The Fallacy of Pitting “Learning How to Learn” Against Learning Facts
The reason it’s a fallacy to pit these two against one another is that learning is about making connections. That is, learning is about making connections between facts — between truths.
Hence, you cannot learn anything without knowing facts.
The process of learning is the process of seeing and identifying and even delighting in the connections that you see among various truths. Without a storehouse of knowledge — of facts — this can’t happen. With a great storehouse of knowledge — of facts –, however, this can happen in abundance.
Learning how to learn is important. However, the first step in the process of learning is to gather the facts — gather information and truth. As you are doing that, connections (learning) will come. And as you gather more truth, more connections happen — and thus learning increases.
If in our schools and colleges and graduate programs we only focus on learning “how” to learn, we set people up to be incredibly behind. For they will have to embark on the actual process of gathering the information that is the fuel of learning after they are done with their school or program, rather than getting a bunch of that in place during their program.
Far better to learn how to learn and, right along with that, actually learn. Then, when you graduate, you will not only know how to learn when you encounter new territories, but you will already have a large storehouse of knowledge to build on. You won’t have to take so much time getting basic (or advanced) knowledge in place, and thus you will be coming at the new territory with a significant head start.
I think this is recognized in most schools, but there still persists this idea, perhaps only in popular conception, that the most important thing is “learning how to learn” rather than actually learning specific and abundant facts and truths as well. Though probably we could do better in most schools and graduate programs as well (with graduate programs, perhaps, focusing more on the making connections component of learning rather than mostly gaining information; also critical here is gathering the right information — which means, for theological education at least, reading fewer liberals).
One last thing: The fact that almost everything is available now through an internet search does not eliminate the need to actually learn facts. I love Google and looking up whatever I need to know when the need arises. But since learning is the act of making connections between facts, you need to have a whole bunch of facts in your head — not just available through a quick search on the Internet — in order for learning to take place.
(And, it’s also more efficient not to have to look everything up.)
Interview with Michelle Rhee, Former Chancellor of DC Public Schools and Education Reformer
This interview with Michelle Rhee here at the Global Leadership Summit was highly, highly impressive. She is an amazing, clear-minded, hard-headed thinker and reformer when it comes to education. Many of you may be familiar with her from the documentary Waiting for Superman, which tells the story of her relentless quest to reform the public education system in Washington, DC. Here’s a brief bio:
Leaders know that change isn’t easy—and it doesn’t come overnight. That’s why, for the past 18 years, Michelle Rhee has stayed the course with a single objective: to give children the needed skills to compete in a changing world. Rhee, who served with Teach for America, founded The New Teacher Project, equipping school districts to transform how they recruit and train qualified teachers. During her three years as Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools, students’ scores and graduation rates rose dramatically. Today, Rhee is CEO of StudentsFirst, a movement to transform public education. She holds firm to her conviction that teachers are the most powerful driving force behind student achievement.
This is a paraphrased summary of the interview — I tried to type the highlights as I could keep up.
Question: You had a lot of opposition against you as you brought about the reforms as Chancellor of Washington, DC public schools. Why didn’t you bail?
Answer: I loved my job. Every day I loved it. The children in the district were receiving such a disservice. More than half of the children weren’t graduating. It was really criminal what was happening. And to think people were avoiding addressing the problem because they were afraid, I said “I can’t let this keep happening on my watch. If you want to yell at me, fine, but this won’t keep happening on my watch.”
Question: How did you get to where you are?
Answer: My parents always emphasized the importance of gratitude. We grew up with a mindset of how do you help others and cure the injustices and do as much to that end as you can.
Question: You ran into Teach for America after college.
Answer: Yes. In my senior year of college, I had no idea what I was going to do when I graduated, and I was watching a PBS documentary about Teach for America. I thought “Wow, here’s a place were people are seeking to change the world through public education. I want to do that.”
Question: You got assigned to inner city Baltimore.
Answer: I was not such a good teacher my first year. I realized what most do: It is literally the hardest job you can possibly have. Coming to school each day and seeing to it that all 36 kids receive the education they need. [Applause]
Question: [I missed it]
Answer: Yes, some people came and said “you might want to think about a career change.” That was hard, because I’d been a success at everything I’d done so far.
Question: But things changed quickly. 2 years later, 90% of your students were at proficiency levels in reading and math. When you started, it was at 13%. What did you do?
Answer: It wasn’t rocket science. We did what every school in this country that is seeing those results do. We built a very strong work ethic. We taught them there is no easy way to do this. Come in before school and after. Engaged their parents so they understood what we were doing and why. I sometimes had my kids do two hours of homework a night, and the parents though I was nuts. Now, right now I have a daughter and 20 minutes is hard to get through! So maybe it was too much at the time. But the things we put in place changed the way they did things. It was their hard work that brought the change.
