Short Circuit

Teachers can learn something from electricians.  For example, taking the path of least resistance isn’t always the best way to go.  If we want the lights to go on, the current needs to flow through the full circuit, and a short cut, like a nail lying across the wire, usually results in darkness.

English teachers, for example, hope their students will become better readers, able to make sense of literature, but the path to this goal is long and difficult, requiring students to move beyond literal decoding to an understanding of metaphor, imagery, connotation and an ability to see meaningful patterns and then to link all these to their own experiences and understanding of the world.  So teachers often go for the result, forgetting the skills required to attain the goal.  It’s much easier simply to tell students what To the Lighthouse “means” than to watch them struggle with it on their own.  So that’s what many English teachers do.  They give their students an interpretation instead of teaching them how to develop one on their own.  The result is a short circuit, and the light of understanding how to read interpretively never goes on.

The goal gets substituted for the process.  It’s like thinking you can get to the top of the mountain without climbing it.  Well, I guess you can if you are airlifted, but you certainly never learn hiking skills or develop the muscles you need to climb on your own.

Two of the major goals in school are constantly short-circuited: memory and behavior.  Teachers want students to remember what they teach, and they want students to behave—pay attention, sit still, be quiet, wake up, take notes: “stay on task.”  So concerned are teachers and administrators with these outcomes that they focus on the outcomes rather than on the processes that produce them.  Look at the number of books and articles about strategies to improve the memory by focusing only on memory.  Listen to all the discussion about discipline and class control.  Test-preparation, memory-and-regurgitation, drill-and-kill, control and discipline consume lots of time and energy.  They are the nails lying across the circuits of learning, and they burn us out without producing much light.

And then look at yourself as a learner or at the research about how people learn and how memory works.  We remember what matters to us, what is emotionally relevant to us, what we need, what we understand in context.  Memory is an outcome, the result of following certain paths to understanding and using that understanding to achieve personally important goals.  Good behavior, too, is an outcome that relies on other factors.  We behave when we are engaged, when we are interested.  There is no short cut to meaningful, relevant learning.  Memorizing what we don’t understand and what doesn’t matter to us is not the answer.  Telling people to be quiet and meting out punishments are not the answer.

In other words, we need to pay more attention to the paths than to the goals; we need to create schools that nurture the growth of neural pathways, the circuits, that result in engagement and recall.  And educators need to trust that, if students build the circuitry, the lights will go on.

This article was originally published on the Learning Lab (WBUR, Boston NPR station) and republished in the National Association of Independent Schools Independent Ideas blog.