A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
Learners Distinguish How to from What to Learn.
CLASSIC EDUCATION: A Learners’ View (ALV) of Choices during Teaching and Learning introduces a learners’ view (ALV) of what people do while learning. ALV identifies relationships among common choices of teaching and learning. These relationships are grounded in experimental behavioral and social science research reports. Scientists have been describing these choices with increasing precision for more than 12 decades. Using ALV during instruction adds accuracy and precision to teaching and can accelerate, increase, and deepen (AID) learning.
The term a learners’ view and its acronym ALV represent the use of choice during teaching and learning. Both teachers and learners make choices during lessons. Choice is one of the few common elements in reports of experimental studies of learning. People will likely (probably) make choices from a finite set of options while learning lessons. They choose these options in observable, manageable, measurable and predictable ways from among alternatives. Teaching occurs when instruction of ways to solve problems matches choices learners make. Solutions to problems are ways that the most accomplished people in civilization have solved them.
Instruction by matching likely choices of learners shifts the burden for learning lessons from learners to educators. Technically, this shift makes choices of learners the independent variable and instruction of lessons the dependent variable. At the same time, when learners learn lessons not intentionally based on ALV, those lessons randomly matched choices of learners.
This distribution appears to ration life chances of people in and out of schools in ways that assign them to social-economic classes, and limits their ability to compete in a global economy. ALV offers teachers ways to shift the distribution of learning from random to planned results without relying on special programs to moderate the distribution.
Digest of ALV
Teachers as instructors and learners hold identifiable social roles in and out of schools. Their roles exist while people learn to solve problems; they exist for seconds at a time, if for that long. Instructors present problems and ways to solve them as lessons. The role of learners exists while they solve those problems. That role disappears after each problem is solved. The people who hold roles of instructor and learner do so while also holding other social roles, such as student, parent, employee, and gardener.
Learners:
1. CHOOSE FROM AMONG THEIR SENSES. Learners make choices from what they see, hear, and in other ways sense. A finite set of choices attract the attention of learners. We call these active ingredients of learning (AIL). Scientists report hierarchies of these choices based on ingredients/elements such as visual color, size, etc.
2. LEARN BY MAKING CHOICES. Behavioral and social scientists describe these choices in ways educators and others call the process of learning, including by trial-and-errors. When described this way, teachers, parents, and others may manage these choices in ways that accelerate, increase, and deepen (AID) learning.
3. DEFINE LEARNING. Learning occurs in (1) step with two (2) options through three (3) parts in four (4) stages that yield one or more of five (5) results through a minimum total of 15 choice points.
4. DEFINE LESSONS. Lessons occur as natural as well as composed social events. Learning occurs when lessons match choices people make while learning. Lessons arrange these choices in ways that lead learners directly and promptly or indirectly and later to the criterion for that lesson. Composed lessons combine learners’ choices with instruction (what the most accomplished people do to manage learning) and lesson content (what instructors show/tell learners to learn/to do).
5. TRIPLE-HELIX OF LEARNING (THL). Learning occur when lessons form a triple-helix of learning. This helix matches learners’ choices with instruction and content. Delays and failure to learn occur through mismatches among one or more of the elements on these strings.
6. INFRASTRUCTURE OF LEARNING. The triple-helix serves as an infrastructure of learning. You can observe it when learning occurs with or without formal lessons in and out of schools.
By using ALV this way, educators distinguish application of experimental behavioral and social science principles and facts of learning from the use of impressions, beliefs and other speculations about learning.
A Learners’ View (ALV)
Probably most people can describe an intuitive view of learners, for example, those who receive good grades in school, understand language and its vocabulary as well as add to their memory of ways to use increasingly sophisticated symbols and other tools. Those who use such views account for variations in learning as resulting from individual differences and other diversities. This view has led to ongoing debates about whether differences are caused by nature or nurture. They validate these intuitive views by comparing them with things people do that violate their impressions. These impressions often clash with data reported by experimental behavioral and social scientists. ALV replaces relying on such impressions for managing and forecasting learning and for defining education.
A learners’ view addresses the questions, How do people learn? What do they do first, second, etc.? These questions ask for empirically grounded descriptions of processes teachers and learners use while people learn. They leave the value of content learned and other parts of social life to descriptions by others, including of cognition and other inferences.
