Creating Life-Long Learners

I’ve been reading a lot about teaching and learning lately. In-depth stuff and big picture stuff. It seems to me that education and how we think about education is beginning to shift in a big way across a lot of planes. A colleague and I were talking about our own teaching experiences earlier this week. He and I teach in fields that are similar in structure but different in content. One of the things I like about this particular fact is that so much of our strategies and course structures are identical but in the same way, they are radically different from some of the other academic fields.

He teaches Culinary Arts, I teach Theatre. We have an advantage in our areas. When we say that our classes need to be hands-on, people say, “Of course they do.” But when I first started teaching acting here it was very difficult for me to make people understand why an acting classroom needed to be an empty space with no desks. That we would never need desks. That there were no tests. If we needed to lecture, we would do it sitting on the floor. There is a disconnect between the thought “hands-on” and what that might actually mean in any given field.

I think, for my colleague and I, that it is easier to see the way that things are headed because our fields are already tipped in that direction. In our fields we cannot learn without doing. But as we talked about our students, about their grown and their milestones, about their education, we both found a whole other set of similarities.

When I have a student come through the program here they are on a path of growth that has very little to do with what they are learning in the classroom. In two years I cannot possibly prepare them for the deeply complex art that is theatre, and I don’t try. Instead I focus on two things, self-confidence and problem solving.

First, people need agency. We are quick to make rules and box our students into a structured and direct path through our classes. But when our students don’t ever have the power to influence the world around them, they won’t ever try. If we don’t value their opinion, regardless of how much experience the have, how will they ever value it. If we don’t ask them what they think, why would they even try to?

Yes, I know. We are the content experts! Content is important. But we do not teach content through experience. We teach experience and we use the content to do it. Content is the lens through which each class teaches self-confidence and problem solving. When you are making a test or writing an assignment, do you ever ask yourself, “What about this assignment will they take with them when it is over?” Even if they are not majoring in your area, even if you teach gen ed, even if every student says, on magical introduction day, that the only reason they are in your class is because it was the only section open and they need it to graduate what are they taking away from what you are giving them?

If you don’t know, worse, if the answer is “nothing” then why are you doing it? What is the point? If we want critical thinkers, we must make them. If we want to raise the bar for education, we then have to do it. That means more work. More discussion. More one-on-one.

If all I have done at the end of the semester is gotten students to regurgitate facts and content, I have wasted an opportunity to do something extraordinary. Content is important. But it is also static. We need to use content to teach them about thought. To teach them how to think. To teach them to teach themselves how to think.

Because the world they face is increasing in complexity at an exponential pace.  There is no way to guarantee, for a lot of fields, that the content we offer will be relevant 10 years from now. But if you have taught them to be curious, to think deeply, to solve problems, to communicate with one another respectfully and productively, then the new content will be mastered and the old content will be drawn upon and enriched.

Above all else, content included, we need to be producing life-long learners. Problem solvers. Pioneers. The Future.

Tags: edtech, higher ed, Teaching, theatre