Teaching my students to Fish

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post titled, “I don’t know, but Google does.” In this post, I describe the educational journey of my daughters and how they have come to be able to learn things on their own just by asking questions in the right context. I argue that what I have done with my girls is teach them to fish, instead of giving them a fish, and that this is what I want to do with my students.

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The book A New Culture of Learning (Thomas & Brown, 2011) argues that my metaphor does not work, though. After reading the reasoning, I understand why. In the book, Thomas and Brown (2011) state that this fishing metaphor is tired and ineffective for our ever-changing world. The problem with the metaphor lies in the idea of finding fish. Specifically: 

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It assumes that there will always be an endless supply of fish to catch and that the techniques for catching them will last a lifetime. (Thomas & Brown, 2011)

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As our world continues to change and evolve, the way we find information and the information we find will change. What I have taught my daughters, and what I want to teach my students, is to have questions, let those questions lead to more questions, and find a way to ask them so you find the knowledge you need.

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When I think of inquiry-based learning, I think of going to google to find the answers. I think of things like Wikipedia and other “just the facts” types of sources. What I do not think of, necessarily, is blogs and community-based learning. I tend to think of Wikipedia as just a free version of The Encyclopedia Britannica, but it is not. The book describes Wikipedia as the new type of encyclopedia, because it is factual but built on a community that contributes to its knowledge.  It is the community that makes it better than the encyclopedias of old. The knowledge changes and updates at the speed of the internet.

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In thinking about my own inquiry-based learning, I use blogs and knowledge communities like those in my learning networks, every day. My daughters and my students do, too. They have questions they “search up” all the time. Our challenge lies in trying to help students phrase their questions in the right context to find the information they need and to find it from credible sources.

 

This brings me also to a big challenge in implementing such a learning model in my school: Convincing parents and administration that students should have free reign of the internet to be able to find answers to their questions. Last year, I wrote a blog post discussing the censorship of sites in schools for the benefit of students. I agree that there are places on the internet children should not have access to until they are mature enough to handle the content. But maybe this leads to another change we need to make in our educational system. Instead of fighting the internet and banning the parts we don’t want to discuss with our students, our time might be better spent educating students about what’s available on the internet and helping them find ways to get to the right information.

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Learning as play

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Play is how we learn from the moment we are born. Playing with objects teaches us object permanence and experimenting with those objects teaches us that we can chew on one to help us with the pain of cutting teeth, and we can use another one to help us pull up so we can take our first steps.

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Thomas and Brown (2011) define play as a combination of passion, imagination, and constraint. We learn best when we play with something. Our brains can investigate, ask questions, and frame knowledge in terms of our own tacit dimension of knowledge. (Polanyi, 1966)

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My innovation proposal suggests that my students should learn from interactive lessons, not from my sage on the stage lecture style. This allows them to learn at their own pace and play with the lessons and the information. As they play, they develop their own questions, which is where the second part of my innovation plan comes in – the discussion. This is the community part of learning. Where the questions become more important than the answers and where their online learning communities will be so helpful.

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Building the significant learning environment

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It would be foolish to assume that one teacher could have all the answers. Students frame questions in ways that are meaningful to them and relate to their tacit dimension of knowledge. For example, a student and I were talking about vectors. I framed my examples in terms of shifting tectonic plates because I like geology. My student, though, asked questions relating to aviation and planes. I do not have a depth of knowledge in air flight, so we went to google to find information about vectors and air travel. This helped my student understand vectors in a way that was meaningful to him.

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This example highlights the environment we need to create for our students: We need to create a learning environment centered around playing with ideas so that our students organically generate questions they can investigate, which generate more questions and deepen their learning. They need to form communication and investigation skills that will serve them in the classroom and in the future. And Teachers and administration, myself included, need to let go of the concept of knowledge transfer as the basis for lessons.

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Our significant learning environments are the learning communities we create and support for our students. Embracing the internet and all it has to offer is how we can prepare our students to be life-long learners for the 21st century.

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