Pedagogy Gold Nuggets: 5 first principles of learning for mastery

Pedagogy Gold Nuggets: 5 first principles of learning for mastery: 5 first principles of learning for mastery "All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are sad in their own...

5 first principles of learning for mastery

5 first principles of learning for mastery

"All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are sad in their own unique way”, gushed Tolstoy in his famous work- Anna Karenina in a special burst of literary exuberance. He may not have realised that this innocuous yet profound assertion is almost tailor-made for the world of pedagogy.

All learners and academic performers who reach high levels of knowledge mastery seems have a common set of approaches when it comes to processing knowledge, mechanisms of retrieval, tactics for recapitulation and revision. On the other hand, all unsuccessful learners have their very individualised narrative of what went wrong, mostly centering around factors which are essentially non-academic or not connected with the domain at hand.

The core proposition is that all successful learners follow what I like to call first principles of learning regardless of whether they are self-aware of this learning behaviour or not. The pedagogy onion, an apt metaphor in my opinion of learning and self-awareness (one peels off layer after layer getting to the core of the topic/subject and becomes progressively more and more inward-oriented and naturally self-aware) will have various dimensions/layers which are elucidated below:

The first concept is not to gag on knowledge. Ingest only cognitively manageable morsels, as it were.. Small conceptual blocks once understood provide a bedrock of useful ‘eureka’ moments which facilitate more vertical and horizontal absorption and correlation of knowledge. For sake of later referencing, let us call this incremental cognitive inputting. Many such cognitive blocks could be strung together in the form of a chain of knowledge (the blockchain being originally a more apt description, but one that has been used and abused ad infinitum in the current cryptocurrency discourse) 

Contextual anchoring of this cognised knowledge becomes extremely important as a means of quick and logical retrieval of knowledge. Jottings preferably by hand, in my opinion are important because the exact mental state and memory correlates at the time  of writing get embedded/captured or experientially relived at the time of reading these notes. Needless to say, this enhances the memory aspect.

Assessment drives learning is a dictum, which few, if at all, will disagree with. While this is commonly understood to mean that students study because exams exist, the more accurate and empowering interpretation/application is that when what is studied /mastered as knowledge is assessed, a direct feedback is received about how much of the knowledge has been mastered.This can be called the Read-Assess-Read cycle in learning. This combined with selective cognitive inputting can accelerate mastery of the relevant knowledge base.

Self-awareness is the ultimate aim, the holy grail of every participant in the pedagogy spectrum be it a preceptor/teacher of student/learner. The process of self-awareness begins with gap analysis- the gap between what I think I know and what I actually know; the gap between what knowledge I have mastered and what I have not mastered. The Read-Assess-Read cycle helps in precisely that, an objective Gap Analysis in terms of the specific knowledge to be mastered. This is like an ultra-personalised report card which delineates and highlights deficiencies which cry out for improvement, figuratively speaking. This should spur a kind of reflective thinking in the learner wherein or whereby the learner examines critically his own learning behaviour (predispositions, predilections, predictabilities) as well as deeper self-actualisation factors that may be submerged (for example inner conversations such as why study? All work and no play makes jack a dull boy) Indeed a researcher by the name of Donald Schon applied reflective thinking to medical professionals (who purportedly are life-long learners) and coined the term- reflective practitioner.

Sometimes or maybe often, like in life at large, the larger perspective in learning gets clouded by short term urgencies. It is more important to reach the destination safely in stipulated time rather than only have wonderful pleasant short stretches. The whole and the part cannot be viewed at the same time but alternating the view time and again is important, as one may lose sight of the forest when looking at the trees and vice versa. Mastery Testing is testing or assessment of the entire body of syllabus/knowledge which needs to be mastered. Mastery of the whole can be tested while studying in parts (MWSP- mastery of whole, study in parts) as can mastery of the part be tested while studying the whole (MPTW- mastery of part, study of whole). Both of these approaches judiciously applied will create Knowledge Mastery and Domain Expertise.

