Philosophy of Learning

by Mike Kaechele

I have been working on creating an on-line portfolio the past week or so. This is a page that I made that I thought I would share with you:

In college you have to write a philosophy of education, but I choose to write a philosophy of learning instead because that is what is important to me.

Lectures don’t motivate, active learning does. I believe that whoever is doing is learning.

I believe learning is social and should happen in community through investigations, experiments, questions, and conversations.

The learner should have an active role in choosing both the content and the method of their learning.

I believe learning should be holistic, not compartmentalized into artificial subjects.

I believe that every learner is an individual human being with her own feelings, emotions, strengths, weaknesses, passions, and dreams to explore.

I believe textbooks are a poor source of learning, unmotivating, and a crutch for teachers.

I believe learners should be connected to the world through on-line tools to share and expand their learning.

I believe that learning should be “real world” right now, not just preparation for later careers.

I believe students can and should  make meaningful contributions to all fields of study today.

I believe learning should be assessed informally and formally with formative assessments not just high stakes tests at the end.

I believe that all students can learn, but that curiosity and motivation has been driven out of many of them by the boredom of how we “do school.”

I believe the reward for learning is personal satisfaction and enjoyment, not a letter grade.

When you stop learning you’re dead.

I’m still learning every day…

Because It Was the Only Way

Norman Constantine left a really striking comment on a post here recently, saying:

"We memorized before the internet not because it was the best way to learn but because it was the only way to have recall."

Would love to hear folks' opinions; I think Norman may have struck on something very interesting: traditionally, we think of prior knowledge generally as an internal thing; but could we not imagine a future where prior knowledge is a public or external thing?

And how best would we teach our kids in such a world? By continuing to plug knowledge into them or by plugging them into the knowledge?

What We Do

Had a great conversation with a retired veteran teacher last night.

The thing he said that I keep coming back to in my mind:

"It's easy for anybody to point out what a kid does wrong. But that's not what a good teacher does. A good teacher goes out of his way to figure out what the kid does right and then sets the kid on a path of confidence and success."

As I prepare to go back to school tomorrow after a week and a few days of Spring Break, this is exactly the kind of advice I need to keep at the front of my mind. Focus on success, not failure. Turn failure into success and turn success into confidence. Seems like such a simple formula, and yet we as a profession struggle over it over and over again.