Page 63 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

Almost everybody learns to drive a car and passes the practical test, regardless of how smart your school or anybody else may judge you to be. Driving is probably one of the most complex cognitive tasks we ever attempt in our lives. How is it possible that everyone passes that test, even if it may take more than one attempt? Why don’t smarter people pass that test more quickly than less able learners, or become better drivers?
The answer to these questions also provides an explanation for why some subjects in school are easier (soft), and some are difficult (hard) to learn. If we separate subjects in school systems into the hard subjects and the soft subjects, we discover some differences in the way each of these two groups of subjects are taught.
The underlying reason soft subjects are easy to learn is that they leverage the way in which the human brain learns most efficiently by learning to build new concepts and concept frameworks. This approach focuses on introducing a small amount of knowledge and then apply that knowledge to create ideas and concepts in a very specific sequence. We add new knowledge as it is required; Just-in-Time, rather than Just-in-Case we may need it later. The hard subjects could become soft subjects by significantly changing how they are taught, but that will require increased rigour in the understanding that educators have of the underlying concepts for each of the learning domains of those ‘hard’ subjects.
Yet
Resource 25: Comparing ‘Hard’ & ‘Soft’ Subjects
again, the exception to this notion is reading and writing. These two tasks require a significant amount of front-loaded rote learned knowledge before ideas and concepts can be developed. The structure of words and syntax is almost completely devoid of patterns that we could learn quickly as concept frameworks.
The Move to a Conceptual Curriculum
We defined concepts earlier in this resource as “Concepts are patterns between two or more variables (processes) that depend on each other (cause and effect), where the relationship between the variables is understood in a range of contexts. Once the pattern is recognised, the brain immediately maps that pattern and turns into a non-conscious process. We refer to this human ability to as automaticity”
We have introduced the idea of variables and we now need to define and explain their role in our understanding of how we learn and make sense of our world.
97 Contemporary music studies, as opposed to learning to read music or play an instrument via rote rather than via an understanding of the underlying concepts for music.
98 Technology - the technology and design process, including ‘making’, are the emphasis in these courses.
99 Kahn, Sal; The Kahn Academy. What is a variable? Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra/introduction-to- algebra/alg1-intro-to-variables/v/what-is-a-variable
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Hard subjects
History
Mathematics
Science
English
Computing
Soft subjects
Drama
Social Science
Art
Music97
Technology98
The word "variable" comes from the Latin, "variābilis", which roughly translates to
"able to be various" or "able to change".99 Kahn Academy