To recapitulate, incremental cognitive inputting, contextual anchoring through personal jottings, read-assess-read cycle, gap analysis and reflective thinking & mastery testing are the first principles of learning that every accomplished learner will use or will have used. He/she may call it something else. No sweat. “A rose by any other way smells as sweet” as the bard has said. Tally Ho.

Learning and the 'Eureka' phenomenon

An image of a docile student sitting in a classroom listening attentively to the teacher is almost iconic and clichéd. Indeed the said student could in fact be seething with aggression or frustration and may with great difficulty be keeping his or her open eyes plastered on the teacher in order to almost unconsciously live up to this common clichéd perception of learning. Indeed the entire field of learning, in this case the classroom and all its constituents, is a veritable maelstrom of conflicting contradictory thoughts, emotions, mental processes and psychological phenomena all of which clearly impact the learning process and outcome.

There is an existential dichotomy as it were, in all that transpires in the hallowed portals of teaching and learning. There is a forever primal urge to unify divergent processes which constant seek to meet and create the ‘aha’ or moment for the learner and the teacher when there is a deep sense of self-worth, understanding, actual transmission of learning and a kind of conceptual rootedness. At this apogee, there is no vestige of fear and a complete absence of self-doubt. I would like to refer to this as a state of learning wholeness wherein the two divergent streams have become one.

From the preceptor’s perspective, the entire teaching exercise is a kind of preparatory, iterative, awkward ritual that is supposed to be a preamble to the actual concept clarity and proficiency in application that are intended outcomes. In the common scenario that the learner is unrevealing about his comprehension of the teaching and is mostly blank faced, the teacher is fishing for cues of learner involvement, throwing in a bait of a question or cracking a joke to be able to decipher what is going on inside the learner’s head. And all this while he has solid theory content to cover along with application questions as a staple load.

The weary learner has survived parents’ expectations. On top of this, he/she is struggling with self worth issues (am I good enough, kind of conversations) as a background noise. Superimposed on these in the classroom are the shrieks, as it were, of ‘I am not understanding this. Shit!!’ This sort of thing is compounded in the early phases of learning because there is very little prior knowledge at the disposal of the learner which could facilitate the understanding and help his/her to build bridges from what is already known to what new is being taught. This entire process is like a circular trajectory, which forms smaller and smaller circles and finally collapses or involutes to a point, at which all learning and prior knowledge suddenly fits together. There is a lightening of spirit and opening of hitherto un-traversed conceptual coves for the learner, a sort of unifying ‘gotcha’ moment.

Teachers are special birds, as Plum would have put it. May their tribe increase.

The teacher or the teaching- Guru deconstructed.

The word Guru (which in Sanskrit means he, she or that which removes the darkness, presumably of ignorance) needs some additional explanation if it has to be understood at its widest and most multidimensional. The overriding paradigm is that this has to be an individual person who transmits specific knowledge to his students, which purportedly the learners would not be able to access otherwise. Herein lies a catch or a misplaced emphasis, in my opinion. Are we focusing on the fisherman or the plentitude of fish in his basket? The teaching is much less changeable, recipient-neutral, can be documented and studied using ancient shruti-smruti (hear and memorize) protocols or modern knowledge taxonomical approaches. This is really the substance of the transmission to the student. Compare this with the teacher who is essentially human and hence essentially idiosyncratic, is obviously a perishable entity and thus is outlived by the content, the teaching that he/she transmits. The Guru would hence mean the teaching more than the teacher. This aspect seems to have been well understood by the last living Guru of the Sikhs- Guru Gobind Singhji when, realizing the primacy of the teachings and the crucial need to preserve their pristine purity, he proclaimed that the Granth Sahib, the Sikh religious book, will be the Guru that time onwards. Since then, it is the Guru Granth Sahib, which continues to provide spiritual teachings to the community.

