Context
One of the messages on the Information Literacy Instruction mailing list today referenced this blog post. I encourage you to read it yourself, but here's the quick summary: it's about using a learning cycle consisting of assimilation, accommodation, and organization as a model for library instruction.
Commentary
This is my interpretation of the learning cycle described by Frierson: assimilation is when we receive information, accommodation is how we match up new information to what we already know, and organization is how we decide to use the information. Let me give an example of how this works: I look at my thermometer and assimilate that the temperature outside is 49 degrees Fahrenheit. I accommodate this knowledge by remembering that in the past when it has been 49 degrees, I've been pretty chilly. I organize the information by deciding to wear a coat.
Teaching is often treated as just a process of putting information out there so students can assimilate it. In return, students sometimes bypass accommodation entirely and only organize the information so they can regurgitate it on an exam. Teachers are frustrated because students don't appear to learn; students are frustrated because teachers don't appear to offer anything of lasting value (Where am I ever going to diagram sentences in the real world?).
Early in his teaching career, my husband attended a workshop called Teaching and Learning. He learned all kinds of useful stuff there; I learned for the first time that education is not just about teaching, but about learning as well. In other words, you can be the best teacher in the whole world, but if your students aren't learning, it's a pointless exercise for everyone. This can be terrifying to teachers, because although we have complete control over how we present information, we have no control over how students accommodate it or organize it. The best we can hope for is to accompany them in that process and maybe learn something ourselves.
There's also a time factor. Presenting information generally doesn't take long, whether we talk, or give the students something to read, or even demonstrate a task. However, waiting for each individual student to find existing knowledge in his/her brain to tack the new information to and decide how she/he wants to use it is not only time-consuming, it's unpredictably time-consuming.
A typical response is to say we don't have time to teach that way. I don't buy it. Here is my philosophy about time: we have time to do everything we really want to do. I have a similar philosophy about money, but I won't go into that. Anyway, when it comes to time constraints, I think what we're really saying is we don't have time to do something and . . . "I don't have time to do the dishes tonight" really means "I don't have time to do the dishes tonight and go to bed early so I can get up early tomorrow and not be sleepy." We're setting some priorities, which is reasonable, but it's not the same as having no time to do the dishes.
So why don't we have time to teach in such a way that students will want to learn and be successful doing so? Because what we prioritize more highly is "covering material." Of all the insidious ideas to infiltrate education, this has got to be the worst. OK, I'm not super fond of group work either, but I digress. I don't know how we ever got to a place where we believe it is more important for a teacher to get through a certain number of lessons or concepts or textbook pages than it is for students to actually learn something.
Actually, I'm lying. I know exactly how we got here; it's through mistrust and laziness. We don't trust teachers to teach, so we want to evaluate them. But measuring how much a student has learned, as opposed to how much he/she can remember at test time, is difficult. So we settle for a quantitative measure, like a percentage of right answers, instead of a qualitative one, like how good a student is at formulating worthwhile answers to substantive questions of her/his own devising. But man, that material gets covered!
What did you see today?
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