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Teach Talk
This is the third in a series of articles begun last spring on the contributions of educational research to the improvement of teaching and learning. Each article has attempted to tie the findings of scholarship to specific actions that can be taken within the classroom and the lab, as well as the more informal settings in which teaching and learning take place.
The first article described research into the differences between expert and novice learners, and offered recommendations for how those findings could be used to help student novices acquire the habits of mind and work that characterize professional expertise. The second article looked at a theory of learning known as constructivism, so-called because its fundamental assumption is that learners construct their own knowledge through a process of "meaning making" that entails acquiring and using the concepts of a discipline. One of constructivism’s most fruitful findings is that a student’s prior knowledge plays a pivotal role in how he/she learns, a realization that has important implications for the presentation of new ideas in the classroom.
In this final article, I want to describe two streams of research that have become particularly prominent over the last 10 to 20 years. One of these perspectives, championed primarily by developmental psychologists, examines how the elements of the environment can support – or impede – learning. (The environment being defined as something as contained as an instructor working with one or two students, up to and including the culture to which that instructor and his/her students belong.) A second school of thought, coined "situated learning," holds that to learn means not only to master the facts and concepts of a given field – its explicit knowledge – but also to master the ways of seeing, interpreting, and knowing that are practiced by professionals in that field.
What is common to both these views, first of all, is the premise that the context in which learning takes place exerts an enormous influence on learners and their educational development. Second, these scholars see learning as a social phenomenon – a process firmly rooted in the way human beings interact with one another – rather than simply something that goes on in the head of an individual learner. Finally, they define learning as ecological, by which they mean it can only be done by and within adaptive, open, complex systems. Individuals are complex, open systems; so are classrooms and universities. At every level of analysis (individuals, classrooms, universities) one must look at how the elements comprising the system operate both individually and interdependently, and work towards structuring those elements so that the system can function optimally.
Let me describe in more detail what each of these schools of thought can teach us about teaching.
Development in Context
Development in Context is the title of an influential book in the field of psychology that appeared in 1993. Composed of chapters written by some of the leading scholars in the field, Development in Context described a major shift in the way development and learning was being studied and conceptualized. Specifically, the researchers working within this paradigm see human development as the result of transactions between individuals and their physical and socio/cultural environments. In their introduction to the book, editors Robert H. Wozniak and Kurt W. Fischer argue that, "how we perceive the world, act on objects, interact with people, and generate symbols . . . must be understood as the joint product of the physical and social situations that individuals find themselves in and the personal characteristics that individuals bring with them to these situations." (p. xii).
This perspective, which has its roots in the scholarship of such seminal thinkers as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Semenovich Vgotsky, and Kurt Lewin, has powerful implications for how teaching is conducted and learning achieved. In an earlier Teach Talk, I described one stream of research that can be seen as rooted within this theoretical framework: Educational researchers who have studied the difference between what they call "deep" and "superficial" learning maintain that deep learning - generally thought of as learning that goes beyond rote memorization to a fuller understanding of concepts and ideas - results from fundamental decisions instructors make about how their courses will operate (for example, the kind of assignments and exams given). (Please see "When Students Learn," Teach Talk, Oct./Nov. 1996, http://web.mit.edu/tll/published/teach_talk.htm.)
At the risk of becoming overly theoretical, I would like to focus on one piece of research reported in a chapter in Development in Context entitled "The Dynamics of Competence: How Context Contributes Directly to Skill" by Fischer, Elaine Rotenberg, Daniel Bullock, and Pamela Rya (pp. 93-117). As the title indicates, Fischer and his colleagues set out to tackle an understanding of the role of context in competency: that is, how an individual acquires and perfects his/her ability to do something – whether that something is writing an essay, carrying out a scientific experiment, or playing the guitar. (Competence is defined "most simply as the upper limit on the developmental level of behavior" (p. 97).
I believe the findings of this study have direct applicability to what university-level instructors do (or don’t do) in their classroom and in their interactions with students outside of class.
