I love learning!  I’m not sure when I began loving learning.  I think I began to love learning itself when I became a teacher; not right away, but as I realized how passionately I wanted all  my learners to love learning.  I realized I especially wanted struggling learners to love learning.  I knew from my first encounter with a struggling child, a child with cerebral palsy, that it was my job to unlock the learning that was inside his head making it possible for him to communicate and use all that he was learning.   

How did I get to this place?

In creating paths to the love of learning for struggling learners, I travelled as a learner and teacher through undergraduate school, graduate school, seminars, conferences, workshops, study groups, professional development, and through reading and my own writing.  Most of all, over the years, ongoing experiments with teaching struggling learners set me up to ask: Am I doing everything I can to help these learners be successful?  Do they know that struggling, poor grades, mistakes, learning pace and rank in class do not predict or signify how capable or smart they are?  In my experience, all struggling learners are smarter that they think they are!    

Here’s what I learned along the way 

In undergraduate school I learned that grades weren’t enough to tell me if I was really learning.       

Sometimes I got A’s and really didn’t know why; other times I got C’s. I remember a teacher writing, “You can do better than this.” He didn’t tell me how, even when I showed that I didn’t know how.  Feedback was minimal except through grades and I was never asked to evaluate my own learning.  I became curious about what it meant to succeed or to fail at learning.

After working in a school system for two years, I realized I needed more knowledge to really help my students learn.  I completed a graduate program in Speech Pathology.  I learned to compare and contrast theories of speech/language development and disorders.  Putting the best theories into practice was a challenge.  Even with “practicum” experiences, my learning remained abstract.  Much of it became “inert”, never to be used.

After a few more years working in the schools, I joined the faculty at Emerson College where my teaching colleagues had high levels of expertise.  Now, I really had to “know enough” to teach and supervise the “clinical” work of undergraduate students majoring in speech/language pathology. As I carefully observed their student-teaching, I had the luxury of “stepping back and thinking about” the interactions of teachers and learners.  I could see where learning was working and where it was breaking down .  Both teacher and learner had to be responsible for what happened, especially with older students.  My tact was to try to make sure that there was a good alignment between the student’s needs and roles, the goal and design of the lessons, the data collection and analysis of the outcome, and the subsequent planning.  I spent many hours critiquing lesson plans and helping students to revise them.

Reflecting on my own teaching

Several years later with new graduate students at the University of Vermont it became clearer that good theory and research didn’t automatically lead to good teaching and learning.  Again, I  worked with graduate students in academic classes and then observed them “apply” their knowledge.  Still, I could see the challenges these bright, mature students had in trying to apply what they “learned” in class.  As for myself, I knew a good bit about communication skills and disorders, but I didn’t know nearly enough about the process of learning.  Back to school again.

I returned to school as a graduate student in Psychology, focusing on learning and cognitive development;  Piaget, Vygotsky,  Flavell, Sternberg, Wittrock, Bruner, and Case among many others.  Now, I thought, I’m really ready to use this research, these models, to help frontline teachers translate abstract theory and research into good teaching. These frameworks would help in teaching kids not just the easy stuff (the basics, the algorithmic stuff), but higher order thinking and sophisticated learning skills.   Armed with Piaget’s emphasis on thinking, Vygotsky’s emphasis on “the zone” and the importance of context, Sternberg’s triarchial intelligence and Flavell’s concept of metacognition, I assumed I could do an even better job of teaching by designing coursework to bridge the gap between theory/research and application with real kids struggling with real tasks in real contexts.  Later, I was able to shift my quest to how much I could learn and teach about learning disabilities, metacognition and higher order thinking when I redesigned the graduate program in Learning Disabilities at Goddard College.

Although teachers I worked with were interested in Piaget, Vygotsky, etc., they didn’t see an immediate application.  I have a very distinct memory of developing my first “model” of “diagnostic teaching” based on Piaget.  Diagnostic teaching is central to working with kids with learning disabilities or “differences.”  I knew that Piaget had a lot to teach us but his language and ideas were too abstract for easy application.  My quest led me to build a model that teachers could “hold on to” because of its simplicity and clarity.  I developed CAERTONS [link under construction] as a way for teachers to figure out what the stumbling blocks were for individual kids in specific situations trying to master specific learning goals/objectives.  Using the model, teachers could identify learning breakdowns in terms of 7 dimensions of learning: Conceptualization, Abstraction, Engagement, Representation (long term memory), Tentativeness, Other (contextual specific factors), Number (working memory) and Strategy (self-management).  What the CAERTONS model added to earlier theories was a way to address the breakdowns for individual learners in a classroom context:  Change the Objective, Change the Standard, Provide Support, Change the Learner.

