Matthews, D. J., & Keating, D. P. (1999). What we are learning about how children learn, and what this means for teachers. Education Canada, 39 (1), 35-37.
What We Are Learning About How Children Learn,
and What This Means for Teachers
By Dona J. Matthews and Daniel P. Keating
In a period of social, political, and economic transition, education assumes a critical role. As people experience escalating, unpredicted changes, their health and prosperity depend increasingly on their having acquired effective communication, coping, and decision-making skills. Children who lack strong networks of support at home and in their communities have fewer opportunities to acquire these skills and are at higher risk of serious developmental problems.
At this critical time of social change, teachers have an unprecedented responsibility toward their students. They need more than ever current research about learning that can support them in providing the school cultures that will enable their students to become happy and productive members of our society. Where that kind of access to information and understanding is not readily available, it is understandable that many teachers may succumb to the malaise and cynicism that is evident in the public discourse on education, or revert to simple solutions such as "back-to-basics", or "child-centered education" approaches, each of which incorporates some useful principles, but neither of which embodies the required complexity for the problems now facing us.
Over the past two decades, there has been a great investment in learning about learning, across many disciplines, and in diverse fields. Many of the new understandings have reached the popular media (for example, Howard Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences, and Daniel Goleman's discussion of emotional intelligence), but they are often not communicated in ways that teachers can apply to their classroom work with children and adolescents.
This article provides a brief review of some of the current understandings of learning that have direct implications for teaching practice, and includes references to other work that may be useful. We have separated these understandings into five general topic areas (multiple domains of competence; social/emotional factors; collaborative learning; conceptual change; and diversity of pace and style), but these concepts are inextricably interconnected. As educators implement understandings gained in one of these areas, they tend to find they are including principles from others, and soon, all areas.
Multiple Domains of Competence (a.k.a. Multiple Intelligences)
Although many educational policies reflect an implicit view of intelligence or competence as being domain-general (such that children are perceived and sometimes labelled as being globally "gifted", "average", or "below average/"slow"), this perspective has been challenged by considerable research and theoretical evidence over the last several years. (1) Work that we have been doing with early adolescents identified as "gifted" by virtue of high global scores on tests of intelligence and academic achievement, suggests that their school-relevant ability is more accurately understood as developing by subject area or domain, than as resulting from an overall cognitive superiority. (2, 3) For example, those students who show evidence of mathematical advancement may or may not demonstrate exceptionally strong abilities in linguistic, or social/emotional, or other areas.
The idea that competence develops differentially across multiple domains is not a new one. It has been receiving considerable attention recently in the writing of Gardner (4,5), who has proposed an evolving model that currently postulates linguistic, logical/mathematical, social/emotional, musical, bodily/kinesthetic, visual/spatial, naturalistic, and spiritual/philosophical intelligences. One important outcome of implementing such a perspective is that room is made in curricula and school cultures for diversity of all kinds, including racial, linguistic, gender, temperamental, and others.
Where competence/intelligence is seen as developing multiply in this way (rather than categorically and somewhat monolithically), teachers and students learn to respect diverse ways of being capable, and a much broader spectrum of learners come to think of themselves as capable.
Socioemotional factors in cognitive processes
Students who think of themselves as capable have (by definition) stronger and healthier self-concepts than others, and are far likelier to be motivated to engage in learning activities such as school coursework. The connections among self-concept, motivation to learn, engagement in learning, and actual achievement have been discussed at some length, and with many practical teaching (and parenting) recommendations, in a number of recent and thoughtful books (e.g., H. R. Clinton (6), R. Coles (7); D. Goleman (8)).
Research is converging to demonstrate that where educators take into account socioemotional factors in learning, such as motivation, temperament, and engagement, their students' learning is helped to proceed optimally. One of the practical keys to understanding how this concept applies to the classroom is to recognize the importance of discourse. An understanding of the range and complexity of any subject area is possible only where students are provided with many opportunities to talk and write about their ideas and perspectives with others who are at similar and different levels of understanding, and are given the guidance they need to make sense of the available discourse.
Authenticity is another key concept that enables the integration of socioemotional needs into classroom learning: where people feel that what they are learning matters in some real-world way, they are far likelier to be motivated to master and apply complex concepts (9, 10).
In considering the large individual differences in students' academic achievements and apparent cognitive abilities, we have suggested the efficacy of thinking in terms of differing "habits of mind" (11), rather than ability or intelligence. The habits of mind approach presumes no determined structural outcome of competence and seeks to accommodate what is known about the plasticity of development and to incorporate affective, motivational, and personality variability. Teachers who consider their students' habits of mind rather than merely their academic skills may better understand the possibilities for nurturing high-level cognitive competencies such as critical and creative thinking in all of their students, not just those who begin with good skills and habits. Although habits are hard to break, they can, with attention and perseverance, be learned and unlearned.
Collaborative learning
Teachers must be willing to work with students, colleagues, and other educational stakeholders to create a school climate which encourages and nurtures an engagement with authentic real-world learning. Teachers who see themselves as learners, and who are engaged with others in their own learning, are far likelier to create classroom climates which students find stimulating, and which lead to high level learning outcomes, or a "knowledge-building" perspective (12). And on a purely pragmatic level, collaboration is essential if the kind of approaches under discussion here are to be implemented. It is unreasonable to think that one teacher working alone can effectively meet the diverse learning needs of every student in the classroom.
