A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices on The Fastest And Shortest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
Last Edited: January 23, 2018
FROM A LEARNERS’ VIEW OF LEARNING (ALV), THE LAW OF TEACHING-LEARNING (LOTL) reduces to a minimum of 15 choice-points that predict the likelihood of learning occurring from lessons taught by teachers. This prediction rests on ALV representing the shortest and fastest path to learning. ALV of learning is a social process of learners making choices while learning something. This process includes an implicit law (a consistent and reliable pattern) of the interaction between teaching and learning (LOTL) as a social (observable and manageable) process.
ALV Path
The ALV Path of learning consists of the least number of choices learners make while learning. From this view, learning occurs in one step preceded by trial-and-errors with a beginning, a middle, and an end, at four levels of choices yielding at least one of five results (answers at least one of these five questions: What is it? What is it not? What is like it? What comes next? What is missing?).
LOTL
Learning most likely occurs when teachers match their choices in a lesson with the choices learners will likely make to learn that lesson.
The union of ALV with teaching rests on the assumption that teaching results in learning. This assumption is grounded in over a century of experimental studies of learning through teaching.
ALV represents facts of the minimum of what experimental behavioral and social researchers have reported learners doing while learning from teaching.
LOTL represents the union of ALV with teaching. This law describes probabilities of results when choices match and does not explain why learning occurs.
LOTL describes relationships among known facts as does Newton’s Law of Gravity without explaining why either learning or gravity happen. It is fact, not theory. If LOTL is a theory, as is the Big Bang Theory, then it needs to be made factual instead of being factual.
LOTL frames predictions and associations of ways choices by teachers and by learners affect the amount and rate of learning by learners from lessons.
Social Processes
LOTL occurs as a social process. A dyad is the smallest unit of analysis of a social process. From this view, the smallest unit of analysis of learning is of connections between two dots, of what constitutes dots, and of how and when connections between these dots occur.
In the same way, the smallest unit of analysis of teaching is of how and when teachers establish two dots and how and when teaching contributes to connecting these dots.
Thus, the union of teaching and learning is the smallest unit of analysis of their social relationship and function. Teaching does not occur without resulting in learning, regardless of what a person in the social role of teacher does. However, learning can occur without teaching, for example through trial-and-error by a person surviving alone in an unfamiliar winter wilderness.
Related_Reading
- A Completed Teacher
- ALV as Social Processes
- Argot Used by Educators
- The Law of Teaching-Learning (LOTL) (Posted September 16, 2013 on ALV Blog; captured January 18 2016, at 4:33 PM)
Related Resources
- Nas and Maya Angelo talk about learning during interviews with Charlie Rose.