Whaddaya Mean, ‘Learning?’

In education, we tend to throw the word “learning” around a lot. This is understandable, as many of us believe that learning is the goal of our work as teachers. But as teachers, how often have we stopped to ask ourselves: “What do we really mean when we use the word, learning?”

Consider the following examples:

• Learning how to ride a bike
• Learning the multiplication tables
• Learning to be part of a community
• Learning the sport of Olympic weightlifting
• Learning to be a more loving partner
• Learning to eat more nutritious food
• Learning how to read

What does it mean to learn in each of these examples? Does learning take on the exact same meaning in each of these cases? What are the differences between each of these kinds of learning?

What we’ll be discussing in this chapter are some of the different ways that people have come to think about learning, sorted into three big categories. Because there are overlaps between these different ways of thinking about learning, we like to think of each one of them as a “lens” for looking at the world.

You can think of each of these lenses for looking at learning as allowing us to see and notice different things about the world – particularly our students, classrooms, and schools. Much like a magnifying glass, microscope, and telescope can allow us to notice different things, so too can these lenses highlight different aspects of learning. We’re going to use the word paradigm from now on to describe these different lenses-for-seeing learning.

In reality, any learning phenomenon^[1] is a complex and multilayered process that involves lots of different things happening all at once. Let’s take the last example we shared: learning how to read. At the time of publication, a lot of ink (and podcast audio) has been spilled about the “best way” to teach kids how to read. Some people argue that we need to focus exclusively on the letters on a page and the sounds we are (supposed) to make when we see them. Other people argue that focusing on meaning is the most important, and that being able to sound out words perfectly while not understanding what you’re reading is useless. Still others (ourselves included) believe that it’s all important to different degrees. More to the point, we believe that all of these complex processes are happening at the same time while people are learning to read.

Amori’s Reading Goals

Let’s stick the reading example for a second, actually. The embedded YouTube above features a 5th grade student named Amori. As you watch the video, ask yourself the following questions:

• How would you describe the learning that Amori is going through in this video?
• How would you describe the way that Amori’s teacher, Rick, is trying to support that learning?
• How would you say Amori is responding to Rick’s teaching approach?
• Based on Rick’s approach, what do you think are some of the assumptions he has about learning, and specifically, about learning to read?
• How would you describe the overall learning environment that Amori is part of in this video?

There are, of course, many valid ways to answer the questions above. And often times, there can be so many things happening in the classroom at a given time that it can be difficult to decide, as a teacher, what to focus on in any given moment.

For us, then, paradigms of learning provide a useful starting point that let us tease apart and focus on different kinds of learning at different times. One paradigm might help us better support Amori ability to recognize certain words on sight; another might help us understand her thought process as she tackles a word she is unfamiliar with; still a third paradigm might help us better welcome her into different communities that love different genres of writing – and ultimately help her build toward a lifelong love of reading. It’s all important, but sometimes it helps to just focus on one thing at a time.

Three Paradigms of Learning

Okay, so after all that build-up, what are the three big paradigms of learning that we mentioned earlier? How does each of them help us understand different aspects of learning? How can they each help us become better teachers? And is there really one that is better than the rest? That’s where this chapter is headed next. We’ll return to Amori’s reading experience throughout our discussion to try and illustrate the points we are making.

Behaviorism: Seeing Is Believing

Skipping a bit of history for now, let’s dive right into our first major paradigm of learning: Behaviorism. As its name suggests, a Behaviorist paradigm tends to focus on observable behaviors – things we can actually see students doing – as evidence of learning. Do we want to see if students know how to enter and exit a classroom appropriately? We need to observe their behaviors at the start and end of class. Do we want to measure how strong a given student’s reading habits are? We need to observe their reading behaviors over time. Do we want to help students develop healthy eating and exercise routines? We need to observe the behaviors of people we consider healthy and help students replicate those.

What all of these questions and answers have in common is their focus on behaviors – specific actions or mannerisms – what we can actually observe. This is different from things like inner beliefs or desires that we might assume exist – but can’t observe directly. Behaviors that are repeated over time are collectively called habits and tend to become unconscious – we don’t always need to think about doing them. And sometimes people use the term routines to describe sets of behaviors that occur together – like the routine of behaviors that leads to starting a car (getting keys, walking to the car, opening the door, putting on a seatbelt, inserting the key into the ignition, and finally turning the key). When someone switches from a gas-powered car to an electric, this routine then needs to be adjusted.

