What Is Learning?
Central to our job descriptions as teachers is to promote student learning. We build small fires and create the proper conditions for combustion.
In my courses in teacher education, I have always took time to get teachers to think deeply about “learning” - what it truly is, at its core.
My definition has always been “the permanent change of state in an organism”. This can be of their behavior (skills), belief (values), and understanding (logic). It is not short term retention and recall of information (I’ll refrain from a deep dive into the quite pockholed Bloom’s Taxonomy).
Central to creating a “learner”, one who fluidly and without blockage, dances along this journey of change are several fundamentals. We often kills these in our teaching, mostly because of the demands placed on us in terms of time. We speed through content, we don’t give students enough time to review or consolidate. We also don’t “apply” knowledge and understanding in valid contexts (praxis is lacking). We also “show and tell” too much as teachers and don’t allow students to use their agency, thought and discovery. I’m in favor a more inductive lesson model.
In the early days of the internet, a high school student wrote an incredible post about their schooling and why it was “murdering” their learning. It’s a great read, like a true crime episode. It takes Gelb’s principles in the book, “How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” and describes how school murders these - thus, not fostering learning.
I think Ai does much the same to learning but much more effectively. It’s a cognitive replacement. It’s murder is much more clean, the perfect crime.
I have highlighted 8 concepts central to learning in this infographic below.
Think about each one and how Ai bastardizes each through destroying student agency. I’ll come back to this in a future post, highlighting each with my assessment about Ai’s impact.
(and you might wonder about my transcription of Ai - I use a small i to better denote the word, done on purpose).
Download this infographic as a pdf »>
Hi David. Thanks for the infographic. I agree wholeheartedly. Don’t know if you are familiar with Edward de Bono and lateral thinking? He mentions that you have to force your brain to think. It’s in survival mode and lazy to think, exactly what Ai is supporting.