Do you personalize learning or specialize learning?
What might be the difference?
Jerome Bruner makes reference to personalized learning in his early works, The Process of Education (1960) and Towards a Theory of Instruction (1966). This quote struck me as especially powerful when thinking about personalized education:
"To personalize knowledge one does not simply link it to the familiar.
Rather, one makes the familiar an instance of a more general case and thereby produces awareness of it" (1966, p. 161).
Educators who think personalized learning should be tailored specifically to the interests of a student are missing the point. To make a child's entire education about football, music, robots, or anything else is doing the opposite of what education should be. Education should open a child's eyes to make broad connections while transmitting culture. Letting a child focus on one small slice of life for overly extended amounts of time does not build connections.
Bruner's view of instruction moves the child into ever wider concentric circles, each one with a larger worldview. A continual movement from specific to general. Personalized learning uses what is familiar to aid this movement. To me, this is the opposite of specialization, in which a student becomes more and more adept at a single skill or domain. Specializing learning in this way (letting a child focus exclusively on one type of content) is harmful to young students in the long run.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Bruner & the Role of Teachers
In the previous two posts (here & here), I wrote about the early work and legacy of Jerome Bruner. Bruner's works calls us to take a closer look at the role and purpose of teachers.
Bruner called education a "social intervention" (22) and said that every generation needs to redefine the purpose of education for itself. Because society is constantly re-inventing itself, so too must education continue to re-invent itself.
The natural world is the place for spontaneous, authentic learning - school is an artificial environment we have created for learning out of necessity. But what does that mean for the role of a teacher? Bruner says "Instruction should have an edge over 'spontaneous' learning" (44). So the job of a teacher is to make sure instruction builds upon knowledge and skills at a faster rate than a student could on his/her own.
This is exactly the work of the Hattie study (2009). Hattie's mantra of "Know thy impact" comes from his meta-study which compares the effect sizes of various instructional strategies on achievement. A few strategies and policies had a reverse effect on achievement (a negative effect size), some are called "Developmental effects" (what a student would likely achieve without a teacher), "Teacher effects", and finally a zone of "Desired effects" - strategies that had an effect above the average effect size of 0.40 in the study. This is Hattie's "hinge point".
It should not be surprising, then, that the highest ranking strategies in the Hattie study are foreseen 50 years ago in Bruner's early writings. The words might be different now, but Bruner foresaw the strategies teachers needed to use to keep that "edge". Here are some examples:
• Piagetian programs - Bruner was a strong believer in matching learning to Piagetian stages
• Formative Evaluation and Feedback - Bruner saw feedback as important not just for achievement in the moment, but also for connecting the student to his/her greater goals. Calling this the teacher's "special role", Bruner says learners can usually recognize if his/her immediate efforts worked or not, but a teacher's feedback is needed to show students if their work is leading to the eventual goal (51).
• Acceleration - allowing students to move forward at their own pace, jumping ahead when possible
• Problem-solving - Curiosity is the first intrinsic motivator for learning according to Bruner.
The teacher's role is a "provisional" role in Bruner's words. We teach to create independence from a teacher. This means helping students discover the ability within themselves to continue to learn on their own - to transmit culture without aid. To that end, Bruner says (96):
"For if we do nothing else, we should somehow give to children a respect for their own powers of thinking, for their power to generate good questions, to come up with interesting informed guesses."
Bruner called education a "social intervention" (22) and said that every generation needs to redefine the purpose of education for itself. Because society is constantly re-inventing itself, so too must education continue to re-invent itself.
The natural world is the place for spontaneous, authentic learning - school is an artificial environment we have created for learning out of necessity. But what does that mean for the role of a teacher? Bruner says "Instruction should have an edge over 'spontaneous' learning" (44). So the job of a teacher is to make sure instruction builds upon knowledge and skills at a faster rate than a student could on his/her own.
This is exactly the work of the Hattie study (2009). Hattie's mantra of "Know thy impact" comes from his meta-study which compares the effect sizes of various instructional strategies on achievement. A few strategies and policies had a reverse effect on achievement (a negative effect size), some are called "Developmental effects" (what a student would likely achieve without a teacher), "Teacher effects", and finally a zone of "Desired effects" - strategies that had an effect above the average effect size of 0.40 in the study. This is Hattie's "hinge point".
It should not be surprising, then, that the highest ranking strategies in the Hattie study are foreseen 50 years ago in Bruner's early writings. The words might be different now, but Bruner foresaw the strategies teachers needed to use to keep that "edge". Here are some examples:
• Piagetian programs - Bruner was a strong believer in matching learning to Piagetian stages
• Formative Evaluation and Feedback - Bruner saw feedback as important not just for achievement in the moment, but also for connecting the student to his/her greater goals. Calling this the teacher's "special role", Bruner says learners can usually recognize if his/her immediate efforts worked or not, but a teacher's feedback is needed to show students if their work is leading to the eventual goal (51).
• Acceleration - allowing students to move forward at their own pace, jumping ahead when possible
• Problem-solving - Curiosity is the first intrinsic motivator for learning according to Bruner.
The teacher's role is a "provisional" role in Bruner's words. We teach to create independence from a teacher. This means helping students discover the ability within themselves to continue to learn on their own - to transmit culture without aid. To that end, Bruner says (96):
"For if we do nothing else, we should somehow give to children a respect for their own powers of thinking, for their power to generate good questions, to come up with interesting informed guesses."
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