Learning to Do: Or What Beyoncé Can Teach Us About Learning

This week, I recorded a short video Op-Ed about teaching. For those who prefer reading, I’ve included the same argument (more or less the script of the video) below.

Some readers of this column have asked me what I mean by the ideal of “learning by doing.” In some of the stuff I’ve written on teaching, I criticize college lectures for being too passive, not creating students who know how to do the things that a college-educated person should:

thinking critically within a field;

researching like a professional;

and writing in an analytical way.

I believe that if students learn-by-doing, professors will see their skills improve markedly at the exact sort of things we care about. I’m not talking about the technocrat’s vision of education as job skills or test-taking competence, but the analysis done by our disciplines, the critical thinking that we care about, and even deep reflection on who we are and what we believe.

So let me illustrate “learning by doing” for you, with the help of my favorite analogy: dance. I hope this will help you see how a lecture just doesn’t help a student to learn by doing. So when you get a student paper at the end of the semester, and you think to yourself, “They don’t know how to analyze a quote from a text… or they don’t know how to use evidence to address a claim in the way that someone in my field does… or they don’t know how to make an argument,” that’s probably because they have watched you do these things, passively, in a lecture, but they have not done these things themselves. And no one — not even you, as you mastered your own discipline — can learn to do anything (analysis, evidence usage, critical thinking, argument) without being shown an example of it, given an explanation of how to do it, and finally provided with close guidance as they do it themselves.

Or in other words, learning by seeing and by explanation are not sufficient… they are merely small steps towards learning by doing.

To show you why this is so, I’m going to use the video to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” Now there’s some debate whether this is a great music video, or the greatest music video. But whatever your position on that debate — I think it’s clearly the greatest ever, but you’re entitled to be wrong about this if you want — I think it will serve as a useful model for you to think about the pitfalls of lecturing.

Learning by Seeing

So, imagine that I was lecturing to you, and I showed you a clip of Beyoncé dancing in the Single Ladies video — the opening clip above. Then I said to you: “Alright, now do it. That’s right, get up out of your seats, and do that move right now, in the aisles.” That wouldn’t be too easy, would it?

I showed you it, I asked you to try it. Maybe you’d get the basics, but there’s a lot about the way Beyonce moves, the way she faces the camera, the way she synchronizes her leg movements. No one ever got it quite like Beyonce did it.

So let’s have that serve as our model of how hard it is to “learn by seeing.”

Obviously, people can’t really comprehend anything — disciplinary analysis, critical thinking, etc. — just by “seeing” it performed in front of them.

Learning by Explanation

But you might say to yourself, “That’s not all I do in my classroom! I don’t just perform disciplinary analysis up in front of the students, I also explain what I’m doing.” So your model is, you think, “learning by explanation.”

Now, I might have some doubts about how many faculty really do this. When I work with my students one-on-one, even advanced students, they often don’t know the simple mechanics of making basic claims about texts. I have no doubt that the humanities and social science students have seen this many times. But when I say to them that it’s a three-step process (you make a claim, use textual evidence that supports the claim, and then show how the evidence support your claim focusing onsome key words from the quote itself), they look at me dumbfounded. They’ve seen textual analysis performed in front of them countless times, but I can tell you it’s rarely been explained to them. And they have to know, mechanically, how it’s done before you can even explain to them the significance (intellectually, and in your discipline) of doing it that way.

The most innovative chefs may not just work from their grandmother’s recipes anymore; but that doesn’t mean that they could just somehow intuit all the steps necessary for making upscale gourmet gnocchi today. There was a point at which they had to make a start with the proportions of potato and egg and flour and so forth. So don’t expect your students to somehow intuit the basic mechanics of putting an argument together in your field. They need a recipe to work from, and then you will see how creative they can get with it.

But let’s say that you’re one of the very few faculty out there who even explains how you make your disciplinary moves. That still doesn’t mean your students will know how to do them. Imagine again, using the Beyonce video… but this time I explain the dance moves to you.

Voice Over: you see how Beyoncé steps confidently forward, and coordinates her arm movements; you see that swagger. Look again, her legs move left, right, left, right left…. Pause then right left, and reverse. One more time — now notice how her hand motion opened up as she was pumping her fists, almost triumphantly.

