Making Learning Whole

How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

David Perkins

• Editorial: Jossey-Bass
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470639658
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education Teaching Methods

New in Paperback! Make learning more meaningful by teaching the "whole game"

David Perkins, a noted authority on teaching and learning and co-director of Harvard's Project Zero, introduces a practical and research-based framework for teaching. He describes how teaching any subject at any level can be made more effective if students are introduced to the "whole game, " rather than isolated pieces of a discipline. Perkins explains how learning academic subjects should be approached like learning baseball or any game, and he demonstrates this with seven principles for making learning whole: from making the game worth playing (emphasizing the importance of motivation to sustained learning), to working on the hard parts (the importance of thoughtful practice), to learning how to learn (developing self-managed learners).

• Vividly explains how to organize learning in ways that allow people to do important things with what they know
• Offers guidelines for transforming education to prepare our youth for success in a rapidly changing world
• Filled with real-world, illustrative examples of the seven principles

At the end of each chapter, Perkins includes "Wonders of Learning, " a summary of the key ideas.

1

Play the Whole Game

YOU KNOW HOW MOUNTAINS ON THE HORIZON CAN LOOK SMALL, BUT WHEN you actually approach them they turn out to be much higher? This was my experience as a doctoral student approaching a dissertation. From a distance, the mountain did not seem so formidable, but when I got to the base I had no idea how to climb it.

My academic degrees are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was a mathematics major. After I finished the undergraduate work, I continued into a doctoral program, developing an interest in mathematical approaches to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the study of how to get computers to undertake intelligent activities, such as playing chess or proving mathematical theorems or controlling a robot to do interesting and challenging things. My work on artificial intelligence stimulated my interest in thinking and learning in human beings. After finishing my degree, I slid over into the world of cognitive psychology and education, but the why of that is another story. Right now, you can picture me in the foothills of the dissertation range, thinking about what kind of research on artificial intelligence to attempt.

The problem was problem finding. There is a very useful rough distinction between problem solving and problem finding. Problem solving is the art and craft of dealing well with problems that are already reasonably clear. Sometimes we find such problems in a book. Sometimes they emerge as blatant needs in the course of everyday life. Wherever they came from, there they are, and we burrow into them and try to dig through them. Just because they are clear in outline does not make them easy. For instance, the problem of lighting efficiently with electricity had been recognized for some time and pursued by a number of inventors, before Thomas Edison finally cracked it. Classic mathematical conjectures like Fermat’s Last Theorem not uncommonly linger for centuries in very well-defined form before anyone resolves them.

Problem finding is a somewhat different matter. Problem finding concerns figuring out what the problems are in the first place. It also involves coming to good formulations of problems, formulations that make them approachable. Often it also involves redefining a problem halfway through trying to solve it, out of the suspicion that one may not be working on quite the right problem.

So my dissertation problem was problem finding. I really did not know how to go about looking for a good topic. I was very able and even creative at problem solving, with a good toolkit of technical knowledge, but problem finding was another face of the game.

I wondered, why the mountain? I thought over my undergraduate and graduate experience at MIT and realized something that surprised me at the time and has stayed with me ever since: In my technical courses, I had rarely done anything but solve problems. I almost always succeeded, but the problems came from the text or the instructors. I had never undertaken anything like a project or an open-ended investigation. The consequence was inevitable: I had a fierce battery of problem-solving skills and hardly any problem-finding skills.

My experience in the humanities was quite different. Contrary to what you might think for a technical school, MIT had very strong offerings in literature, philosophy, music, and other areas, as well as notable professors. I nourished a range of interests in the humanities and took a variety of courses. There, I realized, problem finding was routine. The major piece of work for a course was normally an essay or two, with great latitude about their topics. I routinely had to ask what sorts of questions were worth pursuit, whether I could assemble a good argument, where to find relevant resources, and how to bundle it all together into a compelling statement.

Let me be clear here: MIT gave me an excellent undergraduate and graduate education. The institution treated me generously with support and flexibility. It was a privilege to be there and I learned a great deal that proved both interesting and helpful ever since. I’ m just pointing to this one puzzle, problem solving versus problem finding.

It’s a puzzle of playing the whole game. Problem finding, after all, is part of the whole game. Look at any piece of formal instruction you want, any subject matter, any age. Apply this simple test: If there’s no problem finding in sight, you can be sure that the learners are not playing the whole game.

The Quest for the Whole Game

When I think about what it looks like for learners to play the whole game, I think of teachers I know who have made whole games one of their teaching strategies. I think of how they invent and adapt whole games creatively in the service of their students’ learning. One such person was Lois Hetland, now a professor and research colleague, but several years ago a seventh-grade teacher participating in a research and development project on teaching for understanding. (I’ll say more about the teaching for understanding framework later in this chapter and in the chapters to come.)

