If anybody asks Donald Norman about rote learning, this is what he would say, taken from The Design of Everyday Things:
Rote learning creates problems. First, because what is being learned is arbitrary, the learning is difficult: it can take considerable time and effort. Second, when a problem arises, the memorized sequence of actions gives no hint of what has gone wrong, no suggestion of what might be done to fix the problem. Although some things are appropriate to learn by rote (the letters of the alphabet, for example), most are not. Alas, it is still the dominant method of instruction in many school systems, and even for much adult training. This is how some people are taught to use computers, or to cook. It is how we have to learn to use some of the new (poorly designed) gadgets of our technology.
Most psychologists would argue that it is not really possible to learn arbitrary associations or sequences. Even where there appears to be no structure, people manufacture some artificial and usually rather unsatisfactory one, which is why the learning is so bad. For our purposes it does not matter whether arbitrary learning is impossible or simply very difficult, the end result is the same: it is not the best way to go, not if there is any choice in the matter. Thus, in teaching the alphabet, we try to make it into a tune, using the natural constraints of rhyme and rhythm to simplify the memory load. People who have learned to use computers or cook by rote are probably not very good. Since they do not understand the reasons for their actions, they must find tasks arbitrary and strange. When something goes wrong, they don’t know what to do (unless they’ve memorized solutions). Although rote learning is at times necessary or efficient–so that emergency procedures for things like high-speed military jet aircraft are handled quickly, automatically when the need arises–on the whole, it is most unsatisfactory.
Filed under: Announcement
This week Jeff Shrager and I will be talking with a couple others that are interested in leading a new EduCamp event! Before, we were thinking it might be another year before we do another, but it be sooner than that. We’ll keep you posted.
Filed under: Ability, Desire, Education, Jamshid Gharajedaghi, Peter Senge, Systems Thinking, WB Yeats
I was reading Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity and I found something so relevant to education I had to include it in my manifesto. All the case studies towards the end of the book were about redesigning large organizations. Like The Fifth Discipline, the book seems like a management book, but as a book based on systems theory, it’s about so much more.
Plus learning is a core principle of systems thinking.The bit I liked was about designing the learning dimension of the organization. It described the function and role of a learning system as reinvigorating the ability and desire of the members to satisfy their needs and desires both individually and collectively. How wonderfully put!
Very wisely, it includes not just ability, but desire as an equally important responsibility of learning systems. It continues, Ability without desire is impotent, just as desire without ability is sterile. How much of what we consider to be education concerns itself with desire as much as ability?
“Education isn’t the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -WB Yeats
EduCamp is coming up in about a week and we didn’t even have a logo! Well we put one together inspired by the logo for the New York EduCamp that happened a while back. Thanks to William Doane, the organizer of the NY EduCamp, for letting us use the logo. Here’s ours:
If you’re coming, but sure to register with EventBrite and then let your friends know on upcoming.org and Facebook. See you guys next week!
Today a friend of mine showed me a website design he was working on to get feedback on the design and the idea. It was a site to help people learn Reason, a popular software tool for music production. I told him I liked the idea and pointed out some of his design decisions I particularly liked. After I thought about it, I realized it would really get him ahead if he used a blogging tool like WordPress instead of doing this site from scratch with HTML and built the site on top of that. So I told him he should do this design as a WordPress theme. His response via IM:
eh i could
but its actually for class
: (
What does that mean? It means he would, but this is just a class assignment. I asked him if he really wanted to make this site, and he said definitely. All of a sudden I remembered so many class projects that I was really excited about either because it really interested me or because it allowed me to do it around something that really interested me. The thing about all those projects was that I was never satisfied with how they turned out, but because it was a class project made that okay.
In fact, if I took the opportunity to take something I was doing outside of class and do it as a class project, that would almost certainly kill the project.
I hated that dynamic of school. You only really have time to do things for class, but the things you do are never enough of what you would really want to do if it wasn’t for class. Then because it’s for class, you don’t really want to treat it like it was something you really wanted to do. Instead it’s reduced to what most schoolwork is: busywork.
Instead of making it a WordPress theme and getting his site started, my friend made a very sane rationalization that it would be more work and more to learn than it would be worth as a school project.
Greatness is not encouraged in school because greatness is relative, and that’s very hard to industrialize. You generally get the lowest common denominator. Not all schools suffer from this, it’s mostly K-12, but even many colleges suffer from this and they used to be the hope after K-12.
Compare this to what some of the educators are doing that use systems thinking as a foundation. I saw a talk by Jay Forrestor that mentioned how some K-12 classes are daring to do things that nobody else is. One example was a class that was redesigning the population policy of China, and they actually engaged the Chinese government to get real data to work with on this real problem. It was a thrilling experience for the kids to actually engage a foreign government to work on something real. In that context it would be a bit harder to look at it as “just a class assignment.”
Filed under: Daniel Greenberg, Democracy, Education, Fairhaven, Sudbury, Teachers, Videos
There are an increasing number of schools, though still not all that many, that are based on the idea of democracy. In a country so enamored with democracy that we feel the need to impose it onto others, you would think there would be more schools built around this great thing. Sudbury Valley School founder Daniel Greenberg is one of the few that believes strongly enough in democratic education that he did just that.
