Learning matters a great deal, as we are generally able to be only what we’ve learned to be. An education, then, is the leading out of limited ways of being into increasingly unlimited ways of being in the world. In this sense, learning shapes and defines our being.
As professional educators, scaffolding learning what we should be expected to do. This is as complex and nuanced as are the learners for whom our profession exists. But beyond our profession, it’s our uniquely human opportunity to intentionally construct interactions that enrich and grow our perspectives, insights, and possibilities.
Research tells us that learning is initiated when we encounter engaging stimuli that move us to want or need to understand our worlds more broadly, more accurately, and more purposefully.
For these reasons, our best teaching must be crafted in the media of multiple, synergetic stimuli that meet learners where they are then invite further possibility for significant growth. While it’s been said that no one cares how much we know until they know how much we care; but I’m not convinced this is so. Instead, research appears to be suggesting that no one cares how much we know until they know what they care about. So learning might just start right there—where wants and needs and hopes remind us of our further possibilities.
And so we as educators need to be instruments of assisting learners in growing closer to becoming what they feel moved to become. For these reasons, until our curriculum connects with learners’ intrinsic values, interests, and cares, our curriculum tends toward noisy irrelevance.
In contrast, when we’ve used our classrooms to craft stimuli and reflective spaces that allow our learners to feel moved to grow outwardly and inwardly, our work has then begun in earnest. It’s then that we must model habits of mindful excellence in divergent and discursive inquiry, analysis, synthesis, and creation, so that these templates offer opportunities for learners to try on disciplined cognition. And because thought inspires action, the actions need to belong to our students, so that discovery can be theirs through cycles of informed action, reflective observation, conceptualization, and further action.
As I see it, this may be what learning is. These are the guiding principles that appear to be emerging from brain research, and these shape my teaching philosophy as I currently practice it.
My teaching style follows from this philosophy. I attempt to invite into my daily curriculum divergent stimuli that connect with students’ interests in the context of our curriculum standards. Daily experiencing, reflecting, conceptualizing, analyzing, and taking action are the major concepts that shape my teaching for learning.