Lois was teaching an integrated humanities strand that focused on colonial America. She organized the students’ work around several fundamental questions that the class lived with throughout the year. Some of the questions focused on the role of land: How does land shape human culture? How do people think about the land? How do people change the land? Other questions probed the tricky issue of historical truth: How do we find out the truth about things that happened long ago or far away? How do we see through bias in sources?

Lois Hetland called all these questions throughlines, an allusion to a notion from the method acting school of Constantin Stanislavsky. By throughlines he meant central themes threading through the entire course of a play. Lois Hetland made a point of bringing the class back to these throughlines no matter what the particular topic under consideration. The aim was a deeper understanding of colonial America, but more than that some insight into the character and rhythm of inquiry and students’ management of their own learning.

With the same teaching for understanding project in mind, I also think of Joan Soble, a talented English teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. Joan wondered what to do for a group of ninth graders considered at risk and as she put it, “perpetually overwhelmed” by the demands of schooling. She designed an introductory writing course for them. The course experience involved various activities, among them preparation for writing by laying out collages, maintaining and reviewing portfolios with a critical eye, and articulating and pursuing individual goals. In focusing on their individual goals, the students were aided by a form targeting various writing skills they might want to sharpen, in other words, working on the hard parts. The skills ranged from sentence structure to ways of revising to strategies for managing their own work patterns better.

Readers might recall my MIT experience at this point and speculate that whole games are much easier to put together in the humanities than in mathematics and science. Yet examples are easy enough to find in these disciplines as well. Chris Dede, a fellow professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, sustains a line of research and development work on the scientific method and how to get students doing it as well as learning about it. He and his colleagues have constructed a MUVE called River City. MUVE stands for multi-user virtual environment. Many popular games that adolescents and young adults play online have this characteristic; participants navigate through virtual worlds, represented by icons called avatars, encountering and interacting with other players who may be physically located in Beijing or Cape Town or Rio.

In the River City MUVE, the students face a problem. Diseases of various sorts are sweeping through the virtual population. What are the causes? Exploring River City, the students can observe at various sites, test the water, and in other ways investigate the possible sources of the epidemics. In doing so, they learn some science content, and they also engage in the process of scientific inquiry itself.

Or turning to mathematics, there is an example from Kenna Barger of Elkins, West Virginia, one of the recipients of Disney’s 2001 American Teacher Awards. An excellent vignette of her teaching ninth-grade algebra can be found on a videodisc developed by my colleague Ron Ritchhart about the nature of creative teaching. She leads the students in water balloon bungee jumping, the outlines of which were developed by a program at the University of Arizona called M-PACT, learning Mathematics with Purpose, Application, Context, and Technology.

Water balloon bungee jumping is a complete exercise in mathematical modeling. The ninth-grade students have been studying linear equations. They start the activity by forming small teams and measuring the stretchiness of rubber bands with weights attached to them. The teams use their algebra to construct a model of how much weight produces how much stretch. The activity is anything but routine and formulaic. The students struggle with issues about what counts as dependent versus independent variables and how to represent the situation, while Kenna Barger circulates and coaches.

Then the entire class troops outside. The teams in turn drop water balloons attached to rubber bands from the roof of the school—this is the water balloon bungee jumping part. The students have used their equations to predict just how much elastic would bring their balloon to just above the ground. A student on a team often lies underneath the descending balloon. The challenge is to come as close as possible without breaking the balloon on the ground . . . or the student. The entire exercise involves joining experiment with mathematical modeling using linear equations to try to understand how the whole system works and make effective predictions.

Barger emphasizes that this is only one piece of a year-long effort to teach algebra, seeing it not just as an abstract system of manipulating symbols but as a process of mathematical modeling. Barger comments, “When I was a student, I was always the annoying one in the back of the classroom who kept asking ‘Why?’ It was not until I began teaching at a school that emphasizes real-world careers and collaboration among faculty and disciplines that I truly got this question answered.”

Such examples are not hard to come by. Many others can be found on the DVD with the Barger example, or in the book Teaching for Understanding , or in endless other resources available to the educational community. What then are the earmarks of playing the whole game? How do we know whether we’ve got a whole game or not?

In settings of learning, a whole game is generally some kind of inquiry or performance in a broad sense. It involves problem solving, explanation, argument, evidence, strategy, skill, craft. Often something gets created—a solution, an image, a story, an essay, a model. Moreover . . .

It’s never just about content. Learners are trying to get better at doing something. Joan Soble’s students are trying to get better at writing. Lois Hetland’s students are trying to get better at understanding colonial America and at historical inquiry. Kenna Barger’s students are trying to get better at mathematical modeling.

It’s never just routine. It requires thinking with what you know and pushing further.Rather than just standard routine problems, it involves open-ended or ill-structured problems. The writing, rethinking the throughlines again and again, modeling the fall of the water balloons, all of these endeavors asked the learners to go beyond what they already knew and extrapolate to novel and puzzling situations.

