How Learning Works

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

In remote organisations, we not only need to work asynchronously (see 💡Asynchronous Working), but also teach and learn asynchronously. To do this well, we first need to understand a little bit about how learning works.

Any document on How Learning Works could easily run to a thousand pages: learning is clearly a very complex topic! So while we barely scratch the surface here, I can provide a few principles by way of an introduction. Let's start with a definition of learning...

A process that leads to change, which occurs as a result of experience and increases the potential for improved performance and future learning.

There are three critical components to this definition:

1. Learning is a process, not a product. But because this process takes place in the mind, we can only infer that it has occurred from learners' products or performances.
2. Learning involves change in knowledge, beliefs, behaviours, or attitudes. This change unfolds over time: it is not fleeting but rather has a lasting impact on how students think and act.
3. Learning is not something done to students, but something students themselves do. It is the direct result of how students interpret and respond to their experiences—conscious and unconscious, past and present.

Now let's look at some principles we can use to help us create useful learning experiences...

First and foremost, good learning experiences are always centered on the learner. If you've ever sat through a boring lecture or clicked through a series of endless e-learning slides, you've likely experienced learning that is instructor-centered. Much like good user interfaces require designers to focus on the user-experience by putting the users needs first, good learning requires learning designers to focus on the learner-experience by putting their needs first.

It's also worth remembering that people all learn differently, so we can't expect everything we design to work perfectly for everyone all the time.

The Learning Environment 🏠

As with most things, our environment has a huge impact on our ability to learn.

The Remote Learning Environment

Creating a good learning environment can be hard in a remote setting. In real life, we have control over learners' physical, digital and social environments. In the remote world it's very hard to influence the first two.

But we can influence the social environment within a group of learners - which makes it especially important for us to focus on this when designing remote learning.

Seven Learning Principles 🔢

There are an infinite number of principles we could talk about here, but we're going to focus on seven core ideas taken from the book How Learning Works. (link below)

1️⃣ Students' prior knowledge can help or hinder learning

Students are not blank slates – they come to us with all sorts of prior knowledge. In a perfect world, all students will arrive with correct (if incomplete) knowledge. Our job would just be to add knowledge to their existing mental models.

Often, though, students will arrive with incorrect knowledge and mental models. If we simply add to these, we are just adding to a flawed mental model (and often causing much confusion along the way). In this case, we need to correct their existing mental model before we can add to it.

Students' prior knowledge can help or hinder learning

old books.jpg By Michele DiPietro

cetl.kennesaw.edu

2️⃣ How students organise knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know

If we can help students to organise their knowledge, they're more likely to make connections and build knowledge networks. This is crucial to applying knowledge in new contexts.

Generally, experts tend to be much better at this because they have denser and more evolved knowledge networks.

As we expose learners to new information, we should also try to facilitate guided opportunities for them to increase the density and meaning of the connections they make with existing knowledge. As it's simplest level, this could involve linking new learning to prior learning in our courses.

3️⃣ Students' motivation determines, directs and sustains what they do to learn

Nobody will learn if they don't want to... we cannot order someone to learn! Instead, we must inspire students to want to learn. This means we need to promote and maintain a strong desire to learn and a sense of curiosity.

It also means that learners will inevitably be interested in learning about different things. Our school systems tend to discourage this, but we should try to lean into it. If someone is especially interested in something we should encourage them to follow that path - they'll be much more motivated to learn.

4️⃣ To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned

We want our learners to really master the things they are learning - if they don't, it won't stick. We achieve this by going through a three-phase process:

1. Acquire competency with the new skill or knowledge (this might involve a lot of practice).
2. Practice integrating the new stuff with existing stuff. (See progressive practice below.)
3. Know when to apply what they have learned in the real world.

We need to design our learning in a way that encourages this progression – not stop after the first step.

5️⃣ Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students' learning

If we help learners set clear goals for themselves they are better able to assess their performance against these goals when practicing. This provides an opportunity for feedback (from themselves, peers, teachers etc), which can be used to design more useful practice. Rinse, repeat.

These goals can take many forms. Learning Outcomes are an example (eg. By the end of this lesson you must be able to...). If we set a learning outcome, we should also provide an opportunity for learners to practice towards it, and receive targeted feedback on their progress.

6️⃣ Students' current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning

We cannot force development, but we can encourage it, and we can certainly affect the course climate to make it conducive for learning.

