Learners Gain Experience

Here’s a window inside the 4-P classroom. As I wrote about in an earlier post, we’ve been talking about how people learn.

This is a re-blog from my classroom blog.

Jamba on the windshield
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Martin LaBar via Compfight

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been offering the children a look inside their learning brains. No, we haven’t actually lifted up anyone’s scalp to peer inside, but we have explored some of the things I learned about learning while reading Dan Willingham’s wonderful book, Why don’t students like school?

I promised them a look at how people learn so they could be more conscious of the kinds of habits that good learners possess.

First, we started off with this poster that I created (based on Willingham’s book.)

How do we get all that new stuff inside our head?

Our big question was this: How do I get all that new stuff out there, all the way inside my head so I can learn it well?

It turns out that curiosity didn’t kill the cat after all, but it does make us good learners. To even begin learning something we have to somehow experience it. The more we experience, the more chance we have to learn.

Experience is really important! How do we get more of it??

Experience is really important! How do we get more of it??

As the days went by we talked about how we could make sure we had more experiences so our “bank” of experiences was bigger. We generated a list of things we could do, or ways we could be, that would help us gather good experiences from which to learn:

  • Develop “stick-to-it-tiveness” (persistence / perseverance.) If we stick with something, even though it is hard we might learn new things. Quitting something too early cuts off our experience, and only opens us up to experiences that are easy for us, which usually means we already know a lot about them in the first place. New stuff just is hard. There’s no way around it!
  • Read a lot. We realized that readers can “experience” more of the world than non-readers because they are able to multiply their experiences by all the experiences they have through the books they read. They can learn about things they have never seen, or about things they have never experienced in real life.
  • Travel. We can go new places with a mind that is open to the new-ness of that place. This could be going to some place as far away as China, or as close-by as the creek or Niagra Cave.
  • Try new things. We can search out new things to try. Maybe there is a sport, or a book, or a game, a place, or a person that we would like to get to know better. By searching these out, we can grow our own brains, and become good learners.
  • Build things. We can build things to help us learn how things work. Children talked about Lego-League, or building bridges, or “building” imaginative places around the house or at recess. These are all ways to explore how things work together to make something whole.
  • Develop curiosity. A lot of this comes down to developing a curious and attentive mind. Curious people are good learners.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be talking more about the habits and characteristics we can develop to help ourselves become the best learners we can be. This is a nice start!

6 thoughts on “Learners Gain Experience

    • Kim!
      Thanks so much for the kind words and the encouragement. It’s strange…I’ve never met you and Jan, but I feel such a strong sense of shared purpose and collegiality from you two! Here’s to a meeting sometime in the future!

      I’m curious to see where this exploration of thinking is going. The kids have responded well to it so far. We don’t spend a lot of time during any one day talking about it, but it’s in the back of our minds as we move through our day.

      I was really impressed with the way they identified some of the elements of a “growth mindset” as important to learning, just by exploring some of the learning they’ve done in their relatively short lives so far. I guess that just goes to show that if I can remember to open up important things for them to talk about (and ask questions, rather than offer a lot of statements), they can do a lot of heavy intellectual lifting already.

  1. Sigh. I so wanted to join this brain-workings journey this year, and I so got side-tracked by returning to self-contained and having to figure out math workshop. (Only so much a brain can do, after all…)

    • I was struck by your poem(s) “Best” last week, which seem to speak to being sidetracked and over-worked. I feel very busy, too, moving to fourth grade and trying to find my self in a new literacy curriculum. Poetry, for instance, has ground to a halt. Never a good sign.

      What I’ve learned from my “study” of the brain is that our working memory can only hold so much stuff. I’ve also learned that it takes a lot of glucose to keep that stuff there, which might explain the dark chocolate I’ve been eating lately… 🙂

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