How to encourage Learning and unlearning

Posted byMLHPosted inUncategorizedTags:,

There are two types of learning depending on the nature of what you’re learning:

  1. You’re learning something completely new
  2. You’re learning something that overrides what you already learned

While under any circumstances you can always revert to reward or punishment to incentivise a learner, these extrinsically oriented strategies are often short lived without continued and varied reinforcement. While they can of course work for more temporary problems, this article looks instead at ways to intrinsically motivate learners. Of course, the approach to drawing a learner in very much depends on which scenario is being faced and so each is discussed separately below.

Scenario 1: curiosity

Sir Ken Robinson stood in front of one of the biggest audiences for a TED talk and told the crowd that our education system is destroying students. He then went on to advocate for nurturing the individual genius and interests of each child rather than feeding them along a conveyor belt designed to mass produce parts for the now long gone industrial age. If you’ve never read Sir Ken Robinson’s work or read his TED talk, I can’t recommend them highly enough. Similarly, in his article Why we stopped making Einsteins, Erik Hoel raises a concerning point: if, thanks to the internet, we have all manner of information at our fingertips, why do we not have countless more geniuses?

The problem highlighted by both men is that we now exist in a world that has tried, at the expense of imagination and curiosity and play to put education into a box. Whether we look at contrasting roles of tutors as Erik Hoel does or the system at large we can see that rather than the content, it is our perception of learning that’s the problem. We often look at learning as a means to an end. A subject at school gets us to a university course which gets us to a job. As such, a tutor is now there to help teach the student how to hack the system of exams and assessments. In contrast, while admittedly more reserved for society’s elite of the time, tutors used to be the best and brightest in their fields, hired to elicit curiosity and debate in their students. Their aim was to nurture in the child a desire to learn and to develop an appreciation and value in learning.

In an ideal world, we’d have people learning only the things they’re interested in and so they’d be fuelled by intrinsic motivation and curiosity. But many teachers and corporate trainers will tell you this is rarely the case and the idea of being able to take the time to develop 1:1 relationships and insights of a student’s motivations is even less common.

So how do you encourage natural engagement and curiosity?

With imagination, curiosity and play!

A few examples include:

  • Creating practical scenarios that students can relate to
  • Turning learning into a game so the skill is simply learned incidentally (this is used a lot when teaching kids to code)
  • Asking the students why they’re learning this topic and what excites them about it
  • Having students role-play and teach one another to see what they’ve learned and where there are still opportunities to further develop
  • Add an element of shock or surprise to elicit wonder and intrigue

Case study: While teaching students criminal law, I would spend the first half of the lesson teaching them the key concepts. I’d then come up with the most abstract, gory/gruesome stories my mind could concoct, ensuring at the end of each lesson to ask the students for name recommendations for next week’s characters. In this way, they were involved and invested in coming back to learn more the next week and always eager to hear what story would be presented to them to practice what they’d just learned.

Scenario 2: influence or override

When it comes to something you’ve already learned, it’s often far more challenging to teach somebody. This is because there’s already a habit they’ve clung to and so a desire to stay with the familiar.

Because it already exists in the learner’s mind, unlearning can be approached in one of two ways. Either, you can appeal to the mind and rationality/reason, or you can see the mind as a hurdle and look to bypass the problem all together.

Appealing to the rational person

To appeal to the rational mind, or even the emotional one, you need to rely heavily on excellent influencing skills. You may wish to adopt a philosophical approach used by greats including Socrates in which you recognise the still valid or useful parts of the previous concept before highlighting why the new approach is better. You might decide to appeal to a learner’s ego, their desire to succeed, any core values that align with this new approach. You may wish to instil fear that without this new approach, they may become antiquated and dinosaur-like and at risk of being left behind.

Another strategy relies on bringing the learned habit into conscious awareness. Think of how you toilet train a pet for example. If a student doesn’t realise what they’re doing, trying to take control and unlearn can be incredibly difficult. By sitting and observing or having a way to point out when a student reverts to the old practice exactly when they do so, it empowers the student to learn a new set of rules that override what was previously practiced.

Using the environment to override

Where what’s been learned is practiced as naturally as breathing air, it can often be challenging to just rely on the willpower and drive of a student. For overriding learned habits, a more effective strategy can be to update the environment. This works particularly well where the behaviour is something that can be easily swapped such as where a new IT tool is introduced to override an old process. For example, if the old way of doing things was to always use internet explorer as a search tool, you could update the environment to put chrome or safari as the new default browser while also removing the explorer icon from the dock. This approach to changing habits works by gently nudging the learner to a new behaviour in a way that requires minimal cognitive effort without drawing their attention to what they’ve had to give up.

Case study: After learning pottery for almost 2 years, I had a two year break when I moved overseas. During this time I developed some ‘bad habits’ for how I handled the clay. These shortcuts may have worked when I was using a different type of clay but if I wanted to learn how to throw bigger pots using porcelain, I needed to unlearn the bad habits. This meant firstly I had to become aware of the habit (my teacher would watch me like a hawk and point out each time I’d slip up until I started looking for the habit) after which I would start to catch myself and recorrect.

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