We discussed this earlier when looking at The Environment.

7️⃣ To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning

If we want students to take ownership of their own learning journey, we need to help them learn how to learn. We won't go into this too much on this course, but you can read more below.

Metacognition: The Key to Self-Directed Learning

As instructors, we want our students to develop into goal-directed, independent thinkers with the ability to reflect on their own learning. In order to become this type of self-directed learner, students must develop "executive functioning" skills that allow them to take charge of their own thinking processes.

cetl.kennesaw.edu

The Experiential Learning Cycle 🔄

We can think of the learning cycle as basically involving four stages:

• concrete experience
• reflective observation
• abstract conceptualisation
• active experimentation

Effective learning can be seen when the learner progresses through the cycle. In many learning models, we tend to bring people in at the abstract conceptualisation stage - as in a lecture on a new topic. But a learner can enter this cycle at any stage.

Informative vs Experiential Learning

There is an important distinction to make between these two types of learning.

Informative learning. When learners have well-suited mental models (see the How Learning Works section) but insufficient knowledge, adding that knowledge is a fairly straightforward affair called informative learning. This requires very little from the instructors besides providing access to the appropriate information for the learner to assimilate.

Experiential learning. On the other hand, when learners have ill-suited mental models, straight up information makes no difference (tell someone who thinks the Earth is flat that it actually is round and you will get at best a bent version of that same flat model). Said differently, you cannot deconstruct a misconception by simply telling or showing. The learners have to discover these misconceptions and a better fitted mental model themselves. This is called experiential learning.

As its name indicates, the experiential learning cycle is a cycle and as such, it does not have a definite starting position. Learners are best supported when they are allowed to go through each stage of the cycle repeatedly.

Reflection 💭

Reflection is one of the most powerful tools for learning, yet many people are incredibly bad at reflecting well.

There are all sorts of reasons folks' tend to find reflection difficult. Some have never learned how to do it. Some are scared of it. Some have never practiced enough to reap any real rewards. And many folks are just too busy to create a mental environment conducive to reflection.

One of the most powerful things we can do when designing learning experiences is help learners become comfortable with reflection. We'll dig into this more in other lessons.

Group Learning 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

The most transformative learning often happens in groups. Think about how children learn when they're young... it often involves a combination of curiosity, shared experimentation and shared realisation in small groups. As humans, we are naturally more open to forming new and novel mental models when we're working with others to understand something. Groups also help us feel accountable to others for our collective and individual progress.

For group learning to work, we need to be very intentional about how we help our learners to work together.

The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses - Forte Labs

We are in the midst of the fourth wave of online education. Known as "Cohort-Based Courses," or CBCs, this is the first truly Internet-native form of learning. It is the first to tap into the essential nature of the Internet: that it is open-ended and interactive.

fortelabs.co

Creating a Learning Progression 📈

Have you ever taken a course or sat through a lecture where each new idea seemed to follow on perfectly from the last, and at the end you somehow understood some complex new thing without once having felt lost or confused?

If you have, you've probably experienced a progressive learning experience.

By designing learning in this way we help learners build on their existing mental models in a controlled, predictable way. It also helps learners understand where they are in their learning journey, which creates a sense of achievement and progress.

Creating this kind of flow can be hard - especially when designing introductory or "basics" courses. Because they're often designed to provide a baseline in preparation for further learning, they often have to introduce a lot of different topics – they are broad not deep.

So how can we create a sense of flow and progression in a course like this one?

Linking Lessons Together

Wherever possible, we should link lessons together to provide a sense of progression. We might do this through:

• Scheduling lessons in an order that aids learning progression.
• Looking forward to future relevant lessons in our summaries.
• Revising and practicing previous relevant learning at the beginning of our lessons.
• Reflecting as a group on how new learning fits into previous learning.
• Looking back to previous relevant learning when we're learning something new.

Repetition & Progressive Practice

Further Reading

You can see a few tips on writing good asynchronous lessons in 🎨Designing Asynchronous Lessons for Remote Learning.

firstliteracy.org

firstliteracy.org

Kolb's Learning Styles and Experiential Learning Cycle

By Saul McLeod, updated 2017 David Kolb published his learning styles model in 1984 from which he developed his learning style inventory. Kolb's experiential learning theory works on two levels: a four-stage cycle of learning and four separate learning styles. Much of Kolb's theory is concerned with the learner's internal cognitive processes.

www.simplypsychology.org