Yesterday, March 23, 2020, the governor of Virginia announced that school facilities throughout the state would be closed for the rest of the academic year to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Overnight, we have become a state of homeschoolers – joining many other states that are seeking to “flatten the curve” of disease transmission by radically limiting our contact with other people in the near term.
As the husband of a physician, and the son of parents over age 70, I applaud this move. It seeks to preserve life by making sacrificial decisions.
Yet this decision also has profound implications for learning and society. It means that for the next two months, the center of gravity for learning will return home. And – in deference to my homeschooling friends – home is where it always begins, and now we must learn from you how to curate learning environments at home.
Your Children WILL Learn
There has been understandable concern about “lost” learning that may result from children not being in school. In fact, this unprecedented closing of schools should help us to distinguish two kinds of learning – one that will continue unabated, and another that may slow down, remain the same, or even accelerate.
Students of psychology are almost universally familiar with Henry Molaison (commonly referenced as H.M.) who, as a result of brain surgery to treat terrible seizures, lost the ability to acquire new explicit memories – like the names of his doctors. In short, it appeared that he lost the ability to learn. But researchers discovered that despite his complete inability to form new explicit memories, he was continually constructing implicit memories.
Researchers asked H.M. to trace an image reflected in a mirror. (In other words, he could only see the mirror image and the reflection of his hand, but could not see the image or his hand directly). Understandably, he struggled! They gave him the task again on another day. Of course, he didn’t remember having tried it before because he could form no new explicit memories. And they gave him the task again. Over time, H.M. improved at this challenging task. The man who couldn’t “learn” was learning!
This is the sense in which I confidently assert that during this tumultuous time, your children WILL learn. Their repeated experiences, deliberate practices, and focal attention WILL form them. This sort of learning will continue unabated.
Explicit Learning can Accelerate
Earlier this week, a friend, whose first-grade daughter is now home with her every day commented to me, “It is amazing what she can learn in one hour of focused work.” Using What Your First Grader Needs to Know, my friend was engaging her daughter at home. (If you’re not familiar with the Core Knowledge series from E.D. Hirsch Jr. and are trying to navigate the end of a school year, the grade level books could be a lifesaver.) Explicit learning – math facts, the capitols of states, bird names, etc. – is the kind of learning that is variable depending on effort and environment. With wise nurture, this kind of learning can accelerate at home.
The Learning Environment
If you’re a parent like me, suddenly working from home with kids who are learning from home, understanding how learning works is important. It matters because your child is learning and being formed by your home learning environment. Structure, challenge, support, and motivation are essential elements.
If you had the privilege of growing up in a vibrant learning environment, you may take these conditions for granted – and you may even be able to reproduce them for your children without significant effort. You have experienced the glorious goodness of implicit learning. However, you may have experienced this and not be able to reproduce it. Or you may have had only fleeting experiences of enthralling learning experiences – or none at all – and so the thought of being able to provide that for your children feels like a daydream.
In a culture where the conditions of optimal learning are not widely experienced, it is essential that parents and teachers cultivate explicit understanding of how learning works in order to help children learn. Over the coming weeks, that is what I’m going to explore in a series of posts, beginning with this primer.
Engage, Embody, Entrust
Not too long ago, I had the privilege of helping to train Sunday school teachers at my church. So I apprenticed myself to Jesus, the Master Teacher. I read through the Gospels, looking attentively at how He taught. Three themes emerged. Jesus engaged his audiences. He asked them questions (including stumpers), gave them riddles to solve, provoked them, gave them tasks, and told them stories. Jesus took bodily action – touching lepers, making mud to put on a blind man’s eyes, writing in the dirt, and welcoming children into his embrace – and called for bodily action – come and see, go and wash, fetch a donkey, prepare a meal, give me a coin, follow me, etc. Finally, he continually entrusted the work of learning to his disciples (a word that means “learner”), sending them out to do the work of the Kingdom.
These three principles – Engage, Embody, and Entrust – that I observed in Jesus’ interactions with people of all ages and social status, sound a lot like the best Montessori classrooms. As I’ve sought to practice this pedagogy (method of teaching) over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that my own learning design (I’m trained as an elementary school teacher) is deficient. I very often plan learning experiences that fail in one or more of the 3 E’s – despite the fact that I “know” explicitly that these are the dynamics of learning! Explicit understanding is not a sufficient condition for nurturing learning . . . and yet, when I am attentive and plan learning encounters that engage learners, require embodied response, and entrust the work of learning to them, I witness significant learning.
And so, over the past year, I’ve devoured books on learning. I’ve realized that as a classroom teacher, I had little or no explicit understanding of how learning actually works. Moreover, I was just plain wrong in some of my assumptions about learning.
Now, as we become a state – and perhaps a nation – of homeschoolers (at least for a little while), I hope to share some of those dynamics of learning so that the experience of learning at home can be formative in the best ways, and that explicit learning and delight in learning can increase.