The heart of the matter

Everywhere I've been lately there's been a lot of talk about learning: elearning, formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning, professional learning. You name it, someone's found a way to tack "learning" on the end of it, as if this would clarify anything. It doesn't.

Most of my discussion partners really weren't talking about learning, they were talking about other things, like education, training, or schooling. I'm not convinced that any of these 3 last-named notions really have a lot to with learning per se. What is more, in most of those discussions, replacing the word "learning" with "teaching" would have made them at least more comprehensible and, more importantly, accurate. For some reason I get the very strong impression that most people think that others won't learn unless there's someone there to help them. I think that's putting the cart before the horse . We humans are capable of so very much, but there is one thing I found that we can't do in the least: we cannot not learn. We are constantly and continually intaking, assimilating, sorting, sifting, filtering, feeling, processing, remembering, and forgetting ... in other words, learning. Learning is what we do most, and what we do best, even if most of us like to doubt the quality of that learning when we see the results in others. Maybe that's why we so often get that urge to institute some kind of control system, like schools, colleges and universities, religious institutions, and other training providers.

Certainly we can learn on our own, and I would be the last to maintain that others can't or couldn't make a substantial contribution to our learning. What I'm skeptical of, though, is what I like to call the "teacher value-added". What most teachers do - at least in my experience - falls under lecturing, maybe audio-visual (at least since the advent of PowerPoint and the web), and in some cases some demonstration with the occasional discussion group thrown in for good measure. I know I'm being too hard on a lot of my colleagues, but just suggesting changes never brings them about. While it may not be a perfect model, the learning pyramid at least give us a frame of reference for thinking about teaching and learning. It would seem to make sense to place more emphasis where the expectations of the outcomes are the highest, at the bottom of the pyramid. More bang for the buck, as we used to say in defense.

To me, the best teacher of all is the one who gets out of the way and lets others learn. This is not to say that teachers should not be involved in learning. They should be. This is not to say that teachers are superfluous. They aren't. But teachers need a better understanding of their role in the process, as the catalyst of learning process, not primarily the assessor of learning outcomes.