Helping Students Prepare Themselves For Anything

When John Spencer and I wrote Empower, one core idea was at the heart of the book.

Our job is not to prepare kids for "something". Our job is to help students prepare themselves for "anything".

We believe every child deserves to own their learning (as do adults). Educators can empower student ownership of life-long learning.

As B.B. King famously said, “The best thing about learning is no one can take it away from you.”

This is the reason we educate students. It is for their benefit.

When I see folks fighting online about what is the “best” way to teach students, I see a lot of adults who care about our kids and their education.

Sure, there are a variety of opinions, supporting research, and debates that may take place — but ultimately, through it all, there is the hope that we can do better for our kids, and help them be successful in and out of school.

That hope gets me excited and fired up about the future of learning.

But, it does not make it any easier.

The Teaching Dilemma

As parents, and teachers, we have a continual dilemma with our students and children. We have this same dilemma when we are helping colleagues or others in the workplace as well.

There will be many times when you can easily help someone achieve a certain level of success by doing the work for them. For our children, this can be holding their hands while they learn to walk. For our students, this can be giving a formulaic graphic organizer for writing an essay.

Holding the hand is a great first step to guiding the walking process, just like providing a graphic organizer helps with developing your thinking and writing.

But, ultimately you’ll have to let go of the hand to have them learn to walk by themselves, and go through the gradual release of responsibility as a teacher to have them write for themselves and develop a unique voice in the process.

We have the choice to allow for failure and provide support, or continue to do the work for them and make it easier on both of us.

Jessica Lahey wrote an article in 2013 on “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail” that went on to say:

This is what we teachers see most often: what the authors term “high responsiveness and low demandingness” parents.”

These parents are highly responsive to the perceived needs and issues of their children, and don’t give their children the chance to solve their own problems.

These parents “rush to school at the whim of a phone call from their child to deliver items such as forgotten lunches, forgotten assignments, forgotten uniforms” and “demand better grades on the final semester reports or threaten withdrawal from school.”

The study mentioned by Lahey (read it here), describes the problem that over-parenting has on our children and the impact it has on the learning process.

I’d ask if we are also guilty of “over-teaching” and enabling students in the learning process so that they lean on the help of adults, instead of helping them figure it out themselves.

Guiding The Process

When I wrote, Our job is to help students prepare themselves for "anything". The idea was simple. We don’t know what the future is going to hold.

We could not have predicted how the pandemic would impact education and work.

We could not have predicted how computers and the internet would impact education and work.

Right now, we can predict what types of changes will happen because of artificial intelligence in education and work.

But, we do know our kids (and us) will constantly have to navigate the unknown and be ready for anything.

The question I’ve been asking is: What types of learning experiences help learners prepare themselves for anything?

What learning experiences grab attention, engage at a high-level, and lead to the transfer of knowledge and skills into unique and new situations?

The answer was simple, but something that continued to pop up again and again: Meaningful and Relevant learning experiences.

When I set out to write Meaningful & Relevant: Engaging Learners in an Age of Distraction, I took a deep dive into a lot of the current research around learning. From 2019-2022 there were some landmark studies that came out. Not all of them were "new findings" but many shed light on areas that were working...and failing...in our current schooling experience.

In the new book, I share plenty of studies that support the need for meaningful and relevant learning experiences. Here are 10 that I write about in the book:

1. Students Think Lectures Are Best, But Research Suggests They’re Wrong: Learners don’t always have the right perception of learning (and there is a strong anticorrelation between their perception and achievement).

2. Shared techniques of expert teachers for classroom management focus on proactive strategies: 
   That’s no accident, according to new research. While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations".

3. Power of the "Pause" Button: 
   "When teaching students foundational concepts, a video lesson equipped with a simple pause button, for example, may allow students to reset cognitively as they reach their attentional limits, a 2022 study concluded. Pause buttons, like rewind buttons, are also crucial for learners who encounter “complex learning materials,” have “low prior knowledge,” or exhibit “low working memory capacities.”

4. PBL for All - It works for all students in so many different situations: 
   "Now two new large-scale studies—encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students. In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia, elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

5. A Better Approach to Becoming a Better School: 
   "It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found. The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores".

6. Teaching is one of the best ways to demonstrate Learning:
   "One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick? In a 2021 study, researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student. The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading. The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories."

7. Generating Questions is Better Than Most Study Strategies:
   Some of the most popular study strategies—highlighting passages, rereading notes, and underlining key sentences—are also among the least effective. A 2020 study highlighted a powerful alternative: Get students to generate questions about their learning, and gradually press them to ask more probing questions. In the study, students who studied a topic and then generated their own questions scored an average of 14 percentage points higher on a test than students who used passive strategies like studying their notes and rereading classroom material. Creating questions, the researchers found, not only encouraged students to think more deeply about the topic but also strengthened their ability to remember what they were studying.

8. Extrinsic Rewards Don't Work:
   "We compared the long-term effects of generating questions by learners with answering questions (i.e., testing) and restudying in the context of a university lecture. In contrast to previous studies, students were not prepared for the learning strategies, learning content was experimentally controlled, and effects on factual and transfer knowledge were examined. Students' overall recall performance after one week profited from generating questions and testing but not from restudying. When analyzing the effects on both knowledge types separately, traditional analyses revealed that only factual knowledge appeared to benefit from testing. However, additional Bayesian analyses suggested that generating questions and testing similarly benefit factual and transfer knowledge compared with restudying. The generation of questions thus seems to be another powerful learning strategy, yielding similar effects as testing on long-term retention of coherent learning content in educational contexts, and these effects emerge for factual and transfer knowledge."

No study is going to tell the whole story, and what I like about a wide range of research is the trends we continue to see. Kids need all kinds of learning experiences, but when those experiences are meaningful and relevant, we start to see a path to engagement transfer.

The Gift of Learning

Lahey’s book, The Gift of Failure, offers some critical research on why letting students figure it out is better for them at the moment, in their future, and in their understanding of what learning can look like.

In fact, letting our children “figure it out” on their own is one of the most empowering ways to give them ownership of their lives and learning paths.

It does not make the case that they should always figure it out on their own, but how a constant overstepping hinders their learning.

This is true gift of learning that B.B. King referenced.

When I learned how to ride a bike, no one could take that skill away from me. My Dad helped me ride, guided me on that process, and then let me fall and pick myself back up again till I understood on my own.

When I learned how to code, my teacher Mr. Flynn guided that process. He set up all kinds of scaffolded and structured scenarios that helped me learn. Then he turned us loose to create our own games, where I learned so much from the process.

I’m sure all of us can list so many examples where we’ve been supported, provided guidance, and eventually had to transfer that knowledge on our own. So, let’s give kids that gift of learning in school, and not wait till they are out in the “real world” to have moments of ownership, agency, struggle, and success.