Learner-Centered
Reprinted in Heineke & Millis 2001, Research Methods for Educational Technology, Volume 1Methods of Evaluating Educational Technology, p.17-38.
Abstract
Technology is not the solution to the complex problems that face our schools but it can dramatically increase the community of participants designing solutions. This paper examines what we know about the design the learning environments for k-12 students in the light of the emerging Internet technology. The paper is divided into three parts, a focus first on learning, followed by a focus on teaching and concluding with recommendations for the how technology can be used to design new contexts for teaching and learning.The first section examines current theories on learning and their relationship to the educational context which is described as learner-centered, knowledge-centered, community-centered and assessment-centered (Bransford, et al, 1999). It explores the intersection of these dimensions of effective learning contexts with the opportunities made possible by access to communication technology. Where there is a lag between innovative practices and research evidence, examples of how the Web is affecting student learning in specific settings are provided.
The second section focuses on the relationship of teaching and research, historically and in the present time (Lagemann 1999, Berieter' 1999). The paper also presents data from a recent national survey to describe levels of professional engagement of teachers (Riel & Becker, 2000). This data suggests that professionally engaged teachers differ significantly from classroom teachers who are isolated in a "private" practice in their classrooms. This data raises serious concerns over the current structure of teaching and argues for a more collaborative community approach to teaching as well learning.
The conclusion presents ideas for how to create learning environments for students and teachers that balance the four dimensions of learning. These ideas are offered in the spirit of a collective rethinking of schooling in the context of evolving understandings of learning and our rapid advances in tools that mediate minds.
Introduction
Fundamental change in the next decades will result from participation in education by a larger community of people who the Internet brings together, rather then from access to technology. This is because education is a human enterprise. It is dependent on the relationship between teachers and learners in a specific social, political, and historical context. My paper focuses on this context and way in which changes to the learning environment alters the relationships between teachers and learners, and between school and society.
Interactive Learning Environments
Educational goals are tied to learning environments, as one changes so must the other. Literacy goals 100 years ago for many students were to be able to read and write names, copy and read texts, and generate lists of merchandise. Literacy goals of today require mastery over many different genres of writing, persuasive, expressive, expository, procedural and expect students to be able to interpret, compare, contrast, and analyze complex texts. These differences in learning goals also hold for mathematics. Students learn the mathematical foundations necessary for careers that did not exist 100 years ago. There has been exponential growth in the amount of recorded knowledge so that memorization of factual information is no longer an effective approach to mastery of a field.
Conceptions of learning have also shifted with a century of research on learning and teaching. The developmental, experiential, and philosophical notions of learning described byJohn DeweyandGeorge Herbert Meadin the early years of the past century gave way to individual, behavioristically oriented conceptions of learning based on the early work ofEdward Thorndikeand extended byB. F. Skinner. Mid century, theories of knowledge construction byJean Piagetcontrasted sharply with those of Thorndike and Skinner. In the last two decades, beginning with theories of multiple intelligences byHoward Gardnerin the 80's and followed by advances in cognitive science, educational research, and understandings of the neurological functioning of the brain, our understanding of learning continues to develop. The current conception is of a more constructivist process with a much stronger focus on the interactive processes. These changes over the past few decades are detailed inHow People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, the 1999 report of the Committee on the Development of Learning Sciences to the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences. The entire book is available on the Internet. It describes effective learning environments as the integration of four dimension:
- Learner-centered
- Knowledge-centered
- Community-centered
- Assessment-centered
Effective learning environments areLearner-Centeredbecause we need to engage learners with their own goals and a willingness to construct new knowledge. Learning is a basic human function; however, it is very difficult to teach something to someone who does not want to learn. Unfortunately, many of the students in our schools have made "not learning" their primary work. Without student interest, learning proceeds at a very slow pace, if at all. When teachers are the learners in workshops or institutes, these contexts need to be learner-centered as well.
Learner-centered implies that the learner is actively engaged in the process of knowledge construction. Learning is an active, exciting process that can be difficult, frustrating, and challenging but is not inherently boring. Boredom sets in when learning is reduced to repetitive actions or assignments that are disconnected from larger goals or contexts. Skill development requires some amount of practice but practice is motivated by performance. The player who shoots baskets or blocks shots in practice has visions of how these skills will play out in the next game. The game provides the attitude and motivation to practice hard.
