The Starting Point is Where You are.

The 8th key to learning.

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out." Art Linkletter

Attaching knew knowledge.

Abraham Maslow had the following to say about building knowledge on known knowledge:

"In the first place, unlike the current model of teacher as lecturer, conditioner, reinforcer the Taoist helper or teacher is receptive rather than intrusive. I was told once that in the world of boxers, a youngster who feels himself to be good and who wants to be a boxer will go to a gym, look up one of the managers, and say, 'I'd like to be a pro, and I'd like to be in your stable. I'd like you to manage me.' In this world what is then done characteristically is to try him out. The good manager will select one of his professionals and say 'Take him on in the ring. Stretch him. Strain him. Lets see what he can do. Just let him show his very best. Draw him out.' If it turns out that boxer has promise, if he's is a 'natural', then what the good manager does is to take that boy and train him to be, if this is Joe Dokes, a better Joe Dokes. That is, he takes his style as given and builds upon that. He does not start all over again and say, 'Forget all you have learned and do it this new way,' which is like saying 'Forget what kind of body you have,' or 'Forget what you are good for.' He takes him and builds upon his own talents and builds him up into the very best Joe Dokes-type boxer that he possibly can."

Clearly, if anyone wants to to find out what children have learned, or perhaps more to the point what their individual interests are and what knowledge bases they have developed in these interests so far, what is required of facilitators (teachers) is to spend a lot of time with each individual student discussing their interests. An important part of this is getting to know each student, finding out what is motivating each student, what interests each student, what could interest each student, and the extent of each knowledge base.

The cost for teachers.

If real ideas about learning are to become part, or more hopefully, all of the teacher's function, we can not ask them to present so much material to be absorbed. Nor can we expect them to test students to see how much they have absorbed. Many scholars and most of the people who's ideas are being presented here believe, and can produce evidence to the effect that, testing and structured measured out doses of knowledge have little to do with real learning. Indeed they believe that teacher presentation of knowledge and most testing can, and should, be done away with. If these arduous tasks are removed from what teachers are required to do, teachers will surely have the time, and can learn the skills, necessary to facilitate real learning.  

What might be done to help.

"Dorothy was working with me the other day. I have been trying to get to the bottom of her misunderstanding of numbers, so that I might find some ground to start building on. I think we may have touched bottom, but it was a long way down.

On the table I made 2 rows of white rods, 5 in each row. As I made them I said, 'Here are two rows, same number of rods in each row. She agreed. I asked how many rods I had used to make these 2 rows. She said 10. I wrote 10 on a piece of paper beside us and put a check beside it. Then I made 2 rows of 7. She agreed that the rows were equal, and told me when I asked, that I had used 14 rods to make them. She had to count them of course. I wrote 14 and put a check beside it.

Then I said, 'Now you make some.' She pushed my rows back into the pile, and then brought out some rods to make 2 rows of 6. I asked how may she had used, and she counted up to 12. I wrote this down and put a check beside it. Then I asked her to see if she could make 2 rows with the same number in each row and no rods left over, using 11 rods. She pushed her 10 rods back into the pile, then counted out 11 rods from the pile and tried to make them into 2 equal rows. After a while she said, 'It won't work.' I agreed that it wouldn't, wrote down 11, and put a big X beside it."

There follows a long passage where John Holt continues to work with Dorothy while she gradually begins to have insights about numbers. By the end of the session she was able to see the patterns involved and the session ended as follows.

"In the 4-row problem we began with 8 rods. She used the rods to tell me that 9, 10 and 11 would not work, and that 12 would. Without the rods she told me that 13, 14, and 15 would not work, and that 16 would; from there she began counting by fours - 20, 24, 28, 32, etc. In the 5-row problem we began with 10 rods, and after using the rods to get 15 she went on from there counting by fives."

John Holt ended the story with the following observation about Dorothy.

"The reason this poor child has learned hardly anything in six years of school is that no one ever began where she was; just as the reason she was able to make such extraordinary gains in efficiency and understanding during this session is that, beginning where she was, she was learning genuinely on her own."

Let us examine what John Holt has done in his interaction with Dorothy. First, it is not clear if Dorothy is interested in mathematics or not, although it could be suspected that she is not. What John Holt is dealing with here is mostly a matter of Dorothy's understanding. To activate Dorothy's  interest John Holt needs to find out what Dorothy can understand about numbers. John presents her with progressively simpler examples, till he reached an example that the girl could understand. Once he had reached this place of understanding, he feels he can begin to present examples in such a way, that the girl is able to see relationships between the numbers without them being forced upon her. Because she is able to make these discoveries herself, it is possible that Dorothy may begin to develop an interest in numbers for the first time. Numbers are after all useful, and intrinsically interesting, and Dorothy has probably been feeling a bit stupid, because the other kids would seem to understand what she could not. John Holt's finding of this beginning place, is essential for triggering both understanding and interest on Dorothy's part.

What we have learned here, is that no matter how small an amount a child's interest and knowledge are, it is possible, if you can find out what they know, to use that as a stating point to begin to facilitate the development of interest and the consequent building of a knowledge base in that subject.

