Trusting the Learning Process

When we can pursue our own interests, test our own ideas, and make our own mistakes

I've been making a lot of mistakes recently. Fortunately, they've all been small, none of them has been fatal, and I've been learning from them. More than that, I’ve been building confidence. So it's all good. In fact, one of the main principles behind non-coercive education, about which I've been writing for 45 or so years, is that people learn by doing and by living in general. That is, when we are active participants in life rather than passive receivers of information, and when we can pursue our own interests and questions, test our own ideas, and make our own mistakes. But in the educational environment, experiential learning is not seen to be efficient and, perhaps more importantly, our society doesn't trust children and young people enough for these principles to be the basis of our school systems.

Most schools actually work in exactly the opposite way, providing standardized instruction based on someone else’s opinion of what should be studied, in an standardized environment and on a timetable structured by someone else, with standardized testing to ensure the material has been properly learned – er, memorized. In such environments, there is a “right” answer and mistakes are frowned upon and punished rather than seen as learning opportunities.

As they try to integrate technology into the classroom, some educators in both public and alternative schools have begun to give at least lip service to the notion of interest-based and inquiry-based learning. But bending the principles to fit into the reality of school is another thing altogether.

Meanwhile, one researcher – Manu Kapur, currently a professor at an institute of technology in Zurich, Switzerland – has been boosting the reputation of making mistakes. And he's been travelling the globe spreading the gospel of what he calls “productive failure.”

In a paper published a few years ago in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Kapur and co-author Katerine Bielaczyc described how they applied the principle of productive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools in Singapore. With one group of students, the teacher provided strong instructional support and feedback. With the teacher’s help, these pupils were able to find the answers to their set of problems. The second group worked on their own and with one another but without help from the teacher.

Although the latter group had difficulty completing the assigned problems correctly, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what a solution might look like. And when the two groups were tested on the material by being asked to solve complex problems based on the earlier simpler set, the students who hadn’t received instruction “significantly outperformed” the first. The findings did not differ in relation to the level of the students’ mathematical ability.

This seems to demonstrate the difference between memorization and real learning. Kapur refers to a “hidden efficacy” that results from muddling through a problem – i.e. making mistakes and learning from them. When we spend time on a problem, we begin to understand the deep structure of it on a first-hand basis. And that apparently allows us to transfer our insight to other problems in ways that those who were passive recipients of someone else’s knowledge can’t. That, I think, is learning that’s useful in the real world.

Kids and adults learn through experience rather than (and sometimes as well as) memorization.

I also think it’s safe to say that the learning is even more effective if it’s based on a problem that the learner poses in the course of their own real life. This is called intrinsic motivation. When I used to help people start small businesses, I would often tell them not to be fearful of the process, since many successful entrepreneurs failed a time or two before their next idea took off. Some of that eventual success was likely thanks to luck, timing, and financing, but the learning that resulted from the failures was most important.

Pursuing their curiosity is how young children learn as well. Think of the toddler who falls a time or two while learning to walk, the baby who doesn’t get an immediate response to her crying and must do something different (or louder) to get attention, the child falling off a seesaw and getting right back on, and the beginning reader who stumbles over some words but keeps reading. Babies and young children are not interested in short term rote memorization; they are focused on deeper exploration, understanding, and learning in the real world.

This is, I think, one of the main differences between school-free kids and those who attend formal and compulsory schools. What a gift we give the former to be able to continue to learn complicated skills and information in a non-coercive, self-directed way with our encouragement, support, and assistance when required. So don’t worry if they fail (or fall) a time or two. Or make a mess. We can trust the process and encourage them to do the same!

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