Shining a Light on Powerful Learning
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been digesting and reflecting on Rethinking Ideas, a talk given by Alan Kay. In his talk, Alan discusses thinking about our thinking as we are doing and learning and the value of identifying our blind spots. Well, I just identified a personal blind spot that I’d like to shine a light on.
In Modern Learning, Will Richardson poses a thought-provoking question:
What do you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives?
It’s a question I’ve thought about and have a lot beliefs around. But here’s something I’ve just realized: even though I have a lot of beliefs around how we learn most powerfully and deeply in our lives, I haven’t taken the time to sit down and identify my own powerful learning experiences. And until I do, my beliefs about learning may build on faulty assumptions.
Powerful learning experiences
Alan Kay describes a powerful idea as an idea that expands our perspective and creates new contexts for thinking. Using that as my starting point, I’m going to define a powerful learning experience as an experience that causes us to reframe things we thought we already understood and to see and think about things differently moving forward.
I’ve already described the powerful learning experience I had as a junior in college. Studying physical chemistry, I suddenly realized I didn’t understand science nearly as well as I thought I had. This realization led me to drop out of my doctoral program in chemical engineering a few years later to pursue a career in teaching—and it taught me to actively ground my understanding by drilling down to underlying mechanisms.
While I can’t pinpoint a single experience from fourth-grade, the number of powerful memories I have from that single year must be meaningful in itself. I distinctly remember square dancing, making quilted pillows and Chinese lanterns, and entering and winning a fiction-writing contest. My teacher, Ms. Hartsfield, was from Arkansas and I think I suddenly realized that I existed in a larger and more diverse universe. From those experiences, I developed a passion for writing and story-telling.
In 2005, at the age of 35, I moved out to Acton. My parents and siblings graciously offered to furnish my new apartment with their hand-me-downs. Normally, I would have gladly accepted, but this time, I wanted to be an adult and furnish my own place. As I made weekly treks to Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and other stores, I realized a few things. First, I had no idea what I liked when it came to home decor. Second, I’d been muting myself by not fully expressing this part of me. Third, I’m much happier and more relaxed when I’m living in a space aligned with who I am and how I want to live.
Accidental discoveries
I want to go into more detail about this next learning experience because it seems so random. After dropping out of my doctoral program but before moving back to Boston to become a teacher, I spent a year in California with friends from college. These friends were avid basketball players and they decided that we would work out and then play pick-up basketball games on the weekends.
I am not a good basketball player. Growing up in Boston, basketball took a back seat to baseball, football, and hockey. I had a decent shot but lacked ball-handling skills. Let’s just say I could only dribble with one hand. In pick-up games, my defenders would trap me and force me to pick up my dribble. Then, they’d crowd me and try to slap the ball out of my hands while I tried to pass the ball off as quickly as possible.
In those moments, I developed tunnel vision. There’d be two defenders on me and I knew that, somewhere on the court, I had an open teammate. But instead of calmly scanning the court and finding an opening, my field of vision narrowed to my immediate vicinity. I usually managed to pass the ball out of the trap, but since I never made the defense pay for double-teaming me, they kept doing it. These experiences only confirmed something I had known for a long time: I’m good at sports that require intense singular focus and bad at sports that require court- or field-awareness.
But then something weird happened. As we lifted weights between games, I got stronger; and as I got stronger, the defenders swarming around me stopped bothering me. I used to lose control of the ball whenever a defender reached in and made contact with it. Now, with stronger hands and arms, it was a lot harder for them to strip the ball from me and I could stop worrying about it. Reducing my cognitive load reduced my tunnel vision, and I started hitting the open man. I developed court-awareness.
Here was a truth I thought I knew about myself—and if it wasn’t genetic, it was certainly part of the electrical wiring of my brain by now. But suddenly, it was no longer true. If I could develop court-awareness simply by lifting weights, can we really know anything about our own limits and capabilities? I was shocked.
Conditions for powerful learning
On the one hand, if a powerful learning experience changes how we see and think about the world, we can’t really design or plan for one. I can’t plan to realize the others I’ve feared my entire life are in reality a lot like me unless I’ve already had that realization to some extent.
When I analyze the powerful learning experiences in my life, on the surface, it doesn’t seem like relevance, interest, or agency are major factors. I didn’t really want to square dance, play basketball, or learn physical chemistry. The one experience that was most self-directed was my home decorating. But let’s be real. I didn’t say this earlier, but I was a single man hoping to date a single woman—and I didn’t think mismatched furniture handed down by my parents and middle-aged siblings was a good look for me.
Still, I leaned into the furniture shopping. I could have bought a bunch of stuff that just looked nice together, but I was intrigued about discovering my own sense of style. And on the basketball court, would I have had the same realization if I hadn’t been reading educational theory and wondering about the limits of human learning?
We may not be able to design or plan for powerful learning experiences, but on the other hand, we do have to be open to new ideas and prepared to take risks to have them. Maybe it’s less about the external precipitating event and more about our internal state. If I have an active and inquisitive mind that is pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and I’m also stretching myself by taking on new experiences, something I see will trigger a new insight.
I’m having this insight right now because I detected an anomaly. I’ve been trying to provide kids with powerful learning experiences for years without ever thinking about listing and analyzing my own. That seems odd—like I’m avoiding something. And I’ve learned, over the last few years, to sit up, take notice, and investigate when I seem to be hiding something from myself. It’s almost always something worth finding.
Lines of inquiry
I’m still identifying and analyzing my powerful learning experiences. Care to share some of your own? I think it’s a useful practice if we’re going to design powerful learning experiences for kids.
I’m also noticing I’m having powerful learning experiences more frequently as I get older. Is this universal? If not, why do some of us continue learning and expanding our horizons while some of us become closed off? Is there a powerful idea in there we can apply in schools?
If you have any other comments, questions, or insights, please post them. I’d love to start a dialogue and see what we can discover together.
