Satisfied by myths

When I signed up to coach my daughter's soccer team (she was three at the time), I attended a coaches' clinic. Because I had never played or coached soccer before, I was especially keen to learn.

The clinic was run by a man from Eastern Europe. I could tell he had a real passion for soccer. I was impressed with the focus of the clinic -- have fun and be active were the two primary goals of the clinic. And we were going to do this by ensuring that the kids had as many ball-touches as possible. That is, we wanted the kids to kick the ball as many times as possible inside of the 45 minutes that we played. The idea being, kids have the most fun when they actually get to play the ball, and as far as future development goes, the kids will only ever improve at soccer if they kick the ball a lot. And it's more than just coincidence that the two go hand-in-hand.

I thought this all made a lot of sense.

As a sidebar, the man running the clinic told us a story about how his childhood soccer coaches were very old fashioned and traditional. So much so that they believed athletes shouldn't drink water while playing soccer. I think their reasoning was that water would bloat you and slow you down. His point was that we know better today and that the kids need to drink water routinely through out activity.

We all had a good laugh at the expense of those old-fashioned coaches who were silly enough to believe in such a myth.

My point here is that I hope we are not arrogant enough to believe that we are not still foolishly satisfied by a great number of myths.

I hope we are not so pompous to believe that other people years from now won't look back on some of what we do today and have a good laugh tomorrow.

The problem is that everything is obvious once you know the answer. We know today that drinking water is not something to be avoided during physical activity - rather it is something to be encouraged. It just makes sense. Common sense.

There is a danger in all this that Ellen Langer explains in her book The Power of Mindful Learning:

Not only do we as individuals get locked into singleminded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness. There is an awareness of this in science. Scientists proceed along a path gathering data that builds an accepted wisdom. At some point someone turns everyone's attention to a very different view of the previously acknowledged truth. This phenomenon happens frequently enough that scientists are generally not surprised by what is called a paradigm shift. In a recent New York Times article psychologist Dean Radin described four stages of adopting ideas: "The first is, 1.'It's impossible.' 2. 'Maybe it's possible, but it's weak and uninteresting.' 3. 'It is true and I told you so.' 4. 'I thought of it first.'" I would add a fifth stage, "We always knew that. How could it be otherwise?"

So how do we avoid this kind of auto-pilot amnesia?

I think the answer lies somewhere in that we must remain acutely aware of how what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the present relates to our ultimate goals.

While it's true that wishing tomorrow to be just like yesterday won't ever make today a better place, it's also true that pretending yesterday and today are as good as it gets will damn us all to the tyranny of the here and now.

Mindful learning

In her book The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer writes:

Clearly some experience is necessary to acquire complex skills. Yet imagine a coach or piano teacher prescribing a set amount of practice, every day. To claim that any particular amount of time on task is sufficient to learn that skill overlooks the state  in which practice is approached. How much piano, or golf, or tennis can one learn while daydreaming about some other activity? Pressed to its logical extreme, this teaching method would rely soley on moving the body, with the assumption that the mind would follow. If so, one could learn while asleep simply by having one's body moved in the proper patterns.

Although certain therapies have actually made use of some version of this mode (body therapies or neurolinguistic programming), full mastery is not their goal. Recognizing the difference between going through the motions and moving one's body in awareness brings us into the domain of mindfulness.

There is a big difference between going through the motions and focusing intensely. When it comes to homework, I think we can all agree that a student who completes their homework with accute mindfulness is likely to be the exception, rather than the rule. And this is no accident - think about how we speak to kids about their homework. Are parents more likely to ask "are you done your homework?" or "what did you learn from your homework?"

When we only ever ask about the completion of homework, we explicitely tell kids that getting the homework done, regarldesss of quality, is most important.

Just get it done.

And when we don't ask about whether the homework supported their learning or whether it was worth doing in the first place, we implicitely tell them that we don't really care about the learning.

Just get it done.

Automacity is a by-product of mindlessness. When we cease to place the kind of due care and attention into our efforts, we fail to further our progress. We go into a kind of auto-pilot that works to stunt our improvement.

Rather than falling into rote-memorization-through-repetition, it is far more advisable for learners to keep learning new things, to routinely change their approach and not lock into any single pattern.

How else will we ever learn something new and grow as life-long learners?

to reinforce or not to reinforce

Those who look to defend the practice of assigning homework in school quite often will use the automacity argument. That is, we want children to be able to know their times tables or spelling with a kind of automacity.

I have made the case before that perfection is not a desirable outcome, and now I wish to do the same for automacity. Like the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of automacity is likely to paralyze rather than energize - and in the end sabatoge learning.

In The Homework Myth, Alfie Kohn explains nicely how sit-and-get-now-spit-and-forget should never be desirable inside or outside of the classroom:

Giving students homework that involves drill and practice is often said to "reinforce" the skills they've been taught in class. This verb is tossed around casually, as if it were sufficient to clinch the case. But what exactly is meant here? Unless it's assumed that practice is reinforcing by definition, one would have to demonstrate that good results are indeed likely to follow from mere repetition. And it's not at all clear that this is true, except under very limited circumstances. For example, it wouldn't make sense to say "Keep practicing until you understand" because practicing doesn't create understanding - just as giving kids a deadline doesn't teach time management skills. What makes sense, at least under certain conditions, is to say "Keep practicing until what you're doing becomes automatic." But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?

Think about that.

How do you practice an understanding?

It's one thing to say you want a child to practice their times table and be able to bark "36!" in response to the stimulus of "6 x 6", but it is quite another to say that you actually want the child to understand how 6 x 6 can or should equal 36.

Any math teacher who concerns themself with children understanding what is happening when they multiply two numbers will tell you that this process is anything but automatic.

To reinforce the behaviorial response may actually undermine efforts to construct meaning behind mindful learning.