Development and Learning courses

I introduced CAERTONS to graduate students when I started teaching  at St. Michael’s College and later in a district-based professional development course.  CAERTONS as a model was well received by the students and practicing teachers.  I could see from the teachers’ use of the model in real class-rooms that students were often especially challenged by tasks requiring higher order thinking.   I began to attend national/international conferences on thinking.  I read works on thinking from everywhere I could find them:  Perkins’ work at Harvard’s Project Zero, Collins and Brown’s work on Cognitive Apprenticeships, and MIT’s System Thinking by Peter Senge.  I became increasingly interested in teaching thinking skills to middle and high school students.  I applied my new learning model ina year-long “lab course on study skills” for eighth grade students at a local school, co-teaching with undergraduate secondary “ed” students.  Several other courses I offered contributed significantly to my understanding of both higher order thinking and learning how to learn: a First Year Seminar on “The Intellectual Development of Women,” an undergraduate Honors Course on ”Problem Solving:  Content and Process” and a graduate level business course on “Facilitating Learning in Organization.”  All of these courses took on a “problem solving” orientation to readings, assignments, and projects.  In these situations I believe I learned as much as the students did both through my successes and my failures as a teacher.  I learned the valuable if humbling lessons of learning through mistakes.  Making mistakes as a teacher has taught me to see how essential risk taking and “failure” are to learning, whether you are the teacher or the learner.  Mistakes help us to find the right level of challenge for a student, the “zone of proximal development” in Vygotsky’s framework.

The Language and Learning course

Another of my courses entitled “Language and Learning” further expanded my own learning.  From that course came a focus on breakdowns in reading comprehension.  Two colleagues and I developed another model: SPOKES http://explorience.pbworks.com/w/page/19411524/FrontPage   here, again, was an attempt to focus on where the most likely breakdowns in learning were, particularly with higher order thinking skills.   Once again, metacognition (self-management) played a key role in helping kids become more successful readers/learners. 

As we developed this model, we offered it as off campus and school based professional development.  For one school’s response to the SPOKES model check out Sharon Hayes’ SPOKES web site. https://sites.google.com/site/folsomspokes/  Sharon and several of her middle school colleagues participated in a year-long “applied” course.  They tailored their work to what was going on in their individual classrooms.  During these experiences, I continued in a co-learner role as I observed in their classrooms focusing on differences in learner’s responses to the lessons.  Teachers were encouraged to offer critiques and suggestions on how to improve the model. Their feedback prompted changes both to the model and my teaching.

Online learning and wiki development

            It was clear by this time that becoming more tech savvy was a big part of the future of education in general.  Although I had a few basic tech skills (email, word processing, excel), I was far from literate, so I enrolled in a graduate level course in Online teaching (Christine Ramazani at St. Michael’s) and an e-based summer camp (Camp Wiki).  I was back to novice status, working my head off, making tons of mistakes, getting lost and frustrated, and remembering how hard it is to learn something when you are a novice.  There’s nothing like being a student to improve one’s teaching.  I’m not going to be a skillful online teacher for quite a while, but I’m going to give it a try anyway.

Back to love of learning and the Learning How to Learn wiki

            For me, love of learning is all about being a successful learner.  Based on the best theory and research across a broad base of literature and sources—cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, information processing, educational research, learning in the work place, e-learning--adding the insights and frustrations of practicing professionals, listening to kids talk about learning and school, I have tried to create a Wiki that will help teachers help kids become successful learners.

http://explorience1.pbworks.com/w/page/19411732/Futures%20Lab%20Start%20Up   

All kids are already good at learning something.  I’m confident that they will love learning when they see themselves as being good learners, meeting challenges they set for themselves.  Middle school is a particularly critical time for all students, especially struggling students,  to be good at “learning how to learn”  before they get permanently lost and drop out or tune out because they see themselves as failed learners.