What do you believe is the major product of schools? My opinion is to achieve the ability and desire of students to learn new things. That is the product of learning!
The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.
–Clay Shirky
As Clay describes the digital internet age, it is far from minor and not optional. Right on the mark isn’t it? This description is particularly relevant for the need for continuous learning.
The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist. All this in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?
For students starting a 4 year technical or college degree, one half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are clearly living in exponential times, aren’t we?
What is your choice for the top learning issue of the day?
Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? I have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past. I was very surprised by this finding.
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grand parents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. Clearly a paradigm shift had begun. No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.
In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. As we said earlier, the amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability for continuous learning in such a fast changing and complex environment? We have defined 10 ways we believe are essential in achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:
Learn by doing
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world,actually doing, not reading or listening about doing. Confucius once said:
I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. And learn as many new things as possible. That means making your work environment be an environment of change. Rotate into new things to learn often. We believe this the most critical of the ways for schools to improve your learning.
Walt Whitman: Remember this above all. There is no royal road to learning.
Observe and reflect
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Give students more opportunity to increase their ability to ‘connect the dots’ around them.
Related post: Learning From Pet Dog Personality Traits
Present novelty
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and help students become an explorer. Continuously expand their boundaries of new experiences …include some far out things in different fields. Continuously practice connecting the dots of experiences.
Don’t fear failure
Students need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use the often times messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).
Related post: How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
Develop curiosity
Continually to get students to think about what they don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing student learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build students skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning.
Practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improving student learning.
Related post: Albert Einstein Facts and Wisdom
We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen for inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning in the classroom.
Embrace change and contrast
Students learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve learning, work on the experience of change … have students study trends and study changes going on around them. Get them to step out into the unknown as often as they can.
Understand the meaning
In learning, students tend to respond best when they determine things are that are most meaningful. Find the meanings that provide that which motivates us to dig deeper.
Connect and collaborate
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Have students find some online interesting connections who share like goals, and have them try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
In 1976, a British statistician named George Box wrote the famous line, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”
His point was that we should focus more on whether something can be applied to everyday life in a useful manner rather than debating endlessly if an answer is correct in all cases. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.”
