(Foot)Notes on a Pre-Apocalypse

Transformational Learning

There are different types of learning. That’s obvious, right? Learning how to tie your shoes is different than learning who wrote the Declaration of Independence. One is a skill (maybe a set of skills), the other is a tidbit of information (a fact, maybe). Learning facts is clearly different than learning skills. But that is not the point here. This is not a compendium or glossary of types of learning. I think we can take it on intuition that there are different types of learning without fully exploring each one here.

 

I want to focus on the one at the top of the page. It is a bit of a tall order. Transformational Learning. What is that, even? 

 

(Interesting aside: This may be another hundredth monkey example. After writing about Transformational Learning, I decided to search for the phrase. It turns out that  Jack Mezirow created the idea — very similar to the conception here — back in the 1990s. Who knew? Clearly, not me, despite the fact that I did a masters program at a graduate school of education that considers itself one of the best in the country. We never read Jack Mezirow or anything about Transformational Learning. Guess it is a tad ironic. Or maybe that grad school is not so great with Transformational Learning. Let’s get back on topic.)

 

What exactly is Transformational Learning?

 

Teaching kids how to convert Optimus Prime back into the red truck of his transformed incarnation? Probably not. Teaching kids how to transform their labor into someone else’s wealth? No. But we do that pretty well in America. I think what it is is teaching kids (or anyone) to see their world and their role in that world differently. It is not learning the historical fact that Gomes Eanes de Zurara pretty much invented the idea of race in 1453 in Portugal. It is understanding what that historical fact means in connection with the learner’s own reality now or maybe down the road in the future. It is understanding that the concept of human hierarchy was human-created, not learned from observing nature the way science aims to understand reality. How has that fact implicated itself into the learner’s own life in some way, either positive or negative or neutral? Or in ways they didn’t understand before? Understanding that transforms the learner’s view of reality. It, in essence is, relevance in learning. But not every fact we try to teach can transform itself into an instance of transformational learning. That is to say, that not every fact is relevant to every potential learner at every moment in that potential learner’s lifetime, and may never be. So how do we know what is relevant to a potential learner. We don’t and we can’t for sure. Unless we have all had identical experiences at the same times in our lives, we are bound to see the world differently and perceive what is relevant to us differently at the moment in consideration. 

 

So, how on earth do you make this transformational learning happen? I don’t know… Maybe a good story? Nothing sells an idea like a good story.  Convince the learner(s) that the facts, the ideas, the arguments, whatever you think is so transformational, is relevant to them. Do it by telling a story. That is what teachers are: gifted storytellers. Well, the gifted ones. They were the ones who convinced you at some random  juncture in your life that some equation could actuality matter in your life. Or that by studying other forms of life we could see ourselves mirrored in them and the millions of interconnections and interdependencies that we share with all other life forms. Those are the kinds of ideas that change how you see your world, or your place in it. Those are transformational ideas. 

 

Yeah, sounds pretty good in theory, but what could this look like in practice. I mean really. How could you write a lesson plan for something like this? Is it even possible?

 

Imagine something like this:

 

A white male teacher in an uncharacteristically diverse suburban school district, in a high school social studies class has written: 

 

17,805 

 

in big letters on the chalk board.

 

As the students are coming in to class he greets them each individually and asks: “That number on the board, do you know what it is? I’m trying to figure it out,” in a very inquisitive tone, as if the teacher seems to have forgotten the meaning of that particular number. The students each, in turn, give him a crazy look and shake their heads no, but are really saying, “How am I supposed to keep track of your weird numbers?”

 

Once the class has settled, the bell has rung, the teacher says:

 

“Can you guys help me figure this out? Does anyone know what this number is?

 

A student calls out: “That one?”, pointing to the board. 

 

Teacher: “Yeah, that one on the board.”

 

Another student: “Is it the number of questions you’re going to ask us in class today?”

 

Teacher: “No, but that would be hilarious. It has to be something else.”

 

Another student: “Is it the number of times you had to pedal your bike to get to school this morning?”

 

Teacher: “We have two comedians in the house now. Not today, I actually drove my car in today.” 

 

Another student: “Is it how much money you want to give me at the end of class?”

 

Teacher: “No. I like you and all, but I don’t have that kind of money to give anyone. I’m a teacher, remember. I mean I wish I could give you that much money. But…you are definitely right that it is money.“

 

Same student: “It is money?”

 

The students seem to know it is a game now. 

 

Teacher: “Yeah. But what is it though? Would you want it?”

 

Another student: Slowly as the wheels turn in her head ekes out: “You mean…like how much it costs you for college for one year or something?”

 

Teacher: “Interesting thought. You guys want it? You guys want to know what it is?”

 

There is a generalized collective sigh of “Just-tell-us-what-it-is-already!”

 

Teacher: “Ok. You got it. You all got it. It is the number of islands that make up the country of Indonesia.“

 

Blank stares.

 

Teacher: “Just kidding. It is the amount of money the school district spends on each of you.”

 

Student: “Wait, you mean for each of us?” she says, pointing to herself.