Social science research on interest and development.

Facilitating.

While people with high individual interest are self motivated, people with low individual interest require a sort of catalyst to get them going. Renninger goes on to say: "...developing the the kind of knowledge and value that leads to well-developed individual interest needs to be facilitated by more than available texts. This requires planful effort on the part of the teacher or an expert other. Students need enough of a knowledge base that they can become curious and begin generating their own questions about a given content and begin to develop the depth of value for it that will lead to reengagement."

Value.

Teachers as catalysts.

What do interests consist of? In her writing Renninger refers to individual interests by the names we typically use for subject matter categories in English such as for example mathematics and skiing. It should be pointed out however, that how we classify things into groups or lumps is a completely arbitrary thing, made up by humans, so we can sort things to places where we can find them easily. Because humans are familiar with most of these categories or concepts we tend to build our interests also along these lines somewhat. But that is the end of it, 'somewhat'. The fact is, for each person each individual interest is unique.

Take skiing for example? What does a person mean by it? Does it mean a person coming down a mountain with two pieces of long material attached to their feet with the front ends turned up? What a bout a person that uses only one ski? What about a person that does not come down a mountain at all but rather uses skis to walk or slide across country? What about a toboggan? What about water skiing? You see skiing, as an interest, can include all of these things or only maybe one. It can expand and contract, because it is what we say it is. It is what we are interested in at the time. If it is truly an individual interest it will expand to gradually include other related categories over time.

Not convinced? What is mathematics? Is it adding up lists of numbers? Is it multiplying dividing and taking away? Does it include calculus? Mathematics is used by all the other sciences. Is that still mathematics? Can mathematics refer to objects in the real world at all? What about algebra and geometry? Are they part of mathematics? The thing is, we do not have to use a conventional label to describe our interest, until we talk to others. Then the label will undoubtedly be inaccurate, because the other person will understand it to mean something slightly different, or maybe even a lot different.

Finding out somebody's interest then, is not just arriving at a convenient label, but rather, taking a look at the entire subject content absorbed so far.

How to facilitate a person's continued involvement with undeveloped individual interest.

1. "The nature of the students' present activity."

2. "What draws their attention."

3. "How to help them learn to use the resources they have to develop the knowledge and ultimately the value necessary for working with these tasks. This means figuring out what students understand about a given subject and what they need to understand. On the basis of this information, the teacher (parent, expert other) can adjust instruction (information and expectations) to meet student's strengths and needs as learners."

In this way teachers, parents and other facilitators can prepare challenges for each individual student that are appropriate for each student and also attractive to each individual student. This is because each challenge addresses an individual interest of each student.

Common mistakes made by parents, teachers and other facilitators. By far the most common errors made by facilitators concern their own misperception of their charge's knowledge content and abilities. In other words they misunderstand where their charge's are at in terms of knowledge. There are a number of ways to do this as follows:

1. They can base their perception on old and out of date knowledge. Parents especially tend to base their knowledge on an initial perception of inabilities and lack of knowledge. This mistake is also often made by teachers who conveniently drop students into boxes based on first impressions. These boxes normally preclude the further examination of what is really known about specific knowledge and what individual interests and knowledge bases might consist of. These boxes beget expectations and cause an inability to make knowledge relevant and thus interesting.
2. Facilitator's perception can also become too narrow. Parents in particular can become obsessed and overexcited if one of their children shows particular promise in some subject matter. The parents and teachers of prodigies almost cannot help but start to watch and become excited about this subject content to the exclusion of all else. The competence and improvement messages thus tend to accumulate around this subject and thought of competence and improvement in other areas is ignored. Thus although the child becomes more and more competent in this field may start to become anxious about other areas of knowledge which eventually lead back to being anxious about everything including the one area they are good at. Even the way they are being pushed by parents and teachers, in this special area, starts to make it unpleasant, as the intrinsic pleasure they originally felt for the subject, is gradually eaten away, by their own feelings of lack of autonomy. They begin to feel they are only performing for their parent's praise, and not of the intrinsic pleasure of learning.

A wide spectrum of individual interests.

Intrinsic motivation.

1. Provide elements of information that link directly with information already existing in a subject knowledge base. This in turn will provide the person with choices or options that they are most willing to take.

2. Stimulate the perception of relevant problems, the generation of relevant ideas and application of relevant strategies to solve problems. Stimulate the relevant use of others as a resource to bounce ideas off, to receive ideas from and to receive and improvements from. Stimulate the relevant combining of ideas to generate further solutions to problems. All of which will increase the perception of competence and the perception of escalating improvement in competence over time.

3. Control the flow of information to stimulate the asking of curiosity questions that will improve performance and the expectation of improvement in future performance. 

4. Concentrate on lesson structure that is likely to increase the value that each student places on particular subject matter.

Less well-developed individual interests that remain.

Myelin learning.

