On November 28, I attended a truly excellent webinar conversation with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, hosted by Intrepid Ed News and OESIS. Once again, I was struck by the response of so many teachers and administrators who, when presented with new insights into how people learn (insights that challenge the status quo), want very specific answers to questions about how they can implement these insights in their classrooms: “What do I do on Monday morning?” “What would the day-to-day experience look like for the kids?”

While these reactions are understandable, they are an abdication of responsibility and suggest that educators feel incapable of undertaking the hard work of finding their own answers, a notion I reject. The teachers I have known and worked with have proven more than capable of innovative thinking. Although my example hearkens back to the 1990s, ten years before Dr. Immordino-Yang’s insights into learning and emotion, it will, I believe, illustrate a process that might work for any faculty at any school.

Defining the problem

Our faculty room was always rumbling with the humor of trench camaraderie, teachers masking their exhausted disappointment and sense of failure by regaling one another with jokes focused on their students’ inability to learn something (“The South lost the Civil War because they had to fight uphill.”). At graduation, many of the teachers sitting onstage shared running whispered jocular commentary on the scholastic worthiness of various seniors as they came forward to receive a diploma. All this mordant humor seemed to make the basic problem fairly clear:

• Too many of our students were graduating with weak skills and little lasting knowledge.
• Too many approached learning superficially with no deep or meaningful motivation.
• Their approach to their studies was typically do-it-to-get-it-done and memorize-it-for-the-test.
• Traditional structures, it seemed, (schedule, requirements, age groupings, subject-specific departments) and teaching methods (lecture, discover-what’s-in-the-teacher’s-head “discussions”), while effective for some, some of the time, were ineffective for too many all of the time.

Undertaking an examination of assumptions about learning as a strategy to understand the problem

The curriculum committee (the academic leaders, all but three of whom were also teachers) began to discuss the manifestations of the problem and several related issues. We decided to participate as a group in an exercise: Each of us would recall a specific time when we did our best learning—when we felt most deeply engaged and excited as we experienced the development of a skill or new understanding. The learning did not have to take place in school, and we consciously anchored our memories in our perspective as learners rather than in our role as teachers. After all, our focus was learning, not teaching. The goal was to identify specific conditions that we felt were most responsible for our own successful learning.

At the end of probably a half hour or so of silently recalling our experiences and jotting down these conditions, we each presented our list, and the chair wrote them on the white boards around the room. We then collected the ones that were most often repeated—a list of conditions under which we learn best:

• When we care and are motivated and enthusiastic.
• When we have determined what is important and have taken responsibility for our own learning.
• When we feel the need to learn and the specific knowledge or skills are relevant to our personal life and interests.
• When we put into practice or use whatever we have studied to accomplish goals that matter to us.
• When the learning feels substantive and meaningful.
• When we concentrate in depth on one thing at a time.
• When we have time for reflection and for the unconscious to work.
• When we discover what works and what doesn’t instead of being told what’s right or wrong.
• When we have a certain amount of independence to teach ourselves and to realize when we need an expert (teacher) as a resource.
• When what we are learning is appropriate to our intellectual capacity and background.
• When we perceive growth though successful experiences achieved in situations that we feel are challenging.
• When, if working with a teacher, mutual respect exists.
• When we make connections between bits of knowledge, and when we have fit new knowledge into our own system of understanding or truth (often resulting in having to expand or adjust our sense of truth).
• When we see the value of what we are doing not only to our future but in the present.
• When we have some control over the pace of learning.

We then contrasted this list with a list of beliefs about learning that seem embodied in traditional school structures and teaching practices—students will learn:

• What adults have determined is important.
• What teachers teach (teacher as the source of knowledge).
• When they are motivated, so a primary responsibility of teachers is to motivate students; teachers are responsible for student learning.
• Whatever excites the teacher—typically, the discoveries and ideas of others, how others see the world.
• By reading about, listening to, and memorizing.
• Pieces of departmentalized knowledge and skills that have no apparent relationship to each other.
• When they focus on one area for about 50 minutes and then move quickly to another and repeat the process four or five times a day.
• When all teachers treat their separate area of study as the most important and demand one hour of intense homework between each class.
• When assigned large quantities of material to learn.
• When they are asked to answer questions quickly, and tests cover the largest amount of material in the least time—reflex rather than reflection.
• When they are told what is correct and incorrect.
• When they are challenged to learn complex and sophisticated ideas before they are ready to understand them.
• When they are told they will value in the future whatever they are learning now.
• When they fail, so teachers should emphasize errors.
• When they respect their teachers as knowledgeable authorities.