Alright class, you’ve got all that in your notebooks, now go do it at home! Class dismissed.

It’s not hard to imagine that this explanation didn’t really help your students much. They got it into their notebooks. And believe me, they’ll study their notes until they collapse into bed at night. But when you asked them to do the dance on an assignment, they’d still stumble. Maybe they’d do better than if they were just seeing it. The repetition of concepts in your lectures, and the notes they could look at again, would definitely help. But they would still not have learned from you how to do.

Imagine then that you wanted to teach them Beyoncé’s move where she dances up the wall in that video. Now you can see for sure that they wouldn’t be able to do this without a lot more help.

Learning By Doing

You definitely wouldn’t just show them the video and tell them, “Yeah, just step towards that wall over there, and do that move to dance up it.”

They’d need not only an explanation of Beyoncé’s moves that they could study, but a sense of all the scaffolding she used to pull that optical illusion off. Was the wall curved? How curved would it have to be for you to move up it and retain some traction on the wall? Was there a special camera angle they used to make the climb seem more extreme than it was? And even once they knew all of that, they still wouldn’t be able to do it, not without the ability to create a lot of that scaffolding (building the curved wall, using the camera)… not to mention a lot of practice getting it right.

Your academic discipline is a lot more like Beyoncé climbing that wall. Just thinking about my own field, here is just a partial list of some of the things students need to be able to do in order to perform well on something like a final paper:

1. They need to be able to perform close textual analysis — as I said before, making claims, using evidence to back them up, explicating that evidence using its own terminology, and perhaps also the terminology of an outside analytical or theoretial lens, and so forth.
2. They also need to be able to understand the structures of argument. And this is where you, their professor, is indispensable. You implicitly want your students to do arguments of some particular sort, but you may never make that clear to them.

Let’s say you want them to do a basic academic argument: “These scholars say this about some primary source, those scholars say that about it, but I will use evidence from the source to show that another thing is true…. Or to agree with one side, etc.” These “They Say, I Say” moves are so standard that most academics can’t remember when they learned them. It was probably while getting a Master’s or when polishing up their first good seminar paper in their PhD program

But you might want to make an even more complicated move. Let’s say you want your students to study some concept, and how we might find flaws in it, in order to reveal a new, better understanding of the concept, or the world. You want them to use different moves (explication, critique, synthesis of ideas, or whatever). And you want them to use texts in a particular ways: for instance, not summarizing the “main point” of the text in depth — even though that might be what you did with the text in lecture, to help them learn it — but instead using the text to amplify certain claims, etc.

There are myriad ways to make an argument, of course, but if you’re not explicit about what you’re looking for, and which models of argumentation you think are accepted in your discipline (and which are not), you already know what you’ll get — a paper where the student imitates the form of what you do, but doesn’t substantively do what you do. It’s because you didn’t allow them to practice doing it. Worst case scenario, they just saw it happen in front of them, then they’re as awkward reproducing the steps you made as you would be reproducing Beyoncé’s steps from a video.

But it’s not much better if you merely explain what you are doing… left right left… without giving them some practice making the moves, and some fairly close guidance as they do. And this is especially true if there’s a ton of scaffolding needed to do argument the way an academic does argument in your field.

To do all of this right — to give your students the opportunity to see it, hear it explained, do it, then receive critical feedback on it, for each of the many different skills you want the student to do at once in a final assignment — you’ll need to teach each of the skills in a progressive way as your class moves through the semester. If the fundamental skill is interpreting textual passages, then early exams and assignments have to test and critique that skill. Later you would build, bit by bit, the other elements: recognition of secondary literature, if you want a lit review in your paper; different forms of argument and critique, if you want your students to experiment with those. And so on.

You have an entire semester to make them experts in your field. But they won’t get there simply by watching you perform expertise in a video. Believe me, a live lecture is no better than a video, if all it includes is seeing expertise. There are a lot of techniques for explaining expertise, and then getting the students to do expert things, which I’ll explain in future columns and videos.

But I hope you see from this video — and my example of Beyoncé — what the importance of “learning by doing” is for your students.