"The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn ... and change."
Carl Rogers, Psychologist
As we progress our students at the College towards being confident, articulate and creditable learners in the 21st century, we need to take stock of how they learn and what their contribution is to the learning process. No longer are our students just consumers of knowledge and information, in this era they need to become learners who create and share knowledge.
In the year ahead, much work will be done in the College to grow cohorts of students who are willing to ‘learn how to learn”. This is not about curriculum content or assessment, it is about ensuring our students are equipped with a framework to live, learn and grow successfully in this ever-changing world.
‘Learning to learn' is a process of discovery about learning. It involves a set of principles and skills which, if understood and used, will help our learners learn more effectively and so become learners for life. At its heart is the belief that learning is learnable.
‘Learning to learn' will offer our students an awareness of:
- how they prefer to learn and their learning strengths
- how they can motivate themselves and have the self-confidence to succeed
- things they should consider such as the importance of a positive environment for learning
- some of the specific strategies they can use, for example; to improve their memory or make sense of complex information
- some of the habits they should develop, such as reflecting on their learning (metacognition) to improve in future attempts.
Underpinning our ‘learning to learn’ initiative is a fundamental belief that the ‘excluded’ of the 21st century will be those who do not know how to learn. In the past, it was considered perfectly normal to leave school and consider one's 'learning' to be over. Today, this picture seems like a distant memory. In the workplace, 'jobs for life' have disappeared and new technologies and ways of thinking are transforming the way we work.
"Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned."John Holt
The evidence is building up and becoming quite clear - people with few skills are at ever greater risk of social and economic exclusion in the future. Our students will need to learn not just to keep up, but to stay on top of life in the 21st century. Our emphasis on ‘learning to learn’ will be far more than just linking it to individual success – it will target both personal fulfilment and collective citizenship.
In developing a ‘learning to learn’ approach at St Gregory’s over the coming years, we will need to focus our attention on some key aspects:
- Metacognition: reflective and strategic thinking about learning that supports content knowledge and skills development;
- Enquiry: looking outwards and inwards, questioning and contextualising perceived understandings of learning and teaching; and
- Community learning: learning from enquiry can be shared and collaborated; knowledge and processes are critiqued, validated or extended by all learners.
No less important is our attempt to teach through a ‘learning to learn’ lens with pedagogical approaches that focus specifically on learning and includes the teacher as a co-learner; pedagogy which develops and supports authentic learning dialogue, which facilitates motivation and engagement and improves the quality of experience and outcomes for all the students.
Our teaching staff will need to become adaptable in their approach and techniques and change the way in which learning is experienced and understood by students. Staff will need to offer opportunities for new ways to extend, assess, focus on or talk about learning and in the process provoke a whole range of new questions.
To be successful, the ‘learning to learn’ initiative will require students to have the capacity to be self-aware, to understand their own learning processes and to encourage them to use this understanding by being both proactive and reactive in different situations - to be responsible for their own and others’ learning.
We face several significant teaching and learning challenges in our College and each day the strategic challenges seem to grow. Over the next few years, we will see increasing compliance to the new curriculum standards and resulting in higher levels of accountability.
Whilst these challenges continue, we need to ensure, above all, that we do not lose sight of the core of what we do and what we should be focusing on – our students and their learning. We need to ensure our ‘learning to learn’ focus permeates the culture of teaching and learning in the College and there is a definite move away from a teacher-focussed approach to learning and the delivery of content, to a more inclusive model focussing on each individual student as a learner.
We will continue to critically examine how we are meeting the learning needs of our students in contemporary society. We need to ensure that we are addressing the needs of the whole student, meeting the needs for their learning and skill development for when they leave and enter into society more fully. When we get this right, our students will be engaged in the learning process and in their classroom interactions and we will be delivering learning for the 21st century, where learning to learn has been a key focus of our efforts.
"A simple question to ask is, 'How has the world of a child changed in the last 150 years?" And the answer is, "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed! But if you look at school today versus 100 years ago, it is more similar than dissimilar."Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer Massachusetts Institute of Technology