In the context of the classroom, performance is often reduced to memory exercises on tests. When students are engaged in projects, teachers often feel constrained to limit student choice to topics which can be well investigated with the resources available in the classroom, or in the school or local libraries. This restricted range means that teachers will be reading repetitive papers each year. Students know that this writing is simply an exercise, their teachers are not reading their writings for content and ideas but rather to evaluate the form of the writing. For many students and teachers, there is a disconnect with students redefining the task as writing "what the teacher wants to read."
With the growing informational and human resources on the Internet, a student, with access, can find a wide range of materials on almost any topic. If students have more latitude, in both the topic and resources selected, it is more likely that they will be able to create original knowledge products. More important than choice is an audience that is interested in the outcome of their research, development or insights. Research has demonstrated that authentic tasks with real audiences have resulted in increased learning, stronger writing and longer retention of learning and even increased performance on standardized tests of writing. But more than test score results, students engaged in building knowledge products for others develop a sense of purpose and value. They contribute to their community.
Thousands of teachers in classrooms across the country are using the Internet in project-based learning to engage students in authentic tasks. I am going to briefly profile two teachers for the following reasons. First, these examples describe meaningful contributions of students in first and fourth grade. This is offered in contrast to those who argue that young children are harmed by early use of technology. Secondly, in these classrooms, learning has been completely organized around meaningful projects. These are not isolated projects that succeeded. These teachers have shifted the way teaching and learning is organized. Finally, these teachers have themselves demonstrated a remarkable process of learning across many years and their learning has been matched by improvements in students' performance on all measures. These changes did not take place in a single year. Research suggests a 3-5 year period for teacher change to affect student skill. My experiences with teachers suggest that it is closer to the five year time period. Change takes time.
Kristi Rennebohm-Franz's first grade students in Seattle take on new projects each year in social studies, math, history, and science. For example, as part of their instruction in science, seven years ago her students started studying a pond. Over the years each group of students have monitored the pollution and measured a decrease in the duck population and other signs of problems. Her students became local advocates for social policy to solve the problems and have succeeded in having the pond preserved as a natural habitat for the ducks.
Barry Kramer's fourth grade students live in a farming community in New Jersey but actively use the Internet to extend learning beyond the classroom. Barry's students engage in a number of international projects in Learning Circles each year. But his students also learn local history through their efforts to preserve and share it. Each year, his students develop research, writing, interviewing, and Web design skills while providing a public service. They create Web page "case studies" of historic sites and local farms. The students work with a local historian who assures that the information that they collect and post is accurate. They learn to double check their sources as well as work hard on their editing. They know that their work is important to others, and not just an exercise.
Kristi's and Barry's classroom Web sites are testimony, in themselves, as to how the Internet can reshape education. Their students arrive with little or no experience with technology. Instead of focusing on computer literacy skills, the students use the technology to accomplish important educational goals. They join in a process of making knowledge products. In creating external documents of their work, they are much more engaged. Kristi's first and second grade children gave the Keynote presentation at the IEARN international Conference. This "exhibition" of their skills was very impressive. Barry's students begin creating very simple Web designs, but at the end of the year they are able to incorporate multimedia into their sites. But learning to use the technology is not the goal. Barry knows that the technology will change many times before his students see the workplace. Instead he spends his time teaching them to interview, write, check and recheck sources. But what is most important is the relationships that develop between the students and other adults in their community.
The ThinkQuest Internet Challenge offers a different structure for organizing learning that is modeled on group project development common in today's business world. Students tackle the problem of teaching a subject or skill to their peers.
Team building is an important part of the process and this contest rewards diversity of perspectives so team members often come from different countries, or bring very different background experiences to the group. The team finds coaches and works on a time line to bring their knowledge products to completion using Internet tools for both communication and design. The sites are made available on the Internet and the designers are challenged to locate, inform and support a community of learners to use their sites for learning. This process is the final part of the contest. Will students utilize their resources and activities? Is there evidence that learning is taking place as a result of interacting with their sites? The students compete for college scholarships but there are many more winners than the finalists. All of the students who participate learn a great deal and millions of students and teachers benefit from the materials that are created. Students are creating the Web's largest library of freely available learning activities. And the ThinkQuest library continues to grow in size and quality every year. Students teaching other students is one of the most valuable untapped educational resource available in and for schools.
