Learning to Learn

How do people learn best?

That's the question that Sam Chaltain, educator and democratic learning community advocate, spoke about at TEDxSinCity last month. In his book about the topic, Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, he interviewed ordinary and extraordinary Americans about their moments of learning. The five key conditions of learning, whether inside the classroom or outside of it, are environments that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential.

How can students be expected to be engaged in school if they are not built to be optimal environments for learning?

This week's New Yorker includes a review of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and a few other books and articles in that realm of academic disengagement and the question of why we have college. Entitled "Live and Learn," the article considers the numerous theories that aim to explain why we have college -- for meritocracy, for democracy, and/or for credentialing for careers. Louis Menand writes, "The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus."

Guiding focus is not about cookie-cutter chutes and ladders, but about building learning environments where students are motivated and engaged. Student engagement is difficult to measure, but even before entering the maelstrom of higher education, it's an area of concern.

Although high school students drop out of school for reasons ranging from needing an income to needing to stay home with a child, 83 percent cite school-related reasons for dropping out such as feeling disengaged from the academic and social aspects of school.

 "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire," wrote W.B. Yeats. The challenge for educators of toddlers to adults is to nurture environments that embody the five key conditions of learning, so that young adults don't end up academically adrift.