Question: You went to Harvard and were involved in [something with policy.] But you couldn’t get over your time teaching.
Answer: . . . I founded a new organization called “The New Teacher Project.” The idea was that we would work with educational departments and etc. and see how we could get more teachers into inner city schools.
Question: You encountered some myths in some studies.
Answer: The biggest myth that existed at that time is that there aren’t enough people who want to teach in the neediest schools. One statistic said the nation would need 2 million teachers over the next decade, not enough applicants. We quickly found that was not true at all. You do a recruitment campaign, and you get thousands of applicants. The problem was the bureaucracy. The best candidates could not get hired. Their applications got lost, [other stuff].
Question: [Missed it]
Question: Your organization became very effective. In the meantime, this stuff is happening in DC. Some direct authority was given to make some changes, and you were called by that guy. Why did you say yes? You were having such a phenomenal time with the new teacher project. You initially resisted. How did he get you to say yes?
Answer: I said no several times, and being a superintendent was the last thing I wanted to do. And I had never run a school, much less a school district. I was the least likely person to choose. Ultimately I took the job because in a heart to heart with the mayor I said “you don’t want me for this job. Your job as a politician is to keep your constituents happy. If I come in and do what’s necessary to turn things around, I would cause you heartache and headache.” And he said: “As long as the things you are doing are the right things for kids, that is fine.” “I had never heard a political say this. I said ‘what are you willing to risk for this?’” And he said “everything.”
Question: Give us a sense of what things were like when you stepped in.
Answer: 8% of the 8th graders were on grade level in mathematics. Chances of graduating from college upon entering freshman year 9%. At kindergarten, the students were on par with other students in other districts around the nation. But the longer they were in our system, the more they would fall behind. It was almost better if students would have just stayed home all day. We bought computers that first year for the whole district, and I got a call that first day saying “this isn’t going well.” And they said “many of the classrooms can’t plug them in, because they only have two-pronged outlets.” So there was a huge amount of dysfunction; it was very broken.
Question: What did you zero in on as the core problem you were going to address?
Answer: We wanted to clean up some of the basic issues first: make sure everyone was getting paid, on health care, had their books. Then the things we really focused on was … we really elieved the way we had most impact on our students was to make sure there was an excellent teacher in every classroom and excellent principle in every school. So our emphasis was on human capital.
Question: What moves did you then make?
Answer: We decided to close 23 of the schools, 15% of our inventory. At the time that we did that, no district had done it to that extent before. They had wanted to close that many schools, but 3 a year. I cut the central office administration in about half. When I started there were 1,000; when I left, there were 500. I removed about 2/3 of the principals in the district . . . there was a lot that was going on. Separate from those numbers, the main thing I tried to do was address the culture. We wanted to think about every child the same way we think about our own. One day we were having a policy discussion about a new teacher evaluation system we were going to put in place. Question was if a teacher was regarded as ineffective, how long do we let them stay? Some people said “let them stay for 2 or 3 years.” I said “If we let an ineffective teacher stay a second year, I have to be comfortable knowing that person would be teaching my kids. I would never let that happen. If I came to school on the first day and the principal said ‘Here’s Olivia’s teacher. She’s not so good. But we are trying to develop here, and this is good for the system.’ There’s no way I would let that happen.” If this was not a policy I was not willing to subject my own children to, that was not a policy I was willing to let any other parents in the district have their kids subject to. [Sounds like the Golden Rule -- Mt 7!]
Question: [Missed it]
Answer: A good educator who walks into a classroom with a good teacher can tell it almost right away. The teacher is writing on the chalkboard, saying “Fred, don’t pull Sue’s hair,” and you didn’t even realize that was happening. Etc.
Question: What does value added mean?
Answer: This is a term that has just come in. We want to evaluate our students on the basis of how students are growing. I looked at the performance evaluation of the teachers, and 95% were great — at a time when only 8% of the students had a chance of graduating. How could that be? The concept of value add is you measure a teacher and the students at the beginning of the year, and the end, and make sure there’s growth. It creates a fairer system. If you set an absolute goal, “90% of your students have to be here by the end of the year,” you might be at a school where 90% are already on grade level at the start, and another is at a school where only 10% are. So it is more fair to measure if the students grew.
Question: Lots of people lost jobs. Then you got picketed. Did that wear on you? How did you handle that?
Answer: One day they even came to my house. My mom said “there are some people here, and they’re really excited about something.” I said “Mom, they’re here to protest me.” One day we opened the Washington Post and there was a two page spread on all the school closures, news shots of me getting yelled at, etc. My mother walked into the kitchen that night as I was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich and she said “Are you OK?” Then she said “when you were a kid, you never used to care about what other kids thought about you. I feared you might become anti-social. But now I see that that is serving you well. 
