I have been thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague who pointed out that improvement, growth, and ultimately results aren’t always about learning more, but instead just putting what we already know into practice. If you take your health as an example, we know how to stay healthy:  You have to get 8 hours of sleep, ensure proper nutrition, get regular exercise, among other things. These are all critical to staying healthy and living healthy lives at a basic level. There is plenty of research and evidence that supports these practices. Although we know the basic practice, what this looks like for each individual may vary. For instance, some people prefer to run for exercise and others like going to the gym or hiking. 

In education, similarly, it is not necessarily about learning more or trying to figure out how students learn (or educators). Thanks to learning sciences and brain research we know a lot about how we learn, and the barriers that exist. This is a great graphic that comes from Digital Promise and the Institute for Applied Neuroscience. They identified 10 key insights about how people learn, along with suggestions for how to apply this information to classroom practice. In many ways, it’s taking what we know, not what we have always done or what is easy, and putting it into practice. 

It is fair to point out that there are many barriers to these practices like time, resources, motivation etc. and even mandates that don’t align with the practices that we know are critical for meaningful and effective learning. To align our practices to the learning sciences requires that we understand the research and intentionally create new habits, routines, and structures that make these effective practices work.

Based on these key principles, here are 3 ways to use the learning sciences to create meaningful learning experiences.

1. Research Finding: Learning is a process that involves effort, mistakes, reflection, and refinement of strategies.

In spite of this research, I hear of policies where students get one chance to pass a test with no retakes or revisions to ensure the testing environment is “fair and equal.” If we look at the research on how we learn, we might want to consider other alternatives to this approach. Instead of having students exposed to the same content, submit the same assignment and take the unit test, we could create the structures for students to understand the goals and try, learn, reflect and refine to show mastery. 

For example:

• Student chooses a problem to solve or investigate based on learning goals
• Student gets a rubric on how the assignment is graded
• Student generates some ideas,
• Student shares ideas with diverse people, gets feedback (kind, specific and helpful)
• Revises ideas, creates something new and better (repeat as necessary)
• Student conferences with teacher or peers to get feedback based on learning goals and determine next steps
• Student is expected to turn in a perfect product that demonstrates learning and growth based on learning goals
• Feedback is given based on the expectations of learning goals 
• Lessons learned are applied to new problems and ideas and growth is documented along the way. 

2. Research Finding: Students are more motivated to learn when they are interested, have a sense of autonomy, and understand the purpose behind what they are learning.

A conversation I had with a 1st grader highlighted this challenge. He asked, “Why do I have to learn about butterflies? I wanted to know more about what they were learning and after probing a little bit more, he told me that they had glued some parts of the butterfly on paper and colored a picture.  There was a display on the back wall of 27 similar butterflies that each student made. Curiously, I asked, “What do you want to learn about?” He said, “chickens.” He then offered, “I already know about butterflies.”

His comments had stuck with me all week and were starkly contrasted with a classroom I visited where 1st graders were recording videos in pairs to narrate their informational writing.  I asked a student what she was writing about and she explained to me what she was learning about turtles and informed me that some of her friends were writing about Helen Keller, others about owls and continued to list a variety of other topics. The content was based on what the students wanted to learn but each of them, regardless of their chosen topic, were learning and practicing the skills to be better writers, communicators, and collaborators.  The teachers had taught them the skills that they were using to research on their ipads, organize information and share what they were learning. The students were at different stages of the writing process, teaching and learning from one another and beyond excited to share what they were writing. Beyond writing for the teachers as the only audience, they made videos to communicate what they learned about their topic of choice with friends, parents and anyone else who wanted to learn from them.

With access to an abundance of resources and experts to learn in ways that extend beyond the individual teacher and their expertise, we have opportunities to create more personal learning experiences that can allow students to develop the skills and apply them in ways that are meaningful and relevant to them.

3. Collaboration and social interaction can be powerful learning experiences because they encourage deeper processing and engage the ‘social brain.’

I had the opportunity to observe a lesson this week where students were learning about hydroponics and they had to create a design a system based on what they had learned. Individually, students reflected and drew their designs, then they worked together to share their designs and collaboratively create one design based on the ideas from the group. As I walked around and talked to students, they each noted how their group had taken ideas from each person to collectively make their ideas better. The next step is to build the design and each student will have opportunities to step up and step back based on their own strengths. 

What was even better about this lesson was that two teachers had collaborated to design it and then had the opportunity to observe the other teach the lesson. Although they had planned collaboratively many times in the past they had never seen each other teach. They were also modeling effective collaboration and taking their learning to the next level. 

Creating Alignment Between What We Know and What We Do

Renowned psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory explains how behaviors are learned through observation of behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. People learn from one another, through observation, imitation, and modeling. We learn how to act and react to situations from others. When schools are organized to facilitate positive learning models, and interactions are designed to promote learning for everyone, they foster behaviors that inspire lifelong learners. Both research and our own experiences tell us that the most powerful learning requires personal connections, relevance and experiences in our zone of proximal development and allow for productive struggle, yet our traditions and systems that have favored the efficiency of standardization have led us to different and often contradictory methods of structuring learning experiences in schools.

The misalignment between what we know and experience as learners and how we organize learning in schools can lack authenticity and impacts motivation of teachers and students alike. It is easy to let the systems of efficiency and standardization take over but If we truly value learners as individuals and want students to be able to find and solve problems, communicate effectively among learn to learn, we can no longer simply move through the curriculum. Grounding what we do in schools with research and ensuring it aligns with our context is about seeking to understand who the learners are, tapping into their strengths and interests to create better experiences and achieve desired outcomes for all students.