I did this series of higher education commentaries on WYPR in 2019. You can also listen here.
Technology is only one of the many factors that has changed the starting point for educators. Technology has changed our relationship with knowledge, but has also created a new learning economy where most of the information you need for the jobs of the future is unknown.
Education has always been about critical thinking, but now that most of the content we are teaching is also available online for free, and much of what students need to learn is still being discovered, we need to shift the balance between process and content. In this new learning economy, graduates who are truly self-regulated learners will have a huge advantage. Good teaching has always been about making yourself obsolete, but new technology makes it clear that the best schools and teachers are the ones whose students can learn new things on their own.
We are confused about what it means to be smart, we are so confused, we call it a “smart” phone. But despite its access to so much content, your phone isn’t smart. Smart is not about how much you know, but how much you can learn. Smart is the ability to change your mind. In a new economy, where new jobs are being invented every day, requiring new skills, and using new knowledge, we need more self-regulated learners—college graduates who are able to learn new things, reflect and change their minds to adapt to new situations and new information. Learn to change your mind.
Expanding Comfort with Discomfort
Some tolerance for ambiguity is essential for learning, change, and growth. When we encounter a new idea, technology or method, it feels strange at first. That is almost the definition of new: something foreign to what we already know.
Goucher College requires all students to study abroad. And when students ask where they should go to study abroad, the answer is simple. Go to the place that makes you as uncomfortable as you can stand. Learning to be comfortable with your discomfort is a key aspect of learning. All creative people and self-regulated learners have learned to expand their own comfort with discomfort.
If I reject all ideas that are foreign, I will miss opportunities to change. But if I accept all new ideas as better, I will simply substitute one set of assumptions for another. Learning is about creating a space, at least temporarily, for what might be true.
Learning is also about making distinctions. All the music we hate sounds the same. OR more accurately, the less we know about something, the more it seems to all be the same. As we learn, we distinguish, and things become more complex. Knowledge is also always changing: new discoveries will change what we thought we already knew.
Our tolerance for ambiguity is useful because it mirrors how knowledge is assessed and accumulated. The answer to most good questions, is “it depends.”
Discovering Your Thought Accent with Study Abroad
At Goucher College, we require all students to study abroad before they graduate. We do this in part because employers want graduates who can navigate working with people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also because study abroad provides an almost unique opportunity for self-discovery, reflection and growth.
One of the first thing we notice when we leave home is that everyone else in the world speaks with an accent. Then we realize that we too have an accent. Upon further reflection, we get the big reveal—that everyone has an accent. There is no neutral way of speaking and everyone speaks in a way conditioned by culture, geography and experience. This is equally true for how we all think—everyone also has a thought accent and study abroad brings us face to face with our assumptions and how they differ from those in our new surroundings. We can exchange one thought accent for another—just as we can learn a new spoken accent—but the insight that we all have assumptions that are invisible to us is fundamental to critical thinking. Initially this can seem crippling, especially for students whose high school experience was all about a single truth or a single right answer. But understanding that different is often just different is a critical path to many things. Study abroad is not just about visiting difference, it is about encountering your own difference, your own assumptions and learning that everyone thinks with an accent.
The Entire Toolbox
Any college major is like a single tool. And most tools are really only useful when the job at hand is the one for which it has been designed. Biology might be a hammer, and anthropology a screwdriver. But which tool will you need in ten years? If the jobs of the future are uncertain, then what you really need is a larger toolbox.
Colleges usually require a series of introductory courses. It is important for students to be exposed to every tool in the toolbox, but do you really need an entire semester of Introduction to the Hammer before you are ready to build something? Might we instead let students pick problems that interest them?
This is motivating, and we all learn more when we care about the topic. It is also more of a “real world” job skills approach. We don’t know what the problem will be after you graduate, but we suspect you will need both your hammer and your screwdriver.
College students are often far too focused on trying to pick the right major. But rather than specializing in a specific tool, or picking your favorite way of looking at the world, wouldn’t it be better to figure out what types of problems really matter the most to you?
If you are interested in poverty, the environment, immigration or disease, you will still need to understand something about politics, culture, history, music, science, marketing, anthropology, psychology and language. They all have important insights to offer and they are all tools that can help you build your solution.
From Professor to Cognitive Coach
Learning is a bit like fitness. The person who does the work gets the benefit.
So the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the most, in the same way that the best fitness coach is not the one who can do the most push-ups. Watching someone else do push-ups, even intellectual push-ups, is not nearly as useful as doing push-ups yourself.
While it is tempting to think that the best gym is the one with all the latest technology and the coach with the largest muscles, like knowledge, exercise equipment is only beneficial if you use it. You need to be motivated to get on and pedal faster.
So a good fitness coach or teacher starts by asking: why are you here? Understanding what motivates you and what you already know (or fear) about a subject is essential. (If I don’t know you are afraid of water, my swim lessons will be less effective.) A good fitness coach adds value because she understands you and can get You to do more push-ups. It is a design problem. Classes work the same way. If I can design structures and assignments that you find more motivating and engaging and you do more work, you will learn more. The role of the teacher as “professor” needs to be reimagined as more of a cognitive coach.
Learning is Sweet My last WYPR commentary on learning
Discoveries in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, design thinking and behavioral economics have given us substantial new insights into how learning works.
At its core, learning is what happens to the structure in your brain and it turns out that the five most important things anyone can do to improve learning are S.W.E.E.T.: sleep, water, exercise, eating, and time are the most important conditions for supporting your brain in learning.
We have great experimental confirmation of all of these things. Moderate exercise, even 4 hours after studying improves retention. Being dehydrated reduces both cognitive and physical performance. And T is for time: teaching matters, but you learn more when you practice more.
The S for Sleep and it is critical because sleep is when your brain sorts memories and decides what to remember: if you get only 7 hours of sleep, your emotional reactions to yesterday’s class predominate. You remember that you felt stupid in math class. But 90% of your REM sleep occurs in that 8th hour, so with an extra hour of sleep, your brain re-lives that math class and de-emotionalizes the memories: so you better remember the math part.
These research findings can help us improve learning. Your brain lives in your body, so it only functions and learns well when it gets what it needs biologically. Emphasizing wellness and the SWEET part of learning is as essential as what happens in classrooms.
There is a chapter on SWEET in the Nudge book, due out in 2022.