Mindful learning

I mentioned a few days ago that I am reading Ellen J. Langer's book "The Power of Mindful Learning." It is proving to be a fascinating read, despite some muddy writing in places. The book contains a lot of information about numerous studies that show how learning really works, and I strongly recommend that you read it yourself if you're so inclined.

Here, I'm going to pull out a few excerpts that really resonated with me, and that support her contention that some of the deepest rooted beliefs in education are myths.

Myth #1: The basics must be learned so well that they become second nature.

"The standard two approaches to teaching new skills are top-down or bottom-up... I sought a third alternative...

"Sideways learning aims at maintaining a mindful state. As we saw, the concept of mindfulness revolves around certain psychological states that are really different versions of the same thing: (1) openness to novelty; (2) alertness to distinction; (3) sensitivity to different contexts; (4) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (5) orientation in the present... Learning a subject or skill with [sideways learning] makes us receptive to changes in an ongoing situation. In such a state of mind, basic skills and information guide our behavior in the present, rather than run it like a computer program."

Myth #2: Paying attention means staying focused on one thing at a time.

"...when children or adults are distracted they are paying attention to something else... Being distracted, in short, means being otherwise attracted." (emphasis mine)

She discusses how studies have shown that attention is really more effective when we or what we are focusing on is changing, shifting, moving, and that the whole concept of attention as something that should be fixed or static or focused is faulty. Then she has this to say about ADHD:

"Mary Ford found that attention increased when third and fourth graders diagnosed as having ADHD were working with computer softare that used a game format. Frances Cripe found that children with ADHD demonstrated decreased activity and increased attention when listening to rock music as they performed their task. And Sydney Zentall found that when the stimuli were in color, attention increased.

"Some of the problems associated with treating ADHD and other attention problems may result from a lack of appreciation for the importance of novelty. Hyperactivity may be the child's implicit effort to increase novelty. If so, the advice to sit still and pay attention may be counterproductive." (emphasis mine)

Myth #3: Delaying gratification is important.

"If we don't open the presents until Christmas, or if we plan a trip for after the new year, aren't we delaying gratification? We are not, if the anticipation itself is positive... it is merely being gratified by anticipation as well as by the actual [event]."

"There are two approaches that educators and parents typically use to encourage children to engage in a disliked activity... They promise children that rewards (or punishments for noncompliance) will follow, or they add fun elements to the unpleasant task. In both cases they reinforce children's presumptions that the task is odious."

Myth #4: Rote memorization is necessary in education.

"Education traditionally has given students packages of information that are largely context free. Even when context is provided, the manner in which the information is presented still encourages mindless processing. Saying, for instance, that there were three reasons for the Civil War omits both context and perspective. What did a fifty-year-old Southern white man think the reasons were? A fifty-year-old black? A young Northern woman? And so on... Even if information is given from two perspectives, if the possibility of additional views is not intentionally built in, the tendency of students is to consider these two just as rigidly; there would simply be twice as much absolute information to memorize."

"[In a recent study] students who learned the material in the traditional manner and were told of an impending test performed worse than all other groups...

"...we found that the students who did not rely on memorization outperformed the others on every measure..." (emphasis mine)

Myth #5: Forgetting is a problem.

This section covers a lot of ground.

"Perhaps when we can't find our keys it is because we were thinking about more important matters when we put them down. If that were not the case, why would we forgive the geniuses among us for their absentmindedness... Geniuses or not, once we recognize that we have forgotten something we need, we become oriented to the present and reinvent or rediscover what we need to know. In this sense, forgetting provokes mindfulness. Memorizing keeps us in the past; forgetting forces us into the present." (emphasis mine)

"The prepared group [group that had been shown examples] came up with two solutions; the unprepared group came up with ten."

"These results support the view that cultural beliefs about aging play a role in determining the degree of memory loss that people experience in old age."

Myth #6: Intelligence is knowing "what's out there."

"Many theories of intelligence assume that there is an absolute reality out there, and the more intelligent the person, the greater his or her awareness of this reality... An alternative view, which is at the base of mindfulness research, is that individuals may always define their relation to their environment in several ways, essentially creating the reality that is out there." (emphasis mine)

Myth #7: There are right and wrong answers.

"Much instruction...[r]ather than allowing an individual to generate new hypotheses that may be mindfully tested... assumes that the objective is apparent and that only the means of achieving it remains obscure to the naive observer. Teaching from this perspective consists of presenting step-by-step methods of problem solving, making possible an essentially mindless type of success.

"If we can shed this outcome orientation, we may discover that the freedom to define the process is more significant..."

"Intelligence testing, which focused first on such skills as bisecting lines or judging weights and later stressed problem solving, now emphasizes the ability to acquire new skills. In each case the objective—physical motion, problem resolution, or skill acquisition—is preselected by the intelligence expert.

"When students are assessed in this way, they are not given an opportunity to choose their own objectives, nor are they allowed to explore processes that are outside the experts' repertoire of valued skills."

"...the ability to maintain stable categories is often critical for the expert's authority."

"Although social scientists recognize that applying statistical data derived from groups to individual cases is problematic, this recognition does not appear to restrict attempts to [do so]."

"For some... [uncertainty] represents an absence of personal control. From a mindful perspective, however, uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable." (emphasis mine)

"When we are mindful, we recognize that every inadequate answer is adequate in another context... If we respect students' abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come some of the most creative ideas and discoveries." (emphasis mine)