My Learning Philosophy

Most of my major life-lessons, I have learned the hard way; some the REALLY hard way. This post is about my philosophy about how people learn, so I am not going to get into my life-lessons; that will come out on my autobiography in a couple decades. What you might get out of that first sentence is that perhaps I learn best by doing, not by someone telling me, but again I digress, not necessarily the type of learning we are talking about here. But kind of...

In my 30s, I used to do a study skills and learning style presentation with my incoming students during orientation using the VARK Questionnaire (Visual, Aural, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic). There were a few main points that I would make in this talk such as it is important to know what type of learner you are so you can guide your study habits accordingly. I would also point out by a show of hands that the least preferred learning style was usually the “R” modality in VARK which is Reading and Writing, while more often than not, the most popular was Kinesthetic. A few years ago, I saw Dr. Marhik’s (2015) TED Talk about the myth of learning styles, and it changed my perception of learning, but I do still prescribe to VARK as having a preferred alternate or supplement to reading and writing. I also believe there is still some validity in the study skills we would suggest in the seminar, because many current academic assessments require rote memorization. Another semi-related sidebar, an excerpt from my Learning Manifesto:

I believe the most important aspect of education is experiential learning. Experiential learning is the reason we still do long division in school even though we have calculators on our iPhones. What we learn from long division, algebra, geometry, calculus, and many math functions is the basis for logic, arguments, critical thinking, and problem solving. It allows us to dig deeper into the uses and philosophies such as the concept that if A, then B; and if B, then C; therefor if A, then C.

What are we actually learning in schools? Why do we have to take English when we have been speaking English our entire lives? What percentage of people that take chemistry junior year use the periodic table ever again? Does knowing the history of Leif Erikson enhance our being in any way? Probably not, but the experience gained from doing the reading, the projects, preparing for assessments, and everything that goes into the process of learning the lessons might – even the rote memorization!

I bring up these non-sequitur ideas of learning because learning is such a broad concept. There is not one way to learn, nor only one idea. The Merriam-Webster (2019) definition of learning is “the activity or process of gaining knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something : the activity of someone who learns.” There are different levels of learning, and I have narrowed them down to 5 different levels loosely ordered from lowest to highest as such:

• Input

• Transfer to short-term memory

• Committing to long-term memory

• Knowledge or deeper learning

• Transformative learning

At any point, new information can reconstruct thoughts, but that information still has to go through different levels of learning to get to become knowledge. Bloom’s taxonomy (see figure below) separates the levels of thinking during learning, but my model layers the levels of learning.

The lowest level of learning in my model, Input, can happen passively: by hearing something in passing, walking down the street, or the smell of onions cooking when In-N-Out fires up their grills a little after 10:00am. Input can of course occur actively by listening, reading, watching, and by doing. It takes a bit of cognition for a person to transfer input to short-term memory, and sometimes more to commit that thought into long-term memory. Sometimes though, you may remember something you learned passively for the rest of your life, because somehow a connection was created in your mind that stuck with you.

An analogy I have used for how people learn is using the physiological functions of the brain and memory. The more connections, like synapses, a person has with a thought, the stronger the thought may be. The amount of neurotransmitters also has an effect on how quickly or deeply a thought is learned, so the amount of cognition surrounding a thought can also affect the connection. A passive input that ended up in your long-term memory would be like having little neurotransmitters around a thought, but a strong synapse. The ability to bring a memory into knowledge will often require a greater amount of interconnected synapses and higher levels of thought or neurotransmitters. This is where Dr. Harapnuik’s (2019) idea of meaningful connections comes into play.

Transformative learning occurs when people reshape the meaning of the knowledge they have, based on newly acquired knowledge. I believe this level of learning is the advanced stage of constructivism, where the early stages are when a person creates a memory and builds a collection of memories into knowledge. I am still learning more on transformative learning, but it has been very interesting to me so far.

Being a career football coach, I use the knowledge of learning to make sure that I do not teach football just one way. People make meaningful connections differently, but more importantly, I want to create multiple types of connections to try to increase the amount of synapses connected to the coaching points (both literally and figuratively). We have playbooks and drawings. We watch video of others doing different plays or skills, perform those skills ourselves, then we watch ourselves on video. We try to come up with different ways to make more connections with the same idea, such as my Disruptive Innovation, using a virtual reality football simulator, which is now built and functional.

References

Academic Support. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sites.rhodes.edu/academicsupport/learning-multiple-levels

Harapnuik, D. (n.d.). Learning philosophy. Retrieved from It’s about learning website: https://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=95

Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/learning

Marshik, T. (2015). Learning styles & the importance of critical self-reflection | Tesia Marshik | TEDxUWLaCrosse. Tedx Talks. Retreived from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Now8h5Rs

The VARK Questionnaire. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://vark-learn.com/the-vark-questionnaire/