The substance of the teaching as automatically ‘understood’ is content, that something which feeds the cognitive apparatus, as it were, of the human learner. But that it need not necessarily be. Indeed some stories or anecdotes of Zen Buddhism have the Zen Master or the teacher whacking the head of the pupil that would be ‘the’ impulse required for the student to attain enlightenment. It would appear that a transmission of a kind would have happened in such cases, which might not necessarily be a linear conventional cause-effect phenomenon but rather a arise and awake phenomenon transcending time-dependent causality.. In the same Japanese Mahayana tradition of Zen Buddhism, befuddlement of the learner by an innocuous but rather nonsensical question, the so-called ‘Koan’, by the teacher or master has sometimes succeeded in ‘opening’ of the mind of the learner. This learning would impact in this case, the mind or emotions of the learner.   This would also do justice to the Sanskrit conception of the word- Guru, as outlined in the opening sentence.

How could we synthesize these two views of teaching and the essence of what a Guru does? The solution lies in the golden construct- freedom, probably the only English word after love with which humanity experiences an instant and intense connect. That which frees people from the confines and limitations of their own knowledge, physicality, mind and all associated tendencies/impressions and their own background noise J could be termed knowledge or the essence of the guru-tattwa or the teaching. If a whack in the back or a pat on the head can do what 500 hours of classroom time could not achieve, so be it.

Learning inside the comfort zone- A tough challenge

I was speaking to a group of students inside a classroom and checking on what they had learned in the previous semester. I wasn't able to glean much from them except sickly compromised smiles which were more like an entreaty that I should stop the uncomfortable probing. 

Comfort and learning do not seem to like each other and fail to thrive in each others' presence. Learning by essence would mean an urgent desire to break through the limited understanding of the self and seek knowledge or insight  beyond what is already known. It is an energy intensive activity which counters the 'natural' entropy of the human condition. It would necessitate active questioning by the learner, within and without, and genuine attempts to grapple with problem-solving, be they case studies or science numerical questions or complex mathematical derivations or any other which need comprehending and analytical skills.

A comfort zone for the students is any physical or mental condition which creates a 'false' sense of security for the learner's mind. This can either create a faulty self-impression of adequate competence in the domain sought to be learned or worse still, a kind of temporary deadening of interest and a sort of drift mindset wherein the learner glides, as it were, from one lesson to the other feeling good about it but actually achieving very little. It is the latter types which I often encounter in my classroom sojourns to talk to students. These have to yanked out of their inertial frame of self-reference ( Einstein Sir, my apologies!) and made to see reality as it is. 

The reality would be the scores in tests and assessments, formative and summative. Looking hard at reality in an emotionally detached analytical way needs serious courage in what can be an essentially very uncomfortable process. The truth is that emotional detachment is a myth and all kinds of guilt scripts, not being good enough and negativistic thoughts will be unleashed when a learner starts confronting the reality of what he is, indeed, learning or not learning.

'Assessment drives learning' remains the fundamental dictum. The challenge is to be able to facilitate and deliver assessment outcomes to learners with ruthless compassion, the kind which make good educators into great ones and great educators into teaching legends.

The expertise conundrum- Relook at Mastery

Ask any renowned clinician the secret of this diagnostic acumen and the chances are that he will given a self-effacing shrug of his shoulders and ascribe his expertise to experience. Can experience be taught? For those naysayers, the refutation is that if Henri Charriere , author of Papillon can make the experience of his adventures and sufferings come alive for the reader, then perhaps there is a way that the components of expertise or the substance it is constituted of, can be transmitted, taught, brought on par with the learner. If by definition an expert has handled many variable situations successfully on many occasions, logically if these same situations are simulated subjectively or objectively in their diversity and situational uncertainties, expertise could be taught. The moot question- Can mental conflict be simulated particularly in a human interpersonal context? Experts probably are better at handling situations with mental conflict and requiring tough decisions better than the ones who don’t call themselves experts.

