Primal Learning

Educating the young is a fundamental and critical task of any society.  I’d say “it’s more important than ever,” but it’s not. Education has always been, and will always be, the essential task of youth and adulthood, both as teachers and learners.  Though changes in society may make certain skills and knowledge “more important than ever,” taking a moment to step outside of the common use of the word education—going to school—reminds us that what we’re really talking about is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and characteristics needed to survive/thrive in society. 

In the US, education is often thought of as matriculating through the school.  This is an error in thinking.  School is the means, education the end.  Nevertheless, the discourse on education generally centers on schools: standardized test scores, school performance, teacher evaluation and preparation, and funding.  Our focus on these, and the core ideas of aggregation and centralization that they are expressions of, are precisely the reason why the house is on fire.  Education is not about these.

At the core, teaching and learning are not products of the school system, or the proprietary skill of trained educators.  They are instincts.  People of all ages teach and learn constantly.  The bulk of all learning that has ever occurred has taken place between individuals or small, tightly knit groups.  To make the point, let’s imagine a preindustrial, hunter-gatherer or agrarian society.  Children learned in small groups led by their elders, people with whom they had a personal connection.  The skills taught were directly and obviously relevant—hunting for dinner, for example. I’ll refer to this as primal learning.

Realizing this began when we decided to home school.  As an “educator,” I didn’t doubt that we could pull it off.  What caught my attention was how families were able to homeschool their kids with little education or training, and they were generally very successful.  Eventually it became obvious.  By instinct, going 1-1 with kids automatically triggers many of the characteristics of primal learning: accurate understanding of the student’s abilities, lots of feedback, checking for understanding, the right pace, interest, persistence, emotional commitment, and greater relevance of the content.

Teaching and learning: how it usually happens.

As much should be obvious, but the fact that it’s not shows how deeply ingrained the concept of learning as “school” has become.  When we teach our children to tie their shoes there are no PowerPoints, no standardized exams, no grades, no certified shoe-tying instructors…none of it. Yet, nearly everybody learns this skill.  This is valid teaching and learning, as valid as anything generated by the school system.

How do schools compare with primal learning?  Typical class sizes of 20-30, knowledge that isn't directly relevant or at least doesn't appear to be relevant in the eyes of student, teachers unattached to the kids except though school, coercion, classroom management concerns, difficulty providing extensive feedback consistently, the need to produce defensible report card grades, and all the rest.  The typical classroom teacher and their students are fish out of water in this environment. 

Preparations to test about 300 students at once to comply with mandated PARCC testing

US Education has become a race to complication and aggregation (or perhaps it should be aggravation).  It is a vicious circle wherein students are dehumanized by the inherent nature of the system, and when problems arise, we often double down on the very things causing them or address symptoms rather than root causes. For example, an exam score focus causes schools to implement a culture of test prep. Students are disengaged, resulting in more problems, lower scores, more prep.

Parents and teachers can best serve their students by always beginning with the individual, how he/she would have learned without a school system, and how pedagogy and technology can be used to replicate primal learning conditions. By doing this we’ll address the fundamental issues in learning, not merely symptoms.  

What Gets Measured Gets Done

What gets measured gets done

If the goal is to improve learning of students, for most teachers, the big project to tackle is classroom assessment policy.  

Classroom assessment practice, perhaps more than other components of teaching, is still shaped a great deal by what is pragmatic.  As I’ve mentioned before, the primary negative effects of the factory school system we imported from Europe come from class size combined with the need for consistent records.  Assessment is particularly impacted by this, and for much of the modern era has been reduced to merely grading assignments.  

As always, technology may be of some use in mitigating this, but also can make the situation worse if we’re not careful.  The advantage of tech in grading is to save the teacher’s time in doing final calculations: teachers enter grades as they go, and the system keeps a running total that, in more recent years, is live-updated or pretty close to it.  Parents can log in at a glance and see how their kids are doing.  Teachers are spared the work of calculating a student’s grade repeatedly and a lot of phone calls are probably saved as well.

Is this practice ideal? Has it primarily evolved due to its practicality or its educational value?  Has the advent of digital gradebooks shifted focus to the wrong place, the grade instead of learning? I believe so.

One of my sons attends his public high school, another attends a private elementary school.  Though his teachers use grading software, on a weekly basis we receive a folder with all of his work from the previous week. My wife or I go through the folder.  We look at each assignment and discuss the good and the bad.  Most importantly, if there’s something concerning, we see it right away and in detail.  For example, one week this spring we realized he didn’t understand improper fractions, so we worked on it and practiced--a quick adjustment.

With my older son, the conversation is different.  “You have a 2/10 on ‘Practice 5.  What’s going on?”  It’s hard to get it much more specific without the work, etc.  It’s not that one couldn’t get to the same place as in the example above, but it would be a lot harder.  More importantly though, grading in this way implies the most/only important thing is the final grade.  What gets measured gets done.  Kids will focus on the final grade.

Grades are the end result, the record of learning, but slowly they’ve crept into our minds purpose of learning, as opposed to mastery.  We’ve saved time with our current grading practices, but they’ve also shifted the mindset of students, teachers, and parent away from thoughtful qualitative discussions about learning to more mechanistic systems of reporting.  The cost of this is in actual student learning, not to mention the extent to which school starts to become about how to game various systems and become a more educated human being.

Whether a teacher or a parent, we have to think very carefully about what we choose to measure and tend. We need to focus on measuring and reporting learning--the formative, not summative marks.