”
You have to be OK with criticism. This is not the profession for you if criticism makes you feel super bad. I would much rather have had a room full of people yelling at me, than the opposite where no one cares. I would much rather deal with anger than apathy.
Question: And you can’t lead if change isn’t happening. It’s the very nature of leadership. So the million dollar question: If you had to do it over again, would you change that fast? What would you say to leaders: incremental change, or revolution?
Answer: I’m not an incremental girl. I certainly didn’t think it was appropriate for the context we were working in. When I was responsible for a school district that was failing a vast majority of its children, I wasn’t going to stand for that. Some people would say to me “you are going too fast, like a bull in a China shop.” But I always noticed that their children were not in the DC schools. If you have your children tucked up in a private school, you can afford to let this slide in the DC schools a bit. I never heard a parent of a child in the district say “you’re moving too fast.”
Question: [Missed it]
Answer: If you look at the education agenda in this country, it has largely been driven by special interests. And the problem in that scenario is that there is no organized interest on behalf of kids. So seeing that void and believing that the only way we will see change in this realm is to have that voice out there, I decided I would motivate people towards that. So I started an organization called Students First, and it is a movement of people across this country who know that our education system is not serving children well in this country and put pressure on public officials for change.
Question: One more question while we change. Some final parting words of challenge.
Answer: As I think about what needs to happen in this country, it really is about putting students first. Go to our website at www.studentsfirst.org to find out more about what is happening. I’ll close on this. I was meeting with a state legislator a few weeks ago. He said “I understand what you’re trying to do. I just wnat you to understand this is really hard. The union will be picketing, etc.” I looked at him and said: “But as an elected official, your job is to represent all your constituents. If you just turn your attention to where the yelling is the loudest, you will be turning your backs to kids. Because kids don’t vote. Kids don’t hold rallies and protests. Proverbs 31:8: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.” The children cannot go out there and represent their own interests, so we as the adults need to be the ones who stand up and do something about it.”
[WOW. Fantastic.]
Answer: I would describe myself as an aspiring Christian. My fiance is a strong man of faith and evangelical Christian. There are a few things holding me up. I was talking to a pastor recently, and he said “I can tell that you’re close. What’s the problem?” I said [missed it.] He said “this is a journey between you and God. Don’t pay attention to what other people are saying and doing.” The other thing is I’m a very linear and rational sort of person. I have a hard time turning things over. So this concept “let go and let God,” right, is a tough one for me. Going through this workbook Experiencing God. There is one day we did this together and talked about the concept of letting Go and letting God, and the lesson was talking about Sara in the OT, and she took things into her own hands to fulfill the promise God had made. My fiance said, “see, that’s what you do. You can’t do that. Let go!” So that’s where I am in my spiritual journey.
The Strictness Error
There is a class I know of (elementary school) where the teacher gives out hardly any top grades (it’s a complex system–it’s not just a matter of As, Bs, etc., or even just 1, 2, 3). The thinking, it is said, is that no one is perfect, and there always needs to be room to improve.
I’m sure there is more to the rationale, but is this a good idea? No. This is called the strictness error and it is demotivating. Managers can hold to the same error when it comes to performance reviews. Hence, the problems of the strictness error for both contexts is well explained by these comments in the book Management Skills:
The strictness error is the flip side of leniency. You rate everyone very strictly. While it is acceptable to maintain high standards, performance appraisals should be an accurate reflection of performance. Appraisals that are too strict will de-motivate employees and frustrate them. They will begin to think that no matter what they do, it will never enable them to achieve the rewards that they value. [I would restate the last part of the sentence, because it sounds too extrinsically motivated, but you get the point.]
The strictness error, as mentioned, is the opposite of the leniency error. You don’t want to error on that side, either, whether in education or management. The lenience error
provides employees with high performance appraisal ratings for mediocre or marginal performance. This marginal performer is then ‘rewarded’ in organizational terms. This will increase the likelihood that his or her marginal performance will continue–because they have no incentive to improve.
Of course, the one other issue raised here for the arena of management is whether the traditional concept of a performance appraisal is a good idea at all. It is, and should, seem a bit odd that I am able to make a comparison between how we treat elementary students and how we treat adults on the job.
It is critical that people receive feedback on results and are held accountable for meeting the defined outcomes they are responsible to produce, and that this be done through a regular routine of meetings and conversations. But whether this should include or be wrapped in with a detailed performance appraisal that effectively ranks or grades people is an open question, in my view.
Teaching as Leadership
I saw this recommended by Dan Heath and ordered it. The full title is: Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap
What Makes a Good Teacher?
Dan Heath gives some reflections on a recent article in the Atlantic which he highly recommends. He notes:
For years, people have speculated about what makes a great teacher.