Capitalizing on students' personal learning interests, encouraging them to develop their own skills to find, synthesize and use information in creative ways, provides a much richer learning experience for the students as well as the teacher. When students use the Internet to find resources that are new to their teacher, develop original projects, and find other people to help them with their work, they are engaging in an important process of constructing rather then receiving knowledge. Internet resources constantly change. So even if students are pursuing a similar project to that of students a year ago, there may be very different materials available. Helping students to become "knowledge scouts" looking for new materials to extend lessons is a renewable educational resource.
Generation Why, developed as a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant, is a project where school students work as knowledge scouts to help their teachers redesign lessons with technology. The goal is to enlist student help to think about alternative ways of structuring learning. The teacher helps the student understand the goals and objectives of the lesson and then the student uses their network of online consultants to create a new way to accomplish the goals. The student coaches the teacher in any new technology skills. Students bring knowledge of technology, time to explore the Internet, and their network of social resources; while the teacher brings an understanding of how ideas might be adapted to fit into the classroom structure. Together a teacher-student partnership creates a lesson that addresses the changing needs and interests of students.
Knowledge-Centered
Effective learning environments are Knowledge-centered because the ability to think, reflect, and solve problems is strengthened by access to ideas, assumptions and conceptions of others arranged in meaningful ways. Many teachers work very hard to reach and teach their students. This means continual learning of curriculum content as well as methods of instruction. Yet teachers have little time for this form of professional engagement.
Knowledge-centered learning highlights the important role of the teacher in setting the "course" of learning. Over the past century of curriculum development, discipline-based groups have contributed many effective ways to organize essential skills and knowledge. But knowledge building is not a finished activity in any field. Textbooks reduce multiple perspectives to a simplified consensual viewpoint at a fixed moment in time. These secondary sources present knowledge as non-contested facts with less attention to the community debate, the historical discoveries or analytic reasoning that historians employ to come to their conclusions. In the past, it was not realistic to expect students to find primary sources. The Internet changes the relative value of textbooks. Students, like historians, engage in real research, interviewing people who were involved in historical events, accessing real documents, and using them to understand, draw conclusions, and debate different perspectives. Here are three examples. The first one is a ThinkQuest project and the other two result from a collaboration between South Kingstown High School and Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group. All three of them involve students becoming historians collecting and preserving historical data.
Curriculum research and development was the university's solution to poorly trained teachers. Some researchers overtly sought to design curriculum that could be "teacher proof." The knowledge, they hoped, would be learned directly from the materials. But technology has never replaced the teacher for one simple reason. Teaching is an emergent, interactive constructed activity that requires a complex blend of knowledge of the students and knowledge of the curriculum.
The Internet, like a textbook, is a valuable source of knowledge that can help in the process of making decisions about what and how to teach discipline knowledge.
The Web can help provide teachers the structure of discipline knowledge to help them design cognitive roadmaps to organized learning, project ideas for developing students research and thinking skills, and assessment tools to evaluate student achievement. ERIC, the Academic Guide to the Internet, the Annenberg/CPB Projects Exhibits, the Math Forum, Marco Polo and the United Nations CyberschoolBus are examples of sites that archive large databases of informational resources, partners and projects.
Our knowledge is contained not only in what we write but also in the way that we preserve and share what we learn. The Internet brings centuries of discoveries (telescopes, microscopes, transmitters, receptors, recorders, light, camera, sound and action) together in the digital context and makes them available for student and teacher use. Some examples:
The Internet has thousands of opportunities for collaborative projects. With Webcam and video, very young students can watch the behavior of hamsters throughout the day and night. As partners with scientists at the Center for Biological Timing, students' natural curiosity is extended to scientific observations and analysis. Students are invited to "view live images and actual experiment results, analyze real-time data, form hypotheses, suggest variables for new experiments, and share conclusions with other scientists from all over the world."