Building Effective Learning Environments

A Framework for Merging the Best of Old and New Practices

Kevin S. Krahenbuhl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Teachers are bombarded with trends and competing ideas. This book provides a framework to help you find the right balance between new and old instructional practices, so you can design learning environments that truly enhance learning.

The author shares key research-based principles to engage and extend learning, and he debunks common myths. He then shows how to use a classical method and how to engage with new ideas and evidence to create a highly effective learning environment. Each chapter offers reflection and application questions you can use independently or in book studies to get the most out of your reading.

Written for teachers of any grade level, the book contains applications and examples across content areas so you can see how to implement the ideas in your own classroom or school.

PART I

FOUNDATIONS

What Do We Need to Know?

1

Principles to Engage Learning

Learning is the most fundamental concept and purpose when it comes to education. Modern societies mandate education because it is assumed that by learning we can enhance our future. Learning is something that everyone believes that they know because we have all been in a classroom environment of some sort. Each of us thinks that this experience gives us insight into being able to “see” good instruction but this is a significant challenge as it dramatically undervalues the daunting challenge that is effective instruction. This perceived “knowing” about learning is highly deceptive because there is much more than meets the eye to effective instruction.

Within the scholarship on learning there are subtle issues that are helpful to know a little bit about. I don't think we need to be drawn into long debates about learning but we do need to at least begin with a baseline of factors that are acknowledged as elements required for learning. To establish this baseline, we will identify basic axioms – or principles – that are generally true and therefore of the most importance for us to know. These principles will not necessarily tell us what to do but they provide us an important filter through which we can then interact with specific strategies. The goal for the first two chapters will be to highlight some important preliminary considerations and then present six principles of how all of us learn that, if each teacher always kept in mind, would equip them to make decisions more likely to promote learning that lasts. So, let's begin with our brief dive into some preliminary information that is important to consider.

Learning seems to include at a very minimum the following requirements:

• Learning involves a change in a person's mind
• Learning requires an individual effort
• Learning fades but it can be lasting

These three key elements provide some important bounds to consider with regards to learning but they also leave some important things out. These things that are not addressed as a focal point herein ought to at least be acknowledged and briefly discussed so as to ensure they are not missed. Although they are not central to the purpose of this book, they are important to acknowledge, understand, and integrate into your effort to build effective learning environments. So, let us look at some preliminary issues related to learning before we explore the essential axioms.

Other Issues to Consider Related to Learning

In this section we will look at three specific issues we must consider before we dive into learning because each is related meaningfully to effective learning, yet each is distinct from it. These important issues include: The role of truth to learning; the relationship of learning to motivation; and the relationship of learning and values. This will serve as a prologue for our survey of learning principles.

The Role of Truth

A person can learn things that are correct and learn things that are incorrect. So, as persons committed to helping others learn we must commit to a few things to help ensure that learning is aimed in a positive direction. First, then, we must commit to the pursuit of truth. Learning ought to be considered “good” learning only insofar as it helps the learner learn things that are true. I have written an entire book on the problem of truth in education so let me distill the importance of this issue simply for the purposes in this book and I will encourage you to check out The Decay of Truth in Education for a more detailed account on why truth matters.

Anytime we are going to learn something it is right to ask: Why? And simply put, if we do not believe that what we are going to learn is most likely, based on the best evidence we currently have, to be objectively true then let's be honest, learning that is quite frankly just one's prerogative. Truth must be the prime aim for all learning. Truth serves as a lighthouse that does not get pulled with the turbulent winds of popular opinion. So, take some time to reflect on truth. If you believe each individual has their own truth then what you teach them does not matter. If so, the educator's job does not matter. The only thing that matters in that case is that each person believes whatever they prefer, and that they learn things that they want to learn. That is no recipe for a successful society as it will never engender any collective coherence. In fact, it is a recipe for chaos. Alternatively, if you believe that truth is just a construct used by the powerful to oppress others then you, as a person in a position of power, will see your role as one who must compel others to believe the “right things”, which are those things that, of course, you believe. This is not a recipe for cultivating critical thinking but one for encouraging a propagandistic and dogmatic form of education.

So, we can see that truth is an essential topic to use as a lighthouse for learning. However, the principles I will discuss herein lead to learning – what we learn is not necessarily true and so this is one of the important issues educators must really think about. Are the learning experiences of your student(s) leading towards learning of things that are, based on the best evidence, true? Or, could their learning lead to all sorts of “learning” of falsehoods? The framework I will present herein will help ensure that student learning is long-lived and consequently, educators should seriously reflect on to what extent they are comfortable with students learning falsehoods and deliberately counteract such instances. Truth is monumentally important but it is a topic to be reflected on and used in conjunction with the principles of learning I will lay out ahead. So, for now, hold truth in high esteem as a target for our learners – we will explore this concept in more detail later.