ALV responds to these how questions by addressing teaching and learning as social phenomena, that is by describing choices made during measurable social interactions between teachers and learners during instruction of a lesson, as in a school, work setting, or online. Experimental behavioral and social scientists have been reporting these interactions for more than a century. Poets, novelists, and others have described them for many more centuries.
From this view, lessons of teachers consist of presenting problems for learners to solve in ways the most accomplished people have solved them. Educators sometimes refer to these problems as puzzles or games, In their simplest form, problem solving consists of drawing a line between two dots. In turn, learning consists of learners making choices that solve those problems.
To this end, people make choices while learning from among their physical sensations, as do chefs use taste to select and arrange ingredients while preparing a meal and as do masons choose and prepare scaffolds, forms, rocks, and mortar for strength and visual appeal while building a bridge.
Learners, while learning, make choices at 15 points that may be summarized as: Learning occurs by choices in one step through trial-and-error in three parts with four levels that result in solving one or more of five generic problems. This sequence represents a minimum description of learning.
Learning, from a learners’ view, appears as social, not personal or individual activity. As social processes, for example, it is possible to say with measured confidence that people will more likely choose the color red over other colors.
This sequence of 15 choice-points forms an infrastructure of learning which allows observation of learning as part of a social structure of life. These parts are to learning and social life as sound frequencies are to music and particles are to physics. They allow more precise descriptions, predictions, and management of their elements for use in lessons that learners will likely learn.
Use of ALV to compose and instruct lessons makes it more likely to match lessons to social patterns people use when they learn. These lessons can accelerate, increase, and deepen learning by making it more efficient. They discount choosing whether learning occurs in the mind or other body tissues.
Narrative
ALV represents the fact that people make choices to learn. They select these choices from what they see, hear, and in other ways sense. As they learn, learners have been showing scientists choices they make from these senses. Thus the phrase using a variety of words from non-learners, “It dose not make sense to me.”
Scientists have observed, documented, and reported that learning occurs through these choices one person at a time in one (1) step with two (2) options through three (3) parts in four (4) stages that yield one or more of five (5) results through a minimum total of 15 choice points. These descriptions of choices make learning observable with the human senses of other observers, including by you.
Scientists use these as descriptions of primary sources of learning. We refer to them as First Order Learning. These sources are an enduring, first ranked (classic) way to describe, to discuss, as well as to use these descriptions to AID learning.
From a learners’ view, lessons consist of combinations of choices people make to learn with instruction (what other people do to manage learning) and lesson content (what people learn to do). When learners increase their learning, these combinations form a triple-helix of learning.
This helix serves as an essential infrastructure of learning. When learning occurs in or out of schools, this infrastructure exists.
These descriptions fulfill one of the requirements for what may be called a code that learners use to learn. This code, from a learners’ view, is ideology neutral when an activity results in increased learning.
ALV also refers to procedures scientists use to document what they have observed. The results of their studies describe a coherent system of coordinated social patterns you may also observe. You may use these procedures, as have others, to increase both the rate and the efficiency of learning.
ALV represents that system as a set of principles and propositions (POP) of learning demonstrated repeatedly, reliably, and predictably.
You will find examples of using these POPs in and out of schools to increase rates and efficiency of learning various content, including that content passed down from the ancients as well as the newest scientific findings about the universe.
ALV also indicates ways of using a classic education to improve the present and future daily life of learners.
References
- A Completed Teacher (ACT)
- Active Ingredient of Learning (AIL)
- ALV (a Learners’ View) as an Infrastructure or Learning
- Choices Frame an Infrastructure of Learning
- Code of Learners
- Depictions of Learning in Art and Literature
- Folklore about Education
- Folklore about Learning
- Individual Differences and other Diversities
- Triple-Helix of Learning (THL)
- Who Is a Learner?
Related Reading
Related Resources
- Homans, G. (1969). The Sociological Relevance of Behaviorism. In R. Burgess and D. Bushell, Behavioral Sociology: The Experimental Analysis of Social Process, pp. 1-25.
Last Edited: June 3, 2015