didn’t always take the fastest line down the mountain—they seemed to take the most fun line or the line that allowed them to flow down the mountain. Instead of hitting the hardest and fastest lines they seamed to be having the most fun and were simply flowing down the course. He also stated that it took him the full season to finally accept this and it wasn’t until this last race that he stopped trying to go the fastest and simply went out to have some fun and enjoy the day. When you race for 6-7 hours each day its is foolish to try and run at 100%. You not only destroy your bike you destroy your body. He argued that when he stopped looking for the fastest line and simply went out to find the most efficient or most fun way to come down the mountain he ended up being much faster at the end of the day and posted his best results. It wasn’t until he started looking at the bigger picture and started asking different questions that enabled him to look at his racing different that finally led to his best results. His major regret was that he didn’t come to this realization and start asking a different questions until his final race of the season. He also wished that he would have learned this lesson many years earlier.

Asking enough of the right questions isn’t only a challenge in professional EWS racing it is a challenge in our educational system and more specifically in our learning environments. In the words of Ken Robinson, our educational systems are all too often focused on finding the right answer, which is usually at the back of book, and that we shouldn’t look at. Robinson is using humor to lesson the devastating foolishness of our practice and to spur us onto to acknowledging that we have a serious problem. If we just go along with the status quo and accept that our systems of education are primarily focused on conditioning students to find the right answers for the exam then we are missing the fact that our students are not learning because learning is not about finding the right answers it is about asking questions. Learning is the process of making meaningful connections and we can’t make those connections without asking questions— lots of questions from different perspectives. If we only focus on finding the right answers Clayton Christensen argues we will trap ourselves into marginal thinking because someone can’t be taught until they are ready to learn. Asking questions is how we open ourselves up to learning. Christensen argues that:

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.

Unfortunately, as I have stated above and pointed out in the post Foster Inquisitiveness Rather than Rebuild It our educational system focuses on right answers as opposed to starting with the pursuit of questions. I am not along in my assertions. In his book, A More Beautiful Question Warren Berger points to fact that our education systems reward rote answers over challenging inquiry. Berger uses research data to that shows that our children are filled with curiosity prior to going to school and by the time they are in their teens they have little curiosity for anything to do with the curriculum. He points to the correlation between the ages that children lose their curiosity and a number of questions that they ask.

Why have we created an educational system that quenches our learners curiosity and creativity? While the answer to this question is much more nuanced than I can deal with in this post but it is fair to suggest that our current system of education addresses the question of how we prepare large numbers of students to meet the needs of the industrial age. The problem we face is that we have moved beyond the industrial age into the digital information age and we are still operating on a educational system that asks questions related to problems from an earlier era. We have to start pushing educators to start questioning conventional or industrial age 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 differently. To explore these idea further check out the video or podcast in the post Are You Preparing Your Learners for Life or for the Test?

We need to create significant learning environments that will help to open up spaces in our educators minds for new ideas to fit. If we don’t purposely design our learning environments to address the questions and problems of the digital information age we can easily remain mired in marginal thinking and the status quo. It is very easy to maintain the focus on standardized testing, on covering the content, on checklists masquerading as rubrics, and the need to regurgitate the right answer. Maintaining the status quo is much easier then creating a significant environment where giving learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities will lead to making learners struggle with the anxiousness that comes with facing the challenges of deeper learning. We have to remember that authentic 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.

Perhaps we need to start asking:
Are You Preparing Them for Real Life or Just the Test?

References
Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

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

Robinson, K. (2010, Oct 14). RSA ANIMATE: Changing education paradigms. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U