Page 83 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

The brain’s most efficient learning system is learning ideas and concepts, and its least efficient and least equitable learning system is learning via rote. Presently, most of our teaching, regardless of the age of the students, is based on thematic topics that each contain large amounts of front-loaded, rote-learned knowledge. Most of the knowledge that will be learned will almost certainly be forgotten either before, or immediately after, the test.
It is not uncommon for thematic topics and themes to expose learners to numerous unspecified and unexplained concepts along with a considerable amount of somewhat random knowledge within each unit of work. Quite often, the intent of the learning is not made explicit to the learner either. In an era where efficiency and effectiveness of learning are paramount, work of this type can only be described as busy work with very limited and poorly defined outcomes.
In the historical approach to learning, a central context is chosen such as dinosaurs (red box below) and contributing content domains are identified by educators (the green circles). This content is what is generally tested as a measure of the learners understanding. As an example, why dinosaurs died out (cause and effect) is one knowledge domain that learners could find information on. Once we start listing these knowledge domains for ‘dinosaurs’ the volume of work soon becomes overwhelming and the unit can easily last 6-10 weeks to ‘do dinosaurs’.
Resource 32: The Thematic Approach
The thematic unit on dinosaurs above can be unpacked and taught in numerous different ways as there is an almost unlimited body of knowledge that can be combined in an almost unlimited number of ways. An additional problem, though, is that each of the potential content aspects is only experienced via the one context—dinosaurs. A result of this approach is that the learner creates a succession of ideas, rather than developing a conceptual understanding of each of them.
Each of the green content circles can be converted into concepts. The underlying concept of why the dinosaurs died out (cause and effect) is that ‘for every effect that we observe, there is one or more causes’. The cause behind the dinosaurs dying out requires a relationship between the key variables – cause and effect.
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environment
habitat
extinction
behaviour
food sources
plate tectonics
size & speed
intelligence
names
cause & effect
food chain
life cycle
reproduction
defence & offence
Topic/Context: Dinosaurs
time lines
fossilsation
evolution
fossilsation
limitless ?. ?. ?.
movement
concept
concepts