Invent to Learn
April 5, 2017 - Context of Education
Learning is often confused with education
The book Invent to Learn, written by Martinez & Stager, is marked as important by a lot of makers and educators throughout the world including the founder of MIT Media Lab. The reviews for the book made me curious earlier, but now the book is also translated (as well in text as in the fit with the different educational system) into Dutch it really got my attention.
The book starts with some important keywords:
Tinkering– a powerfull form of learning by doing, an ethos shared by the rapidly expanding maker community (it is more like a mindset / a playful approach)
Papert’s principle – it’s not about acuiring new skills but ways to use what we already know
Constructivism – is a well establihed theory of learning indicating that people actively conbstruct new knowledge by combining their experiences with what they already know
Constructionism – we take a view of learning a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.
Making – active role of construction in learning
Engineering – extract principles from direct experience
Martinez & Stager also use the design model for learning as described by Resnick (2007). I blogged earlier on that article.
The book is really an practical handbook for making, tinkering and engineering in the classroom.
Using technology to make, repair, or customize the things we need brings engineering, design, and computer science to the masses. Fortunately for educators, this maker movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing.
The book is based on some BIG IDEAS behind the constructionism learning lab approach (Papert, 2000):
- learning by doing
- technology as building material
- hard fun
- learning to learn
- taking proper time for the job
- you can’t get right without getting wrong
- do unto ourselves what we do unto our students
- we are entering a digital world were knowing about digital technology is as important as reading and writing.
In this blogpost I’d like to elaborate on ‘learning to learn’, ‘taking proper time for the job’ and ‘you can’t get right without getting wrong’.
Learning to Learn
Many students get the idea that “the only way to learn is by being taught.” This is what makes them fail in school and in life. Nobody can teach you everything you need to know. You have to take charge of your own learning. When facing making we see student take charge of their own proces of learning. Most of the time they are not aware of their proces as a learning proces. (We hear students often say to each other when leaving the lab (Stadslab Rotterdam) ‘I have to go to school’ where the lab IS part of SCHOOL) Makers are learning through a different approach. Don’t treat making as a sidebar to an already overtaxed curriculum. Researcher Jean Piaget already wrote about this way of learning in 1973:
[S]tudents who are thus reputedly poor in mathematics show an entirely different attitude when the problem comes from a concrete situation and is related to other interests.
In the book Invent to Learn the authors suggest an approach in which there is more time for play. If we want that to happen we need to reshape the time we take for learning, maybe there is an misfit in the current curricula between the amount of time and amount of knowledge.
Taking Proper Time for the Job
Since classical education started hundreds of years ago it was all about learning as much children as possible about the basics of life. Classrooms were big, there was only one teacher per group and everyone had to end their school with a test.
Image from C. C. Long Home Geography for Primary Grades(New York: American Book Company, 1894)
When we take a look at the education of today, we can conclude that a lot of the same principles of education still stands. One of them is educating the mass in a short period of time. In higher education (in the Netherlands) students must walk through all the courses in four years. The complete system seems to be build on industrial principles as efficiency and similarity.
Many students at school get used to being told every five minutes or every hour: do this, then do that, now do the next thing. If someone isn’t telling them what to do they get bored. Life is not like that. To do anything important you have to learn to manage time for yourself. This is the hardest lesson for many of our students. Constructing knowledge takes more time than listening about knowledge. We can argue that education should not be as timeboxed and regulated as it is today. Maybe we should let students manage their education just like they manage their mobile(phone) contract, an idea which Henk Hagoort, director of Windesheim University of applied science, introduced a week ago in the Netherlands.
Interview with Henk Hagoort in Financiële Dagblad (Dutch)
After this article was published I approached Henk Hagoort for an interview which will take place at 28th of April.
In the book Invent to Learn Martinez & Stager are strongly inspired by Seymour Papert and his thoughts on education. But they even take it a step further by bringing these principes in education. They suggest that teaching should be an iterative design cycle in which we skip the preload, don’t overteach planning, encourage continuous improvements, take time for reflection and teach students to face complexity.
The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made-knowledge – Seymour Papert
This takes more time and therefore we should rethink the current educational system.
You Can’t get it Right, Without getting it Wrong.
Nothing important works the first time. The only way to get it right is to look carefully at what happened when it went wrong. My one-year old daughter is learning all kinds of new skills by this way of learning. In education we are not used to appreciate mistakes. We mostly test kids if they can stop making mistakes and copy the behaviour we want to see and reproduce the answers we want to hear. Making mistakes feels like failing.
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – philosopher Daniel Dennett
We learn by making mistakes when we are young. We need to learn how to make good mistakes and how to learn from the insights it is giving. To succeed you need the freedom to goof on the way. Can we, teachers, learn to make good mistakes again and can we make these mistakes in plain sight? Is it ethic approved to ‘experiment’ with learning? The writers of Invent to Learn are giving some practical insights in how to learn to invent in education. But they don’t discuss the way teachers can perform inventing their own education.
In-Text Bibliography