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?