 

Another student: “I could’ve saved them a lot of trouble. They could’ve just given it right to me.”

 

Teacher in reply: “So you would want that much money?”

 

Student: “I mean, I would definitely take it.”

 

Teacher: “Just once?”

 

Another student: “Wait, do you mean that is for every year?”

 

Teacher: “Yes, that is for every year you attend school in this district. Someone want to do the math?”

 

A student in the back is fastest with her cell phone and calls out: “$213,660!”

 

Teacher: “Whoa! That’s a lot. Did you multiply by 12?”

 

Student: “Yeah!”

 

Teacher: “What about kindergarten?”

 

Another student anticipated it before the teacher finished saying it and calls out, “$231,465!”

 

Teacher: “You would all take that, would you?”

 

Enthusiastic affirmations from the class.

 

Teacher: “What does it mean to take it?”

 

Puzzled looks.

 

Teacher: “I mean, that’s the money that is being paid for you if you go here K-12. Are you, as a student, getting what it is worth?”

 

Student: “But where does all that money come from?”

 

Another student: “Taxes! Where do you think?”

 

Teacher: “What kind of taxes? Does anyone one know?”

 

Blank stares, nods no. 

 

Teacher: “Local property taxes.”

 

A few moments of comprehension.

 

Student: “Like, what everything we own is worth, we have to pay taxes on?”

 

Teacher: “Not everything you own. Just real estate property. Houses, land.”

 

Student: “So people gotta pay that every year?”

 

Teacher: “Yes, for every student in every school in the district. Anyone…?”

 

Student in the back with smartphone says: “The website says 6,281 as of the district wide census in March XXXX (the previous year), whatever that is supposed to mean.”

 

Another student: “It’s when they count all the people in a place. Like all the students here in all the schools.”

 

Another student using smartphone calculator: “OH MY GOD! That is 1-4-5-4-9-9-3-6-5!”

 

Teacher: “How much?”

 

Student slowly counting it out: “One hundred forty five million, four hundred ninety nine thousand, three hundred sixty five dollars!”

 

Teacher: “Yes, exactly. That is how much money it costs the taxpayers of Blingingham Township (made-up name, of course) to give you the opportunity to come to public school for free.“

 

A student interjects: “It’s free?”

 

Many students laugh. 

 

Teacher: “Yes, it is free to people who live here. Kind of.”

 

Student: “Kind of because the people that live here have to pay for all that?”

 

Teacher: “Yeah.”

 

Another student: “That’s crazy!”

 

Teacher: “Yeah.”

 

Another student: “So, is this like the same in every school district?”

 

Teacher: “Probably not.”

 

Same student: “Why not?”

 

Teacher: “The answer to that is the answer to everything.”

 

Same student: “Wait. What?”

 

Teacher: “I really don’t know why things are this way. But, asking why is definitely what you all should be doing. I mean, this could be affecting your lives.”

 

Another student who has remained silent until now: “Wait. So what is the point of all of this? What do you mean ‘affecting your lives?’” 

 

Teacher: “I don’t know. What do you think I meant by it?”

 

Same student: “You mean like if we went to a different school district, and they spent more money on us, we would have better schools or more computers or something?”

 

Teacher: “I don’t know. Maybe. Or less. They could spend a lot less.”

 

Another student calls out: “Philadelphia only spends $12,468! I found it on Google.”

 

Another student: “I got cousins in school in Philly.”

 

Another student: “Guess you gotta tell ‘em the bad news.”

 

Another student with a sense of incredulity: “Seriously, why is it this way?”

 

Another student: “That just seems unfair.”

 

A lot of head nods. 

 

Another student: “Are there other places that spend a lot more than our district?”

 

Teacher: “Probably.”

 

Another student reading from a smartphone: Upper Blingiblingingham spends $24,362 per student. Where is Upper Blingiblingingham?”

 

Teacher: “Not too far away. Just on the other side of Philadelphia from here.”

 

Another student: “Seriously, this is not fair!”

 

Another student: “How come it is this way?”

 

Teacher: “I honestly don’t know. I wish I did. There may be a lot of reasons or factors. It could be complex. But we need to ask questions about why things are the way they are. A lot of times there are no good reasons. People have just been doing some things for a long time and that makes it seem normal.”

 

Silence. Things may be sinking in. 

 

Teacher: “We only have about a minute left in class.”

 

Student: “Is there any homework?”

​

Teacher: “I can’t think of anything other than taking a look around you and asking why things are the way they are.”

 

Another student confidently: “That’s going to be easy!”

 

Teacher: “No, seriously, try and go outside and have some fun. That is the homework, or there is none. It depends how you look at it. Have a good afternoon.” 

 

Something like that kind of happened. It was an experiment I did when I was teaching in a school district just outside Philadelphia. I tried it with four sections of my ninth grade world cultures class. I used this activity (if you can call it that) in anticipation of reading the young adult version of Three Cups of Tea, a book about an American mountaineer (Greg Mortenson) who is nursed back to health from altitude sickness by a small village in a remote and mountainous part of Pakistan. Feeling indebted, he spends the next ten years working to build a school for the village, which did not have one at the time. It is a fantastic story, however, since that time a lot of questions have come up about the veracity of Mortenson’s story. But that is another issue for another day. 