To reveal the bottom line: The experiments led Fischer and his colleagues to conclude that competence is not simply an internal capability of a particular individual, but "arises from the collaboration between person and context, with competence changing as the context changes." They go on to write:
People are especially important in this collaboration, molding the context to support particular kinds of actions and thoughts in those they interact with. The effects of this sort of social support are dramatic, producing sharp shifts in competence levels in individual children. Competence rises abruptly with the provision of support and drops dramatically when the support is removed. [italics mine] (p. 93).
The authors performed a series of experiments in which they asked children, adolescents, and, in one experiment, adults to undertake some action. One experiment asked children to act out and tell stories. Another asked them to sort blocks into boxes. A third required adolescents and adults to explain how they made decisions about a complex problem. Within each experiment, the researchers varied the degree and type of social support the experimenter provided for the task. For example, in the experiment in which children told stories, if support was low, the child was simply asked to tell the story. If more support was made available, the experimenter might model the behavior he/she was asking the child to do. (While the experimenters provided prompts, they never actually intervened in the subject’s demonstration of the skill.) The subject’s capability was then assessed using a pretested, statistically analyzed scale that described in detail the various levels of ability for that particular skill. In experiments involving hundreds of subjects, the research showed that in contexts where there was relatively little support, subjects demonstrated what the researchers call "functional-level competence" (i.e., relatively low); however, in situations where support was stronger, the subjects produced "optimal-level competence."
Functional and optimal levels of competence provide the end points for what the authors call "the developmental range," and they maintain that it is within this range that short-term growth in skills occurs with instruction, practice, and contextual variation each affecting the process. Reporting on experiments with 14- through 28-year-olds, they state the developmental range does not end with childhood but extends at least until the late twenties as young adults are faced with the challenge of learning to employ high-level abstract reasoning. Finally, the authors hypothesize there are advantages to delaying the complete mastery of a skill, and that the existence of a developmental range in which the learner moves back and forth through functional and optimal levels is beneficial to the learning process. At the lower level, for example, the learner can search for and experiment with a variety of ways to structure adaptive behaviors, rather than settling on one too soon. On the other hand, functioning at the optimal level gives him/her the opportunity to practice higher-level capabilities that have proven to be successful. "The developmental-range phenomenon provides a way of having both advantages at the same time by separating the two levels," the authors write (pp. 112-113).
There are several obvious lessons that can be extrapolated from these studies. First, they complement a slew of educational research that shows students do better in a highly supportive environment. (Please note that "highly supportive" is not synonymous with "easy.") In the Fischer studies, methods of support included modeling desired outcomes (as, for example, when an adult acted out and explained the kind of story he/she wanted the child to create), or providing key elements of the desired outcome. These same techniques can easily be adapted to a university-level classroom.
Second, the idea of working within the students’ developmental range and not rushing optimal-level competence has interesting implications. For example, I once observed a highly effective 18.02 recitation instructor pose a question to the class, and then bypass students whom, he later confided in me, he sensed had the correct answer. Rather, he called on students in whom he was less confident. "If the right answer comes out too quickly," he explained, "students often don’t see why the wrong answer won’t work."
"Besides," he continued, "sometimes I’m surprised, and a totally new way of approaching the problem, which never occurred to me before, comes to the surface if we don’t go to the ‘correct’ answer immediately."
I imagine Fisher and his colleagues would applaud this instructor’s approach. Their investigation into how skills are developed and competency reached has yielded some interesting insights into what we are trying to accomplish.
Situated Learning
The idea behind the concept of "situated learning" is, in some ways, so simple and commonsensical that I wonder why it took so long to be articulated. The person who coined the term, John Seely Brown, Xerox’s chief scientist and director of its Palo Alto Research Center, begins this explanation of it by citing an insight by the psychologist Jerome Bruner.
Bruner realized that when we talk of teaching a discipline, we are usually referring to the facts, concepts, laws, equations, etc., that have been commonly recognized as belonging to that discipline. Bruner called this material the "explicit knowledge" of the field. But being recognized as a practitioner in a given field, Brown writes, "involves a lot more than getting all the answers right at the end of each chapter." ("Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn," Change, March/April 2000, p. 15.)
