Sandra Dodd

The following is from the Car Talk site. The link was sent to me by
one of the fine unschooling moms "from the AOL days, " MsTerrE
(Nancy). It's been sitting in my e-mail since before Christmas.
Busy season, busy January, sorry I'm so behind in passing on the good
stuff.

If anyone here is having a hard time reaching some male person,
relative, husband, maybe send this link:

http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/ATC/Education/r-rlast15.html



The text is below for those who don't like to follow links, and all
of this can be deleted by anyone not interested in reading stuff from
non-unschooling parents. I think it's wonderful, though. (The bio
is fun, too, and illuminating, and touching, and inspiring.)




The New Theory of Learning

by Thomas L. Magliozzi


A few people actually read my bio, in which I refer to the New Theory
of Learning. Some people asked, "What is the New Theory of Learning?"
Well, here it is.

This is not really a "rant." In fact, it's one of the few topics that
I think I actually know something about. And it's not really new. The
problem is that it's so old we seem to have forgotten it and been
caught up in so-called "modern" methods of teaching.

The theory derives from many years of teaching experience. Nearly all
of this teaching has been to MBA candidates. But, since I wrote this
(about a year ago) I've been noticing how even little kids learn, and
I'm more and more convinced that the New Theory may apply at ALL
levels of learning. Let me know what you think.

Premise I: THE LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE THEORY

I was a college professor for decades, during which time I became
convinced that education had not progressed much beyond the Little
Red Schoolhouse theory of learning. We put an expert in a roomful of
people and the expert proceeds to tell them everything he knows.

A major problem with this approach is that we ask people to sit and
listen for long periods of time. Studies indicate that under such
circumstances, we have an attention span of 20-30 minutes, and we
retain about 20 percent of what we hear. This so-called "teaching"
doesn't result in much learning. It results in, maybe, someone
remembering enough to pass a test. It's not learning. It's passing a
test. You walk away from the test and the valve in your brain opens
and POOF--out goes the information to make room for the subject of
the next test. An old Chinese proverb offers some guidance here.

Tell me and I will surely forget.
Show me and I might remember.
But make me do it, and I will certainly understand.

Listening does not lead to understanding; doing does lead to
understanding. Does the cobbler teach his son how to cobble by
telling him about it? Does the doctor learn to perform appendectomies
by reading about them? No. They DO IT.

From my own personal experiences, doing something does lead to more
learning. Perhaps your experience bears this out as well.

So, the first element of the New Theory is that students must "do" as
opposed to sitting and listening.

Premise II: ONLY REAL REALITY IS REALITY

Of course, there are various teaching methods that allow "doing" (for
example, in MBA programs we use cases and term projects).

A word about cases (which I have used for nearly all my years of
teaching). The MBA case is an attempt to make the student "do it."
But it's a somewhat feeble attempt. First of all, because the student
very soon learns how to analyze cases and to feed back to the
instructor what s/he knows the instructor wants to hear. Secondly,
cases very soon get boring. Cases are dead, flat pieces of paper.
They are an attempt to bring reality into the classroom, but they
fail because they are very poor substitutes for real reality. The
medical intern may spend some time on cadavers, but would you want a
doctor trained on cadavers to operate on your heart? Me either.

The second element of the New Theory, then, is this: If you're going
to DO it, you must do it with real people in real situations.

Some may argue against this part of the theory on the following
grounds. "What happens to the syllabus?" "How can one predict that
the real situation will offer all the opportunities for subject
matter that the expert deems necessary for this course?" The answer
is that you can't predict that it will. In fact, you can be pretty
damned sure it won't. It will offer far more! One of the benefits of
REAL reality teaching is that it becomes--of necessity--
multidisciplinary. You don't encounter issues that all "fit" into one
course. In MBA programs, for example, nearly all problems involve
everything: marketing, finance, organizational behavior, operations
research. You CAN'T isolate anything. Everything depends on
everything else.

