There is so much more to learning than just getting the right answer.
I grew up in an education system that rewarded you for remembering things and picking the right answer. And to some degree, there is still an abundance of this way of thinking. You only need to look at the over reliance, in some schools, on the use of multiple choice, a system that asks you to pick out the right answer from a list of answers you are given. An approach that has limited application at best.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with being correct. In fact, it is an important goal of the early stages of new learning. When we are learning something new, or revisiting to reinforce core learning, we discover new knowledge; we are introduced to new ideas; we encounter new concepts and develop new vocabulary so that we can understand and explain it. At this stage of the prosses, we are in acquisition mode, soaking it all in, being playful with what we have found, experimenting with how it all fits together. And as a result, we embed this new learning into our memories, hard coding it into our brains. It would then be reasonable to say job done, learning achieved, lets’ move on to what’s next. Constantly in consumption mode. But to do so, would be to miss out on the greater possibilities of all that learning. Knowledge alone is not enough.
Sure a 100 years ago (or even just 50 years ago) to have more knowledge than the company down the street, gave you an advantage. You could get things done quicker and so win the day. But today, we all have so much knowledge, literally, at our fingertips, that simply knowing things is not enough. You have to have a deeper understanding of that knowledge, able to see relationships that others have missed, and be able to apply it to different and more complex situations. When we have mastered foundational knowledge and developed functional understanding, we then get to move on to greater depths.
It is when we are learning at greater depth, that we are able to apply our learning to a variety of contexts, both familiar and unfamiliar. We work more independently on more complex and diverse problems, applying skills and knowledge consistently, with confidence and fluency. We are challenged to organize our ideas, so that deeper connections become visible and we can explain with greater clarity, what we know, how we know it and why we know our solutions are correct. And then we get to explain or teach the skills to others and in doing so cement it in our own understanding. More often than not, at this stage of greater depth learning, there is more than one solution, multiple routes to be taken, all slightly different yet equally right, and the final selection, is more about efficiency or elegance in design, than simply being right.
At BISC we understand the relationship in learning between acquisition, mastery and greater depth. And to stop at the point of acquisition, would be to scratch the surface of learning and miss out on exploring the greater depth that waits.
Nikki Charlesworth, our Head of Primary, wrote an interesting piece on this very subject. If you would like to learn more, here is a Link.
Hope you all have a great half-term break.
