Learning to learn
Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are exchanged in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning.
Learning to learn is key to understanding a domain. Suppose you want to learn about Roman empire, how do you go about doing it ? Is it by reading a book ‘The Fall of Roman Empire” ? Is it by watching Youtube videos ? Is it by googling and following the links that are thrown at you ? Is it by joining an online course ? Is it by sitting in a history class ?
I feel it is by all of this and more. First of all there is content on a topic that is available widely on the Web. Unless a topic is cutting edge, it is easy to find vast materials on any topic.
Once you find the right content, spending time reading it is the first thing to be done to get all the concepts, terms, people, places, things, dates. Initially it is an uphill task as your brain has to get tuned to the new world you are going through. You have to give it adequate breaks to pause and reflect. Over time what you learn creates a knowledge graph or a concept map around the topics.
As you learn, you start questioning the knowledge graph which you gather. Why did the Roman empire fall ? Why Socrates was made to drink poison ? Why did Brutus kill Caeser ? What is the role of the Roman Senate ? and so on. Questioning helps to identify connections between the concepts learnt which may not be obvious while reading.
Over time, as you explore other topics, say, about Indo-Pak conflict or the emerging role of India and China, new perspectives emerge on what you read earlier about Roman empire or how what is happening now has a precedence in the past. When you read fiction written around topics, your imagination spreads and it brings in more possibilities to visualise untouched areas around a topic.
Thus learning involves a constant Read, Understand, Reflect, Question, Connect repeatedly. The graph grows bigger with time. The summarized view of a topic gets more precise. Filtered, refined knowledge becomes possible on a topic.
When we are in school, this is brought in by the various text books, the way the teacher guides you to read and understand the content in the text book, makes you question, makes you debate etc. The teacher guides this process of how to learn as school children can easily memorise than question what they learn. As you grow up, the ability to question, relate disparate concepts improve, memorising takes a back seat. We shun books and end up going to them as a reference material to augment or to substantiate our thinking.
So what is the role of ‘content’ or ‘knowledge’ that helps students to nurture the skill of ‘learning to learn’ ? It appears like the ‘content’ or ‘knowledge’ should be something interesting definitely. Pictures, Videos are absorbed easily than text. English or a language is absorbed better than abstract language like Math. The age of the student also pretty much relates to the type of content. A fifth grader can probably understand geometrical shapes and their relations than Probability and Statistics. What may go well with whom is very personal.
Even if we have research that indicates the type of content that can be in general taught for students of a certain grade, it may not go well with all of them. Our tailor made curriculum that has Science, Math, Social science etc. may work only at an average level to kindle interest in those subjects. For example, social science that teaches ‘Democracy or how the Representatives are elected for the parliament’ can surely be a boring and often difficult to understand concept for a fifth grader. This is because they do not yet understand the social and political structure.
In a way, it is a gamble to create a curriculum that works for students of a certain grade. The school offers a very limited choice in terms of ‘interesting content’. This is where the Web offers multitude of choices. Instead of printing books on a fixed number of subjects like Math, Science or others, it is easy to identify a set of hyperlinks that can help understand a specific topic and point the student at them. The teacher can now ask the student to talk about it to other students who are also enrolled for those topics, sort of Birds of a Feather. When each of them talk about it they get to learn more from each other on that topic. This may sound more like what adults do or what students in colleges do. But this can easily be brought in early in schools may be at a High school level.
Abandoning school text books for good allows to explore freely, find the best content on the Web and be able to discuss and expand the learning around that topic. This also can improve the motivation levels of Students as they are no longer made to learn a fixed curriculum, instead, they can be given a very vast set of topics in any subject (like science for example) that can relate to one another (like a Wikipedia) and can be made to learn them as a group.
A student who finds Trigonometry difficult may learn it from another student and in turn impart a topic like Electricity which he or she understands better. It brings in a lot more sense of ‘how to learn’ for the students than passive learning listening all day to lectures. Grading and exams can be abandoned and instead making them ‘create’ or ‘replicate’ products around the concepts they learn or publish new thinking can go a long way in understanding concepts better. For example, someone making a Telescope on their own can understand the topic of ‘Optics’ better than blindly learning Optics from text books, writing exams and then ending up selling toys for a living.