Addressing the problem

The contrasts between these two lists and the insights we gained from discussing them resulted in an increasing openness of the faculty to exploring possible solutions. The details of the problem became clear, and we discovered that we had a lot in common—shared beliefs about learning and shared concerns about teaching:

• Students’ high school experience is too fragmented and disjointed.
• Motivation is linked to interest; interest is linked to the opportunity to make meaning—to find personal significance, to make sense of the world.
• Inquiry and discovery are more likely paths to significance than is rote learning.
• College teachers want incoming students with strong essential skills (writing, reasoning, reading, speaking, listening, study, research, and creative abilities), so perhaps it might make sense for teachers to focus more on helping students develop these skills and give students more control over choosing the knowledge domains that interest them.

As a result of these discoveries, the curriculum committee created an ad hoc subcommittee to continue the process of analysis and discussion and invited Ted Sizer (the Coalition of Essential Schools) to speak to the faculty about his work, a visit that resulted in more momentum. The ideas generated by his visit and in the ad hoc committee became the focus for a series of open discussions in voluntary (not required) faculty forums.

Eventually, we decided to focus on redesigning the ninth grade year as a first step in creating new structures to support changes to the ninth grade curriculum and teaching and to create a basis for later changes in the 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grades. At this point, the ad hoc committee expanded by inviting any teachers who wanted to participate in this work. The committee grew to about 25 members, roughly a quarter of the faculty, and worked for a year to create the philosophy, goals, and broad outline of this new program (about which I have previously written). After the curriculum committee and the full faculty voted to implement the program, we hired four volunteers who wanted to teach in the program to work over the summer on the specifics—what would happen on Monday morning, what the day-to-day experience would look like for the kids.

Although, in the light of Immordino-Yang’s research, I hope the contrast between the list of conditions that supported our best learning and the list of assumptions about learning reflected in traditional school design might stimulate conversation, my purpose in writing about this process is not to offer a blueprint for other schools to follow. My purpose is to illustrate the ability of any school’s teachers and administrators to find their own answers to the question, “How do we translate Immordino-Yang’s research to the classroom?” (even though an answer might well include the conclusion that we do away with the classroom, which remains a tenacious vestige of the empty-vessel, transfer-of-knowledge assumptions about learning). The educators at our school were no smarter or more innovative than those in any other school. If we could find answers, any faculty can. The key is to study the neuroscience of learning, understand and internalize it, and then to devise strategies for exploring honestly the matches and mismatches between this understanding and the reality of what students experience as school: its structures, policies, and practices.

Asking others for answers short circuits a more essential, creative, and dynamic process and reveals a fundamental flaw: Schools are too much about students and teachers relying on “authority” for answers and not enough on undertaking the hard work of asking themselves the questions and creating strategies for finding their own answers. Understanding answers that we have found for ourselves tends to result in deeper, more complex, and nuanced learning. Received answers carry the danger of the proverbial little knowledge: Received answers are often only partly understood or completely misunderstood, and they become obstacles to achieving the necessary “Copernican shift” that Immordino-Yang challenges us to make.

I’ll end with a story that I have told before, a story that first helped me understand this problem with schools. Many years ago, I studied acting at the HB Studio in New York City with a wonderful teacher named Walt Witcover. In his first class, he asked, “Who wants to start?” That’s all he said. He didn’t identify what we were to start. It was simply, “Who wants to start?” Well, this was a class of serious theatre types who wanted to be professional actors, so someone quickly volunteered. The volunteer moved to the performance space at the front of the room. Walt sat down with us. 

Silence. We looked at the volunteer, and he looked at us. He smiled nervously. He cleared his throat and looked at Walt. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. Silence. He became visibly uncomfortable. He fidgeted and twitched, shifted his weight. “I don’t know what you want me to do.” He spoke with tension and frustration. Silence. He began to tell a story. He stopped. He began to recite a monologue. He laughed. Silence. He sang the beginning of a song. Silence. He became angry. “That’s it,” he said. 

            “You’re finished?” asked Walt. 

             “Yes,” said the volunteer. 

             “How do you know?” asked Walt.

            Walt taught us a simple lesson that day: Most of us had no idea what we wanted to achieve on stage. We came to the theatre as actors waiting to be told what to do. We were accustomed to turning ourselves over to a director, letting someone else give us direction. 

            This sort of passivity characterizes too much of student and adult life in our schools.

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You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Alden “Denny” Blodget for Intrepid Ed News.