Learning to be a physicist or chemical engineer or university professor, Bruner maintained, means thinking, working, seeing, interacting as a member of that profession. It means approaching a problem as a physicist or engineer or academic does; it means, in fact, being able to discern an interesting problem from an uninteresting one. It entails recognizing what counts as "evidence" to solve the problem, and who or what is considered authoritative in the field. It means understanding what skills are valued by the profession, how hierarchy and dominance are defined, and what catapults practitioners to the top of the field. All these things Bruner defined as the "tacit knowledge [of a professional] community" (Brown, p. 15).
The key word for Brown and others working within this frame of reference is community, for situated learning posits that learning not only refers to gaining command of explicit knowledge, but also means being socialized and enculturated into a particular "community of practice." Communities of practice emerge as people develop and share ways of doing things, including approaching and solving problems, interpreting information, etc., so that there are both social and historical aspects to the notion of communities of practice. Members of a community of practice have learned ways of operating that have been created by many people interacting over a period of time, and, in doing so, their own individual identities have been forged.
The term "community of practice" itself was first used in a book called Situated Learning (1991) written by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave. Wenger went on to write Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (1997). In an excerpt from that book, he writes, "Communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives. They are so informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit focus, but for the same reasons, they are also quite familiar" (quoted in "Communities of Practice," Training, February 1997, p. 38). What I would like to put forth here, is as teachers we need to bring the elements of the communities of practice in which we work into "explicit focus," so that we can mobilize all necessary resources to help our students become outstanding members of the professional communities they will soon enter.
For example, in the first of these articles on educational research, I argued one way to make our students better problem solvers is to explicitly lay out the process by which problems are solved. Similarly, although I am not an advocate of relying solely on lectures in the classroom, one of their advantages is they allow students to see how a professional in the field approaches, organizes, and connects ideas related to a particular concept in the discipline. As another example, when I am talking to a group about oral presentation skills, I will often step out of my role as teacher/presenter to comment directly on what I just did ("so notice how I used an anecdote to recapture your attention"), becoming, in effect, my own Greek chorus. All these techniques can help students uncover the mysteries of how professionals engage in their work and make the implicit explicit.
Similarly, Wenger writes that communities of practice include "what is said and what is left unsaid; what is represented and what is assumed" (Training, p. 38). In observing teaching at MIT, a common error I see is that the instructor assumes the students already know some concept he/she defines as basic to the field. Eric Mazur, the Harvard physics professor who has developed a novel teaching technique he calls "peer instruction," explains this phenomenon well. "I keep being surprised," Mazur admits, "by how difficult certain fundamental concepts can be. In fact, I noticed that for us teachers some of these very fundamental concepts are second nature. They’re so second nature that we can not explain them very well any more. They’re obvious; they’re clear without any words" (Thinking Together: Collaborative Learning in Science, videotape produced by Harvard University, 1992). What Mazur is articulating, is the frustration of one who has long been socialized into a particular field trying to put himself back into the position of the novice. This is not an easy proposition, but it is necessary for successful teaching.
I am not suggesting that every student who takes 8.01 or 8.02, for example, should be trained to become a professional physicist. What I am saying is that along with the "knowing what," there are certain kinds of "knowing how" we need to teach, and we should think carefully about how we can bring that kind of knowledge into the classroom. (I don’t wish to give the wrong impression: I have observed many MIT faculty doing this already and doing it exceptionally well.) I am also suggesting that the ways in which we engage with students, both intellectually and interpersonally, teaches subtle lessons that we need to be aware of lest we pass on attributes that will be less than useful in their future professional lives.
This finally brings me back to the premise with which I started this piece: That teaching is fundamentally a complex social process that encompasses more than information transfer. Knowing what some of the research has uncovered about that perspective on teaching will, hopefully, allow us to harness strategies and techniques in order to further our educational goals.
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