Myelin wraps around axons in response to neurons firing and impulses traveling along these connecting nerve fibers. The more often electrical impulses travel along these pathways, the more myelin wraps around these axons and the faster and more efficiently these impulses travel. These myelinated axons in turn decide which other neurons fire by virtue of the speed the impulses in them are traveling. This in turn depends on the amount of myelin wrapped around the axon which in turn depends on how often the neuron fires that that initiates an electrical impulse in that axon. In his book "The Talent Code"  Daniel Coyle puts it like this:

"The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. ...'What do good athletes do when they train? ...They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire - lots of band width, high-speed T-3 line.' ...Whenever you do something your brain sends a signal through the chains of nerve fibers to your muscles. Each time you practice anything - sing a tune, swing a club, read this sentence- a different highly specific circuit lights up in your mind, sort of like a string of Christmas lights. The simplest skill - say, a tennis backhand  -  involves a circuit made up of hundreds of thousands of fibers and synapses."

Myelin doesn't unwrap.

"Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through old age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors - by myelinating new circuits."

All this has massive implications for learning. Clearly learning something for which you have no previous learning would involve an immense effort on the part of the learner. Fortunately learning does not work that way, but rather always builds on something that was learned before. If we try to erase habits and replace them with new ones you have to build the new ones on something that went before. Inevitably that means building on some neurons and axons that are already connected to the old habit which is already a super fast optimized action. What you are building is slow, weak and shaky and difficult to enter into. The old habit being optimized simply interferes by taking over the moment we lose concentration. We just find ourselves in a rut where we keep going down the same path because it is easier to go down it.

A house of cards.

Myelin change and iteration.

Our understanding of myelin, surprisingly, also leads to the conclusion that we really only learn when when change occurs. If we perform the same action over and over exactly the same way myelination would increase in exactly the same way. More myelin means faster but no change in the action sequence. No change means no learning. The action may become more automatic and quicker but it is still the same sequence of electric impulses from the brain and the same sequence of muscular reactions. This, if it ever happened, would be truly repetition. However, it probably never happens, nor would it be good if it did. It likewise would not be good to even approach this condition anywhere but in a situation where no further learning is required or desired.

Therefore it seems likely, that every time we perform an action it is just a little different to every other time. Instead of calling this practice lets call it an iteration. Sometimes this iteration is a little better and sometimes it is a little worse. When an iteration seems a little better we try to perform it that way again, causing myelin to wrap around the axons involved. When the iteration seems a little worse we try not to perform it that way again and no myelin wraps around the axons involved in making it worse. By varying the amount of myelin that wraps around an axon we control the speed of the impulse traveling through that axon and thus determine whether two or more impulses reach a neuron at the same time or just one. In this way we can control the pattern of the neurons firing which activate the action. In his book Coyle explains it like this:

"...myelin has the capacity to regulate velocity, speeding or occasionally even slowing signals so they hit synapses at the optimal time. Timing is vital because neurons or binary: either they fire or they don't, no grey area. Whether they fire depends solely on whether the incoming impulse is big enough to exceed their threshold of activation. To explain the the implications, Fields [Dr. Douglas Fields] had me imagine a skill circuit where two neurons have to combine impulses to make a third high-threshold neuron fire - for say a golf swing. But here's the catch: in order to combine properly, those two incoming impulses must arrive at nearly exactly the same time - sort of like two small people running at a heavy door to push it open. That required time window turns out to be about 4 milliseconds, or about half the time it takes a bee to flap its wings once. If the first two signals arrive more than 4 milliseconds apart, the door stays shut, the crucial third neuron does not fire, and the golf ball soars into the rough. "Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can't code the neurons to time thing so precisely,' Fields said. 'But you can build myelin to do it.'"    

Challenge. The importance of challenge and struggle in learning follows on from this information on the function of myelin. Challenge is the gap between what you know and what you don't know, combined with interest. When the challenge is small the amount of myelin wrapping around axons is small and when the challenge is great the amount of myelin wrapping is large. When we are challenged, when we challenge ourselves, we put a goal in place for ourselves. This kind of goal is based on something we have already perceived in action in the external world, that we are trying to imitate. We try to achieve that goal. If the challenge is difficult to achieve, it is possible we will not succeed on our first try. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't need to learn anything. Here's the crux of it. The greater the challenge the greater the risk of failure, but also the greater the possibility of making large changes in your brain connections, and thus the greater the likelihood of making maximum gains in learning. On the other hand performing routine tasks requires little risk of failure, but in turn provides little change in brain structure and so minimal gains in learning. Coyle had the following to say:

"Struggle is not optional - it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing the circuit - i.e., practicing - in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all myelin is living tissue."

Flow.

Memory.

Conclusion.

A life of long, continuous, learning.

Learning is a process of connection. The reason we know or understand something is because it connects to a mess of other things which in turn connect to a pile of other things and so on, ad infinitum. If we stop connecting information to other information that information loses its meaning, its ability to be recalled, and the special pleasure associated with real learning. Of course, there is some pleasure in absorbing any old information that does not connect with anything much. But this is more like an addiction than viewing the world incrementally more clearly, in an expanding web of knowledge, as in true learning. This expanding joy of connecting within and connecting without is just another way of experiencing and being motivated to learn throughout our lives. In this way we become life long learners.