Although learning is inherently social (13), students working constructively with each other is not simply, easily, or quickly achieved. It requires some knowledge about the problems that are encountered in acquiring and using collaboration skills. One teacher-friendly book published in 1991 that provides detailed and systematic instructions for creating co-operative learning classrooms is Cooperative learning: Where heart meets mind , by B. Bennett, C. Rolheiser, and L. Stevahn.
Collaboration can take many forms. Encouraging students to engage their own authentic learning interests almost always involves the need to move beyond the classroom for information and understanding, particularly as children get older. The school librarian is an often-underused resource for beginning to think about what information sources --including books, human, technological, and institutional -- might be available to help an individual child productively develop an interest. Other teachers, parents, and community members can be brought in or used in diverse ways as resources to encourage high levels of learning in diverse kinds of learners.
Apprenticeships and museums are two possible community resources that can help students engage in meaningful discourse that leads to authentic learning. Exciting opportunities for discourse, collaboration, and innovation are being opened up by emerging communication technologies; it is likely that these will become increasingly important over the next few years.
Conceptual change: Pathways to expertise
Complexity and context are two essential concepts in current understandings of the nature of the learning process as it proceeds from children's naïve ideas to more complex and ecologically sound concepts (14). A useful metaphor for understanding the conceptual changes that constitute real learning is that of "pathways to competence". This notion incorporates a developmental and contextual perspective; the domain-specificity of development; and an understanding that cognitive activities (rather than mental abilities) are the foundation of learning. The pathways to competence notion suggests the diversity of developmental histories that is so obvious in any classroom, diversity that is largely missed in the move toward "back-to-basics" approaches and standardized testing.
A practical implication of this approach, and consistent with the research, is that there are many possible pathways to expertise. When one approach to concept learning in a particular domain doesn't work with an individual child, another approach can be
taken. This implies the need to work toward developmentally appropriate instruction, and a recognition of the essential nature of discourse in the acquisition of key cognitive dispositions, such as critical habits of mind. Looked at in this way, the onus of adaptation is shifted from the child to the educational setting: instead of identifying flaws in the child, we define flaws in the environment relative to the child's developmental needs, and work to find an accommodation. (15)
Another practical implication of this approach is the link between assessment and instruction. To be consistent with what we are learning about learning, assessment should be descriptive; linked to instruction in an interactive, ongoing way; frequent; sufficiently flexible to specify performance floors and ceilings; linked to an understanding of individual learners' developmental histories; concerned as much with the learning process as its products; and aimed toward defining optimal instructional objectives and methods.
Diversity of learning style and pace
Students' learning opportunities are enhanced not only by a recognition of their multiple domains of competence, the socioemotional factors in the learning process, the value of collaborative learning, and the need to encourage conceptual change by attending to diverse developmental histories, but also by a recognition that this is all played out very differently in style and pace, across individual learners at different developmental stages. Although many of us see learning when it appears in the form of rapt attention to books, teachers, and assigned tasks, there are as many ways of learning as there are individuals to learn. Where teachers consider diversity in developmental levels, they are far likelier to recognize and respect the variety of learning styles and pace that characterize individuals, including differences in such attributes (for example) as apparent curiosity, compliance with authority, intrinsic motivation to learn, perfectionism, and test anxiety.
Similarly, teachers who want to encourage their students' capacity for productive participation in a changing society can consider varying preferences for different modalities of instruction and assessment. Visually oriented learners, for example, may not effectively process material that is delivered lecture-style. The wider the scope and range of possibilities in style and pace of both instruction and assessment, the greater the possibility that different kinds of students will be engaged by learning. This has obvious benefits both for the individuals who enhance their competence (who might not otherwise have done so), and for society, which requires as much diversity of ability and approach as possible in order to thrive in a time of unpredictable change.
Students themselves can be excellent sources for devising innovative approaches to learning. They may in fact be education's best hidden and most valuable resource. A classroom of students who are encouraged and wisely guided in thinking about what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, and how their learning should be assessed has a far greater capacity for creative imagination than any single teacher. Thus, engaging students in understanding their own interests and creating their own learning is a good beginning for their later participation in a society facing rapid unpredictable change.
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(2) Matthews, D. J. (1997). Diversity in domains of development: Research findings and their implications for gifted identification and programming. Roeper Review, 19 , 172-177 .
(3) Matthews, D. J., & Keating, D. P. (1995). Domain specificity and habits of mind: An investigation of patterns of high-level development. Journal of Early Adolescence, 15, 319-343 .
(4) Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind . New York: Basic Books.
(5) Gardner, H. (1998). A multiplicity of intelligences. Scientific American, 9, 18-23.
(6) Clinton, H. R. (1996). It takes a village and other lessons children teach us . New York: Simon & Schuster.
(7) Coles, R. (1998). The moral intelligence of children: How to raise a moral child . New York: Plume.
(8) Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence . New York: Bantam.
(9) Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach . New York: Basic Books.
(10) Keating, D. P. (1996). Habits of mind for a learning society: Educating for human development. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Handbook of education and human development: New models of learning, teaching, and schooling (pp. 461-481). Oxford: Blackwell.
(11) Keating, D. P. (1991). Curriculum options for the developmentally advanced. Exceptionality Education Canada, 1 , 53-83.
(12)Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1993). Surpassing ourselves: An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise . Chicago: Open Court.
(13) Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education . Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press.
(14) Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(15) Andrews, J., & Lupart, J. (1996). The inclusive classroom: Educating exceptional children. Scarborough, ON: Nelson Canada.
