A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

Tell me the steps people take to learn something. What do they do first, second, etc.?

THE FRIENDLY VOICE at the other end of the telephone said, after we exchanged greetings, “Tell me how people learn. I want to know what to see and hear as people learn something. Tell me what to see and hear people do first, second, etc. until they learn. I want a list of steps…” We agreed, that without such a list, learning remains an ambiguous subject without a verb, and both without reliable results beyond interpretation of the roll of gamblers’ dice.

The caller was asking for a list of common observable social patterns from across existing behavioral and social science ways (protocols or algorithms without those names) that accelerate the amount, increase the rate, and deepen learning reliably.

I could not provide the list or cite a source for it either. “Don’t worry about it; nobody else can either,” the caller said. “We’ve searched with the experts around the world for over a year.” That search revealed discussions about theories, practices, and programs about teaching and learning. This caller wanted descriptions of learning starting with step one, preferably based on peer reviewed published experimental empirical behavioral and social science research results.

Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV) of Choices during Teaching and Learning describes a proof-of-concept prototype in response to the caller’s question. This prototype illustrates that experimental scientists have already described steps learners take to learn. Indeed, they have provided a large enough body of reports that enough common elements exist to simplify them into testable propositions. And so can other views, however popular, be tested against this prototype to describe challenges by learners. In this way, the problem to list steps people take to learn redefines concerns, issues, and controversies that continue as part of the reality of education and schooling.

These realities contribute in measurable ways to three endemic social problems.

The unequal distribution of learning from teaching that results in rationed learning.
This distribution appears to ration life chances of people in and out of schools in ways that assigns them to social-economic classes, and limits their ability to compete in a global economy as citizens of the world.
A risk management system that has reduced this inequality does not exist in schools for use by educators. Instead, educators assign risks of failure-to-learn to students, their communities, etc. in ways consistent with a professional, rather than a learners’, view of schools.

Development of a learners’ view (ALV) as a prototype offers another way to test these propositions about relationships between learning and life chances.

Sidebar

Learning appears to many people as a constant in life, an ambiguous process with tentacles related to everything else. At the same time, some people take pride in arguing that they do not learn except when they choose to learn whatever “it” might be at the moment. The ALV Path at least supplements, if not supplants the latter romanticism and other such hermeneutics about life.