He poses a good question. How can you expect a kid to know what democracy is when for 12 years or more they’re raised in an autocratic, fascist society?
The Sudbury democratic school has been used as the model for 40 other schools around the world. One of them, Fairhaven School of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, was featured in a documentary called Voices from the New American Schoolhouse. The trailer gives a glimpse at what the Sudbury model is like from the perspective of the kids attending.
Russ Ackoff is one of the most convincing and articulate critics of the major deficiencies of our education system. He’s considered the dean of systems thinking. At the National Summit on School Design he gave the keynote speech. He asked how many in the audience had taught a course. Then he asked, “Who learned the most in the class that you taught?” The audience murmured and Ackoff said,
You see, everybody recognizes immediately that teachers are the ones who learn the most. School is absolutely upside down. Students ought to be teaching. The faculty ought to be learning.
This points out two major deficiencies in our school system. The first is obvious: if teaching is how you learn the most, maybe we should be teaching kids to teach. The benefits of this alone would have a huge impact on the effectiveness of schools. Ackoff then goes on to describe how this used to take place in one-room schools as a necessity, and the success story of having 7 year old kids teach arithmetic to a computer in order to learn it themselves. It’s a great keynote and you can listen to it here.
The second deficiency is about the inability of schools to change. For whatever reason, possibly because of a government monopoly, our public schools have not fundamentally changed since they were introduced in the 1850s. Unless schools are able to learn, they will not be able to become more efficient at their purpose. Unless schools are able to adapt, they will not be able to remain effective in a changing environment, which is only going to happen faster.
I’m writing a manifesto for ChangeThis based on the educational work of Russ Ackoff, John Dewey, John Taylor Gatto, Peter Senge, and Ken Robinson. Hopefully it will elucidate the problems of education and inspire new approaches that will make a difference. Here is a excerpt on the topic of adaptability:
In the Industrial Age, the education planners could depend on just increasing how many children were educated, much like the assembly line increasing the production of goods. Henry Ford effectively dissolved the problem of “how many” with the assembly line and mass production. But he failed to appreciate the implications of this success by not addressing the problem of “what kind” that comes with abundance. Because of the statement, “They can have any color as long as it is black,” Ford gave GM the opportunity to eventually dominate the market.
With compulsory assembly line schools and college graduates at an all-time high, we’ve achieved abundance from a high-throughput education system. The problem has since been “what kind” of education, but with the alarming rate of new fields coming into existence, we’re starting to fall behind. It’s not just one target, it’s an increasing number of faster moving targets. We simply have no idea what’s going to be needed, and we must redesign the system to address this.
Today our education focuses more on teaching than learning. While that may not be ideal, it makes it clear that the most important asset of today’s system are the teachers. A good teacher could make a difficult subject easier, a boring class interesting, and sometimes even make you forget you’re in school. The best teachers would teach you things you remember for life that for some reason didn’t have anything to do with what class they taught.
I think the significance of teachers is mostly forgotten or ignored. I have a theory that in the back of their minds, most people already know that most of school is a shallow institution of proving how smart you are as opposed to a resource for learning. And this is why we don’t value teachers as much as we should.
Still, we entrust our kids to teachers for the majority of their most pliable and influential years. Having a great teacher can have a profound effect on who you become as an adult. Nobody I know has said this better than Taylor Mali…
Since 1991, Peter Senge has been writing books around his packaged version of systems thinking principles called the Fifth Discipline. It turns out Peter Senge was a student of Jay Forrester, the father of System Dynamics and those cool little stock and flow diagrams for modeling dynamic systems. Anyway, fairly recently Senge put out a Fifth Discipline book called Schools That Learn that applies systems thinking principles to education systems, from classroom to community.
The book covers a lot, including a brief history of modern schools systems, which originated at the dawn of the Industrial Age. It was then when European states started building educational infrastructure to help compete in this new era of science and technology. As the book describes,
The result was an industrial-age school system fashioned in the image of the assembly line, the icon of the booming industrial age. In fact, schools may be the starkest example in modern society of an entire institution modeled after the assembly line. Like any assembly line, the system was organized into discrete stages. Called grades, they segregated children by age. Everyone was supposed to move from stage to stage together. Each stage had local supervisors–the teachers responsible for it. Classes of twenty to forty students met for specified periods in a scheduled day to drill for tests. The whole school was designed to run at a uniform speed, complete with bells and rigid daily time schedules.
This very mechanistic model of the school, as well as the assembly line, was the result of the Machine Age worldview, which was responsible for the Industrial Revolution itself. Since World War II, this way of thinking has started to have limited application because it fails to address new issues that we’ve since discovered because of the efforts of industrialism.
As it turns out, schools are the only remaining institution entirely based on this worldview. In hindsight, we can see the disadvantages of this model that we should probably not tolerate any longer.
Those who did not learn at the speed of the assembly line either fell off or were forced to struggle continually to keep pace. It established uniformity of product and process as norms, thereby naively assuming that all children learn in the same way. It made educators into controllers and inspectors, thereby transforming the traditional mentor-mentee relationship and establishing teacher-centered rather than learner-centered learning. Motivation became the teacher’s responsibility rather than the learner’s. Discipline became adherence to rules set by the teacher rather than self-discipline. Assessment centered on gaining the teacher’s approval rather than objectively gauging one’s own capabilities.