Premise III: THE BACKWARDS LEARNING THEORY

Here's a critical issue. People in the Little Red Schoolhouse
environment have little (or no) idea of why they should want to know
what the expert knows. In essence, we give them answers before they
can really understand what the questions are. Sometimes, we tell them
what the questions are. But mostly, they have no real understanding
of the relevance of the questions to their lives. Example: "Now I'm
going to teach you how to read financial statements." They ask, "Why
would I want to know that?" No matter how we answer, they interpret
it as, "Because you will then be able to get a higher-paying job."
This is supposed to motivate people to want to learn. It doesn't.
Motivation literature is very clear on this point. It tells us that
real motivation doesn't derive from external rewards (like money or
grades) but from intrinsic rewards (wanting to know and deriving
satisfaction from, for example, solving a problem). Our current
techniques motivate students to struggle to remember enough to pass
an exam.

Question:
Why are we trying to teach people who don't really want to learn?
Motivation is the key. Of course, we know that some people are self-
motivated. They have a desire to learn everything and anything. We
don't have to worry about them. But others need to know why they
should listen to you or me. Most of the problem here is that people
are in colleges who don't belong in colleges. How the heck can an 18-
year-old kid know anything about anything--or more importantly, care
about anything, besides the opposite sex? We fill up schools with
kids wasting their parent's money and looking for a place to
socialize. There are better, less expensive, and more productive ways
to do that. But I digress.

Here's what I've noticed about the relationship between learning and
motivation. Maybe you've noticed it, too. Have you ever been faced
with a problem like any of the following? Maybe you're trying to
decide how to deal with a particularly difficult person. Or maybe
you're staring at a pile of numbers and you don't know what the hell
it all means. Or, you're trying to decide whether to invest some
money in a company and you can't make sense of the financials. Or--
whatever. It's a problem for which you WANT an answer.

Let's take the first example--a difficult person--just to follow
through on what you might do. You simply don't understand why the
person is behaving the way she is behaving. If you understood why,
you might be able to figure out what to do. Faced with such a problem
you might seek out an expert--someone who understands people's
behavior. He might give you some insights. He might suggest that the
problem really isn't unique. Lots of people act this way under
certain circumstances. YOU MIGHT NOTICE THAT IN SUCH A SITUATION YOU
ARE LISTENING VERY INTENTLY. QUITE UNLIKE THE WAY YOU LISTEN IN A
CLASSROOM. He, the expert, might even suggest some things you might
read to find out more. You can't wait to get to the library. You find
books, articles. You read.

Think about HOW you're reading in this situation. Is it the same as
the way you read textbooks when you were a student? It sure as hell
isn't. The difference is that you're INTERESTED in finding the answer.

Think about it some more. What do you actually do under these
situations? Do you read everything? No. You're looking for answers to
specific questions. What happens is this. You look at a lot of books
and articles until you find something that seems relevant. You read
it. Something strikes a chord: maybe a word, maybe a theory, maybe a
description of a certain personality type that matches the one you're
dealing with. Now you go in search of more info on that personality
type. You find more books. They lead you to more. And pretty soon,
you know what to do and how to do it.

While all this was happening, how might you have felt? Were you
saying to yourself, "God, I wish I didn't have to read all this?" Did
you yawn a lot? Did you ask, "Why am I reading this?" Hell no. You
probably wished you had more to read. More people to answer your
questions. You were--LEARNING!

Notice what happened. You worked backwards. You started with the
problem. A problem that you had a need or desire to solve. You
started somewhere--either with an expert or a book--and you went
whereever it took you. And you went more than willingly; not with
someone dragging you, kicking and screaming. You went because you
wanted to go. Because you knew it was taking you where you wanted to go.

So here's the third element of the New Theory:

Work backwards. Start with the problem and go wherever it takes you.

That's the theory that's been evolving for me over all my years of
teaching. Don't let an "expert" stand in front of people and tell
them everything s/he knows. This is mostly just an ego trip for the
expert, and a very boring experience for the victims. The overhead
projector has done more to destroy learning than any other thing I
can think of.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]