But now there is data. It has been gathered painstakingly by Teach For America for over a decade, and it covers hundreds of thousands of kids. TFA linked the test scores of students to their teachers, so that TFA can spot patterns in the data: Which teachers are causing big boosts in the kids’ scores–for instance, advancing them by three grade levels in one year? And what traits do those star teachers have in common?
He goes into a few pieces of that data in his post, and recommends the full article for more.
Educating Students or Protecting Jobs?
After discussing how the job of leadership entails applying beliefs to real-world situations, Giuliani gives the New York City school system as an example of how this works out:
The New York City school system was never really going to improve until its purpose, its core mission, was made clear. What the system should have been about was educating its million children as well as possible. Instead, it existed to provide jobs for the people who worked in it, and to preserve those jobs regardless of performance.
That’s not to say that there weren’t committed professionals at every level within the system. There were, and that’s the shame of it. Those with their hearts in the right place were the ones who suffered the most.
Until I could get everyone involved to sit together and agree that the system existed to educate children, fixing little bits of it was symbolic at best. Band-Aid solutions can do more harm than good. The system needed a new philosophy. It needed to say we’re not a job protection system but a system at its core about children’s enrichment.
All rewards and risks must flow from the performance of the children. If you took a broken system and repaired just enough so that it could limp along, you lessened the chance that a real and lasting solution could be reached.
Applying Strengths to Parenting and Education
The underlying philosophy in most of the school systems I’ve encountered (growing up and as a parent, with one notable exception) seems to be based on the assumption that a student’s greatest opportunities for growth are in his areas of weakness.
Obviously students do need to develop their skills in areas where they don’t demonstrate their strongest aptitude. You can’t just say “math is not this student’s strength, so he’s not going to study math.”
Yet it would be wrong to infer from this that the educational system should focus most attention on improving a student’s weakest areas. For this takes focus away from sharpening and building the student’s strengths, which are where the greatest potential for growth lies.
One reason focusing on strengths results in the greatest growth is because it is motivating. People like to do what makes them feel strong (the definition of a strength — note, a strength is not merely what you are good at), and so they are intrinsically motivated to do it more. Thus, they get better at it, and the cycle continues. Further, this cycle has “spillover effects.” By getting better at something, your general sense of self-efficacy improves (note: that is very different from self-esteem), and you become better at other things as well.
Focusing on weaknesses, on the other hand, is demotivating. As someone has very rightly said, “if you focus on someone’s weaknesses, they lose confidence.” This can backfire entirely, such that the student not only fails to grow significantly in their weak areas, but also ends up being frustrated with their educational growth all together.
Usually I’m thinking about how strengths-based thinking applies in the workplace. But as our oldest child is now in the middle of first grade, my wife and I are beginning to think hard about what strengths-based thinking means for their education.
The above are some of the ways we’ve begun to think about how to take a strengths-based approach to educating our children. But being in the midst of a school system that seems to have the opposite approach, we’re on the lookout for good resources to help us develop our thinking on this. Which is why we were so glad to recently come across this book:
Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them
Here’s the review from Publisher’s Weekly:
Fox, head of a girl’s boarding school in New Jersey, writes about a strengths-based curriculum she developed and implemented with great success. She not only presents a workbook that can be utilized by educators and parents, but also offers a convincing argument in favor of over-turning outdated curriculums and teaching methods. Instead of focusing on weaknesses, Fox submits that children do far better when the focus is on their strengths. Childhood is for “creative dreaming,” not preparation for standardized tests. Fox identifies three types of strengths: activity, learning and relationship strengths, and helps parents guide their children toward self-discovery, explaining that true strengths include not only what a child is good at, but what she enjoys and makes her feel strong. The book is written in a lively and engaging style, and sprinkled with anecdotes from Fox’s teaching life and her own experiences as a student who was frustrated and uncomfortable in a traditional school setting. Clearly, writing is one of Fox’s strengths, as is her inspiring passion for helping kids lead meaningful lives.
Sparkcharts: Quick Overviews of Major Topics
A few months ago at Barnes & Noble, I came across a useful set of reference tools called SparkCharts. They provide a basic outline of the major facets of all sorts of subjects. Thus, they can be a good refresher on many subjects that you would have learned in school, but which are important to still remember today.
Here are some of the ones that I picked up and found helpful:
- World History
- United States History Pre-Columbian to 1865
- United States History 1865-2004
- United States Government/Civics
- Western Civilization
- Geography
- Sociology
- Philosophy
Here are some other ones that I see also exist:
- Statistics
- Microeconomics
- Macroeconomics
- Constitutional Law
- Weights and Measures
- Western Art History
- Music Theory and History
Sparkcharts don’t serve as a substitute for reading actual books on a subject, but can be useful as a reference tool for giving a quick overview or refresher.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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