We can use Behaviorist perspectives to make sense of the way Rick is teaching, from his emphasis on saying a word “the right way,” to his general use of praise, encouragement, and corrective feedback to promote what he sees as desired behaviors in Amori. Reading teachers might specifically notice Rick’s use of “nonsense words” to illustrate the “rules” that should be followed when pronouncing a “double L” in a word in standardized American English. And if there is a larger class off-screen that still seems to allow the one-on-one time seen in the video, we might hypothesize, through the lens of Behaviorism, that there are classroom management structures in place that have shaped how the class operates on a day-to-day basis. Some key questions that a behaviorist paradigm might prompt teachers to think about are summarized in below.

Behaviorism can feel very attractive to teachers because our work is often framed as dealing with various “behaviors” in the classroom. As have discussed, behaviors are clearly observable, and thus easy for teachers to notice and respond to. And of course, many teachers have already developed some sense of the different habits and routines that impact their own lives, and thus have some predisposition to the idea of shaping behaviors, addressing habits, and establishing routines in the classroom.

Some Limitations of Behaviorism

At this point in our book, or maybe at a previous point in your own reflections, you might have raised some important questions or concerns about Behaviorist approaches to teaching. Some questions that might have come to mind include:

• Who gets to decide what behaviors are “desirable” and “undesirable?”
• What happens when there is a conflict between ideas of what is or is not a desirable behavior?
• What are limits on when, how, and to what degree adults should be seeking to shape the behavior of young people?
• At what point do we draw the line between shaping behavior and seeking to control others? And finally,
• Isn’t there more to learning than just engaging in observable behaviors?

Within the world of Educational Technology, we argue that these questions and more play an important role in our pedagogical decision-making. At what point, for example, does the use of classroom management software like ClassDojo start to feel like we are manipulating students? How invested are we in using plagiarism detection software like TurnItIn to police undesirable behaviors labeled as “cheating,” as opposed to working to build a culture of trust and respect for people’s ideas? And if students are selecting all the right multiple choice answers in a speedy fashion using quiz software like Kahoot!, does that suggest that meaningful and deep learning is really happening?

These questions and issues raised above or not empirical questions, but philosophical ones – questions that ask us to reflect on our own beliefs, assumptions, perspectives, and values, and how those have been shaped by the histories and cultures we have all become a part of. And while the next paradigm we will discuss doesn’t get us through the such challenging philosophical questions, it does help us address the question of what else there might be learning besides observable behavior.

Cognitivism: We Think, Therefore We Learn

As a response to purely behaviorist ideas about what counts as learning, another paradigm, known as cognitivism, will be the next focus of our exploration. The paradigm of cognitivism is tied to the idea of cognition, which generally refers to the act of thinking. But what does it even mean to think, or to engage in cognition? For people who focus on cognitivism as a lens for understanding learning, a wide range of processes have been proposed. These cognitive processes include:

• Perception – the use of our senses to understand and interpret the world around us;
• Attention – concentrating our awareness on a particular phenomenon (and excluding others)
• Memorization – holding ideas in our heads, either in the short term for completing tasks, or in the long term
• Recall – pulling up our memories from long-term storage as they become necessary
• Analysis – mentally breaking something complex up into its component parts to understand it better

If you’ve seen frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy, which lists the processes of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing (or creating, depending on which version you are looking at), you are seeing the cognitivism paradigm in action. In fact, we would go so far as to argue that within the world of formal, institutional education, the cognitive paradigm has become the most dominant way of seeing learning. It’s become so commonplace that many in the field tend to take for granted – then again, some folks might argue the same about behaviorist perspectives.

Cognitive perspectives underpin the most common framings of student learning objectives, which assume that “Students Will Be Able To…” master or perform a particular skill as a result of a given lesson. Cognitivism underpins the idea that we can give students tests, quizzes, and other assessments of learning in order to measure their progress on a given skill.

In Amori’s video, we can use a cognitivist perspective to make sense of Amori’s statement about good reading at 00:45 on “staying in the moment and being able to just read.” At 00:32, Amori also talks about the idea of predicting, a skill often emphasized by cognitivists. After Rick’s prompting Amori about predicting, she mentions the importance of just stepping back to think about what she is reading, again, emphasizing the idea of cognition and memory, “instead of reading just forgetting. what I read” (01.17). The box below shows some questions teachers might ask when thinking about learning from a cognitive perspective.

Unlike Behaviorism, which places the emphasis on observations that are readily apparent, Cognitivism can feel very attractive to teachers because of its emphasis on process that we believe are important to learning – such as perceiving, comprehending, memorizing, and analyzing – but need to be measured by different assessments. Cognitive tests and other assessments of learning can be standardized and used to compare students, which may be attractive when there is a desire to rank and sort students to recognize their achievement. And of course, diagnostic tests of cognitive ability can make teachers feel more ‘in control’ when one or more students appear to be struggling with content. If we can just diagnose the problem

Some Limitations of Cognitivism