The other explanation of expertise could be that it is waiting within the learner, as it were, to be discovered..to be revealed when father time is opportune.  So in concrete terms, skills could be taught and learned. But expertise’s cornerstone is mastery, the unknown variable which transcends pure technical skills and borders on the surreal, much like a Neymar or Messi whose guileless fluidity on the footfall field defy normal teacher-learner paradigms. The sculpture hiding inside the rock, metaphorically speaking, waiting to burst out into the sculptor’s world will at once spur adulation for our new Michaelangelos. But more importantly, it should engage us in the primal question- how does one facilitate the talent, the gift, the expertise to recognize the sculpture or the learning at its most subliminal, minimalistic, almost invisible level almost as it arises in perception for the sculptor or the learner? Can this; this bewitching flirtation on the interface of science and art, man and god; what we call mastery be indeed taught?

For this, we need to overcome the invisible fetters of language itself. Indeed the english word construct ‘teaching’ leaves much to be desired in its ability to convey its core. All that we have been discussing so far in this blog can be done scant justice by what we normally understand by teaching. German seems to have a wide repertoire of words to encapsulate the different strands of what ‘teaching’ in its widest sense could connote. Bringing along (beibringen), lecturing (unterrichten), transmitting (vermitteln) , teaching (lehren) are at least 4 different emanations of the spectrum continuum of teaching & learning in the german language. Teaching expertise could be better understood as bringing along (beibringen) someone who is suitable to be an expert.

How does one become suitable to be an expert? How mastery is born and is sustained may have everything to do with the mind of the expert. Mastery’s subjective existence is from its ontological declarative reality. Being Master may precede Mastery or phenomenologically speaking, they would arise together. It’s objective existence could be like the postulated Schroedinger’s cat of quantum mechanics embodying the different demonstrable attributes of being absolute Master to absoute novice in a probabilistic (sine wave if you must)  continuum. One does not really know the reality of mastery in the context of studying it objectively. That is, until we open the box and collapse 'reality'   Mastery is dead. Long live the Master.  Mastery is alive. All hail the master.

'Beautiful game' of the mind

Wanting to be understood and wanting to understand are more closely related than is immediately evident. Teaching and Learning are synonyms respectively for these two phenomena. We teach best what we most need to learn is an absolute truism with no exceptions. The mind talking to itself (remember Plato)  reassuring itself through its own rational voice that what it has learned is indeed true in an almost ontological way ( let there me light and there was light) as if by repeating it, making somebody understand it, being understood, teaching it, it almost becomes true for the teacher, the one who seeks to be understood..No wonder then that so many of us, almost a silent seething majority in the cities of the world want to teach; we feel passionate about it, more alive, more relevant in a silent celebratory way. 

A secret to teach better and learn better ( now that the dichotomy between these two is extinguished at least for this blog) is to imagine the stuff. There is a certain image which preempts our new cognitive inputs about the learning. Getting in this image can put us in a productive proactive mindset for learning to happen. Imagine = image + in. No wonder. If I am learning, say, architecture of royal palaces in ancient mesopotamia, a certain imagination of what I might know about babylon, palm trees and hanging gardens could prime me better. Of course, if I am a complete ignoramus of ancient history, maybe geography could come to help to mark a beginning point in my learning, by imagining where the deuce this country is on the globe!  Interestingly, if I am the one teaching architecture of royal palaces in ancient mesopotamia, I could begin my teaching by broaching the very same topics as mentioned earlier. Imagination activates prior knowledge which facilitates learning. Prior knowledge as we all know is a key element of adult learning which on utopia means lifelong learning. It is also an interesting way to acknowledge and validate oneself ( all that reading has not gone in vain!) and an inexpensive prophylactic to Alzheimer's.Thank you Albert Knowles for the construct of prior knowledge which helps some of us to deconstruct the phenomenon of learning. As a parting example, some of you did get riveted, albeit for a split instant, by the title of this post, considering that Futbol rules right now :-)