It’s never just problem solving. It involves problem finding. Students in Joan Soble’s writing course set their own goals. In the colonial America course, Lois Hetland expected her students to help her sharpen and interpret the throughlines in the context of new topics. Kenna Barger’s water balloon project was perhaps the most defined, but even there the circumstances allowed for a number of different approaches.

It’s not just about right answers. It involves explanation and justification. The learners in all the settings have had to explain and justify what they were up to and how they came to the places that they have.

It’s not emotionally flat. It involves curiosity, discovery, creativity, camaraderie. Kenna Barger’s students competed in a good-natured way on the water balloon task and strove to get those linear equations to do something. Joan Soble’s students got into writing and aspired to do better. Lois Hetland’s students found their curiosity about colonial America provoked again and again. They were not just learning but developing dispositions to learn, like curiosity and persistence. Of course, not every learner is going to be interested in everything, but the conditions favor most students getting somewhat interested (more about this in Chapter 2).

It’s not in a vacuum. It involves the methods, purposes, and forms of one or more disciplines or other areas, situated in a social context.Joan Soble’s students dealt with the methods, purposes, and forms of writing in collaborative ways. Lois Hetland’s students dealt with the methods and purposes of historical inquiry, framing their conversations and their writing with appropriate forms of justification and explanation. Kenna Barger’s students worked in teams to deal with mathematical formalisms and experimentation.

These are the earmarks of a whole game, but they can also serve as guidelines for constructing a whole game. Start anywhere you want, say, with the routines of fractions arithmetic or a couple of rules of grammar. No whole game in sight yet, but some questions lead in the right direction. Ask: What would this topic be like if it’s not just about content, but learners are trying to get better at doing something? What would they be getting better at doing? Ask: What would the topic be like if it were not just routine, if it required thinking with what you know and pushing that further? Ask: If there were some problem finding involved, where would it figure? Every answer to questions like these draws a larger circle around an initially limited topic. As the circle widens it’s not hard to arrive at some reasonable picture of the whole game.

Kinds of Whole Games

Of course, there is more than one good answer, more than one good version of a whole game. There are many games of thoughtful inquiry around history, for example. Learners can look carefully at original sources to form conjectures and seek evidence for them. Learners can compare and contrast alternative historical accounts, even textbooks from different countries, to discover commonalities and contrasts and consider whether the contrasts reflect biases. Learners can examine pivotal events like Caesar’s ascent to power in Rome, or they can look at the characteristics of everyday Roman life in the time of Caesar. Learners can compare power grabs then and now, or everyday life then and now.

While the “games” here are not as neatly defined as baseball or chess, there is no need for them to be. Realistically, any discipline brings a diffuse cloud of practices into play. Sometimes professionals even debate which ones are right and proper—the right way to do history or economics or literary analysis—but we don’t have to worry about that. The challenge of play the whole game is not to find the one right official canonical version, but to get some reasonable version into action. Chapter 5, “Uncover the Hidden Game,” will have more to say about patterns of disciplinary thinking.

Sometimes the game is integrative. It cuts across a range of disciplines, weaving together ideas from several. A class project might involve an ecological survey of the community, in the process applying concepts from biology, using mathematics to chart problems and trends, and exercising skills of reading and writing to synthesize results and propose a community action plan. A group investigation might focus on the use of art for political purposes, studying several positive and negative cases (for example, protest art in South Africa, Nazi propaganda), considering literary and aesthetic values, identifying political manipulation, and estimating with statistics how much exposure and impact was achieved.

Community ecology surveys and group investigations of political art are examples of what might be called project-based learning, one of several ways to organize learning in a holistic way. Numerous examples of project-based learning are available. For one source, the Edutopia Web site, maintained by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers a sizable collection with brief video examples.

Project-based learning by definition involves big wholes that take some time to work through. But a whole game need not be a big game! This is important to recognize, because big games do not fit very well in some educational settings with their schedules and mandates. However, there is always some room for small games, and learning by wholes can proceed quite briskly in the small. Looking at a poem or a work of art or a newspaper editorial, reflecting on it, and discussing it is an entire meaningful activity that might fit in half an hour.

Also whole games often are not played all at once anyway, but spread out over time. Lois Hetland’s students visit their throughlines again and again, pursuing the same questions in greater depth. Students trying to figure out the sources of disease in the online River City environment enter multiple times.

Some other familiar practices with a whole-game spin include problem-based learning, case-based learning or the case study method, community action initiatives, role-playing scenarios, formal debate, and studio learning (see Chapter 6). These each have their own flavor, but they are hardly perfectly distinct. Often the same example can be used to illustrate two or three of these practices. Here I’ll just touch on three more.

Role-playin...