The Relationship to Motivation

How motivated a person is to learn something can impact their learning. It is, however, not necessary to be motivated to learn. This is an important issue to lay out upfront because throughout this book my emphasis is on aspects related to learning; not related to motivation. Since I am not planning on spending a great deal of time on motivation I want to place emphasis on one key point for educators to know.

Motivation does not precede learning – rather successful learning precedes motivation. In fact, a longitudinal study ranging across elementary grades in a mathematics setting found that intrinsic motivation, at no time predicted student achievement but rather that prior achievement predicted subsequent intrinsic motivation (Garon-Carrier et. al., 2016). When learners get a taste of success, even in small bites, it builds up internal motivation to continue on. An effective educator, then, will build in opportunities to ensure small successes for your learner and leverage those for a lifetime of motivated learning rather than trying to get them motivated first. Success leads to motivation, not the other way around. As you work through this book and attempt to integrate its framework into your sphere of influence it would be wise to ensure you provide opportunities for success in your classroom to help students move towards intrinsic motivation rather than trying to build up motivation in its own right. Unless you are in a one-room schoolhouse or homeschool environment, trying to balance what motivates hundreds of different students is a waste of time. Focus on what will increase motivation of everyone – successful learning experiences. And do what you can to maximize potential opportunities for students to find success in your context.

The Relationship to Values

Knowledge about this or that is very difficult to learn without assessing some sense of whether or not ‘“x” is a good thing or a bad thing. Human beings are, by nature, prone to judge things. And contrary to popular opinion – judging ideas, actions, and so on – is a good thing. Take for instance the common way people point to the story of Jesus in the New Testament in which he is recorded to have said: “Do not judge, lest you be judged”. Well, it's useful to look at that in its full context to make a proper interpretation of Jesus’ exhortation:

Do not judge lest you be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye” and behold the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye¹.

Notice that this biblical example frequently cited to claim we ought not to judge actually does the exact opposite when properly interpreted. Did you notice that the closing command is that you should take the speck out of your brother's eye? The point Jesus is making is that hypocritical judgment – ­criticizing another for something without acknowledging your own shortcoming – is in error. The point being made, properly understood, is that judgment is unavoidable and that we ought to judge considering our own brokenness and not from a position of unwarranted righteousness. When it comes to learning, there is constantly going to be inquiry into what is right and wrong. A traditional aim of education was development of virtuous citizens, which are defined as persons who think about good, the common good, and so forth. This is a good thing and you should actively work to cultivate reflection on the good, while you guide learners in the pursuit of truth, and inspire learners to live out their values consistently.

The Process of Learning

What you know determines what you see; it is not what you see that determines what you know. The importance of knowledge for learning cannot be understated. Learning is paradoxically predicated upon prior learning. The more knowledge one has the more they are able to learn. It is truly a case of the rich get richer. As an educator you should greatly value the knowledge that a learner is able to memorize because it will pave the way to more effective, enduring, and elastic learning in the future.

However, learning is not linear. We should not expect that once something is learned it is sufficiently stored in a person's mind that they can leverage it at their will. This is one of the reasons why review is so important. It is also a tacit endorsement for including some form of spiraling to your curriculum. Through a spiraling approach it necessitates learners to space out practice in domains, which is a method of improving learning that is empirically supported and will be expanded upon with a principle of learning on practice. Additionally, a spiraling approach allows you to dive deeper each time you spiral through similar content because retrieval of previously learned material is much quicker allowing for both broad and deep acquisition of knowledge. In this way it facilitates a meaningful transition of learner from novice in a domain towards expertise (not that expertise will be achieved during K-12 but it's a nice progression to look towards). Table 1.1 delineates some essential differences between novices and experts that should undergird our efforts to cultivate a learning environment for students who are, by their very nature, novices.

Table 1.1 Novices versus Experts

Novices	Issue	Experts
Limited relevant knowledge	Background Knowledge	Extensive relevant knowledge
Working Memory	Relies on during Learning New Material	Long-Term Memory
Lacks an effective representation of successful performance	Mental Representation of Success	Has a clear representation of what success performance looks like
Requires clear steps or results in frustration	Problem Solving	Intuitive
Sees surface and superficial details	What they “See”	Sees underlying structures
Learn best through explicit instruction and worked examples	How they Learn Best	Learn best through discovery approaches
Struggles to transfer principles to new contexts	Transfer	Able to transfer principles between related contexts
Overloaded easily as attention is dominated by new information	Working Memory	Less likely to experience overload thanks to rich knowledge chunked in long-term memory

Some of the aspects of this table will be better clarified as we expand on the principles of learning but sufficed to say novices think in fundamentally different ways than do experts. If we want our students to move towards expertise it is not as simple as having them “do what experts do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Meet the Author
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations: What Do We Need to Know?
• Part II Framework: How Do We Do This?
• Appendix A: The Dime
• Appendix B: Dr. K's Checklist for Evaluating Scientific Claims on Learning
• Appendix C: Dr. K's What's in the Ballpark Activity (Blank Copy)
• References