Learning Deeper
Posted on Dec 20 2006 | Tagged as: learning
I must make a confession. When I was in high school learning did not come easily to me. Isn’t it like God to take an area of weakness and give us a passion to serve others in it? Let me continue to confess. Although I love to read and write it requires incredible focus for me to perform well. I will continue to be honest… To this day I have incredible test anxiety. I remember a few years back one of our Bible teachers handed out a test to the staff at an in-service meeting. He was giving us a Biblical knowledge test for fun. As soon as a copy of the test was placed in front of me I froze. In my mind it took me back to high school; to memories of walking into class the day of a test feeling unprepared and doomed to fail. It has taken me years to overcome some of the self doubt that resulted from my less than stellar high school academic career. My attitude toward learning has changed dramatically over the years. I believe that one of the primary contributors to that change is an understanding that learning is so much more than the ability to memorize information and repeat it back on a test (although this is an important part of learning)
I began to find areas of passion that propelled me to deeper levels of learning, late in high school, in college, and even more so in graduate school. As I matured as a student I began to understand what triggers motivated me to learn. I also began to discover that learning was exciting. Through the challenge of learning I began to not just acquire facts, but construct my own thoughts and opinions as I learned. I found learning was not just purely cognitive, but was beginning to influence my spirit, attitude, and my actions. Today I am passionate about the power of learning to transform us, especially when integrated with the heart of God.
If Westside is to strive for continuous improvement in the educational process where should we begin in order to get the greatest benefit for our effort? One of the elements of our recent visioning and strategic planning process is working to answer that question. What appears to be emerging from that work is a focus on our ability to inspire deeper levels of learning. Adding more content that is purely the memorization of facts does not accomplish the desired goal. We seek to develop in students a passion for learning, and the ability to shape well informed attitudes and actions. That does not mean we don’t need to study the facts, but that we must be intentional about training and challenging our students to apply, synthesize, and evaluate life as we learn.
Educational theory categorizes learning into three domains, the cognitive (what we know), the affective (what we feel), and the psychomotor (what we do). Within each of these categories there is a progression of learning steps that communicates with each step more ownership by the learner. For example, in the cognitive domain we begin with the ability to recall information, progressing to understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and finally evaluation. If we are intentional as a school and in our classrooms and even in our extracurricular experiences to challenge students to move deeper in learning, they will be more prepared for college, and more prepared for life. Students will find that with each level of education (high school, college, post-graduate) higher levels of functioning in thinking, feeling, and doing are expected from them. Assignments change from fill in the blank worksheets to reflective yet documented opinion papers; from tests that require students to recall information to projects that demonstrate the ability to do something meaningful with freshly learned concepts.
In Westside’s mission statement we state a uniqueness of our educational philosophy, which is that we seek to “educate and develop the whole person to the glory for God.” Educating the whole person implies more than just downloading the facts from an instructor’s mind to a student’s mind. We want to inform the mind and inspire life long learning. We want to provide all kinds of challenging experiences that will incorporate the cognitive, but also force the heart to develop. We want to propel young leaders toward action and influence. It is through a posture of listening to Christ that we as a school seek to equip our students toward a life long process of learning – what they know, what they feel, and what they do.