 

What you read above is a composite of some of the things students were saying and thinking from all four sections of my classes. And, it is tweaked a little here and there, as I’ve had about twelve years to think about it since I left teaching. 

 

I think it stands as an example of what I mean by at least aiming for transformational learning. Was it actually transformational learning? I hope so, but if I’m being honest, I have to admit that I don’t know. Maybe we can’t know. It would be extremely difficult to test students to see if their sense of their reality and their role in it has been transformed. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Yet. Maybe it takes time to percolate. Or maybe it takes more life experience to realize what it meant. Or maybe it isn’t meaningful to some students at all. There may be too many factors to account for. 

 

In fact, it is really hard to test if students have learned anything at all. Sure, we can test to see if a student memorized the year that the U.S. Civil War began or who was president during The Great Depression. But what’s the big deal if kids did learn those things when they can just look them up on their phones? And, are those facts relevant to the students’ lives as discussed above. Maybe this is one of the great fallacies of our contemporary education system: that we can measure learning. I’m not sure we can. It seems maybe we can measure whether students can memorize some random facts. Or that we can measure if they have basic math and reading skills. But can we measure more meaningful types of learning, like transformational learning? I don’t know that we can. It would be akin to attempting to measure how much a student matured during the course of ninth grade. Does that seem possible? I mean, can you measure maturity at all anyway? Does it seem reasonable to try to do?  Definitely not in the current iteration of our public school system. Our teachers are already overworked and burned out without sending them on such a fool’s errand. 

 

Maybe it is time for us to admit that education is an act of faith. Not science. That grad school program I did resulted in an M.S. Ed. A master of science of education. There is no scientific systematic way to educate a child or a batch of them all at once and then to measure how much they’ve learned. They are all different. They have different needs, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds, interests, skills, and modes of interacting with the world around them. The best we can do is plant seeds of knowledge or ideas, water them, and hope they grow into something. We cannot know whether what we are attempting to teach students is really relevant to them now (although, you can kind of tell when they know you are BSing them) or if it will be relevant to them at some point in the future. We can’t know how their world will be different when they are out of school or in the job market or making decisions as adults. The world changes in unpredictable ways. All education is based on the faith that some of the skills and knowledge we hope students will “learn” will end up being useful or meaningful at some point in their lives. That may be the best we can do. 

 

Of course, an activity like the one described above may help. I hope that at some point the students saw things differently after that activity. Maybe they realized the incredible investment their community was making in them, in their future. Maybe it inspired them to engage more in the community around them or ask more questions about why things are the way they are. Or maybe it prompted some to think about the equality issues that bubbled up at the end of the discussion. But did it? I have no idea. And that is ok. 

 

Besides there is a lot of value in this kind of activity. It can be used in a variety of contexts, not just the way I tried to use it. And it is something that I could reference back to when we were reading and discussing Three Cups of Tea.

 

Here’s the thinking behind the approach. 

 

The activity started with the teacher giving each student individualized attention, and asking each student to engage in helping the teacher figure something out. That is both planting a seed and a bit of a role reversal. The first students to engage were kids who are usually less likely to participate in class (because it is not perceived as cool). They led off with humor, thinking they were making jokes at the teacher’s expense. It gave the “cool kids” a chance to participate in class in their preferred way, by joking. They are maintaining their status as “cool kids” while participating at the same time. They are expending some social capital in so doing, and the teacher is then able to cash in on that social capital by having the “cool kids” demonstrate that it is ok to participate. That opens the door to other kids to speak up. And in my experiments, almost all of them did in their own way because it is a multimodal approach. Some students interacted by using humor, some by asking questions, some by socializing with other students, some by looking up more information, some by calculating the totals, some by putting the puzzle pieces together to see the bigger picture. Even though all the students were involved in the same activity, they were involved in different ways. In a way, we were thinking through the significance of this number as a group, pulling different ideas and thoughts from different perspectives to understand what was before us. 

 

Then there is the fact that we are talking about money. That usually catches kids’ attention. And the money is directly connected to them — it is literally money that is being spent on them. That makes it hard to argue that the topic is irrelevant. Additionally, this activity is transparent, it is about something real and about the students. It is not some lesson about something going on in a remote village in Pakistan. But it gives them a frame of reference to then consider, knowing what they now know about their own community, why and how things are different in that village in Pakistan. It gives them a point of comparison, but not only for the purpose of reading this book about Pakistan, but for life in general. Students already asked if that same sum of money is spent all over the place on students’ education. And one of them answered that question by digging up the comparative numbers for a neighboring school district. That leads to more questions about equality and fairness. That is engagement. And it could lead to an endless array of potential topics to consider in virtually every subject area.

 

This lesson also got students to do things teachers love students to do without asking them or assigning them to do anything. Two kids looked up information on local government websites to add to the discussion. That is a precursor to self-advocacy skills. Other students calculated totals to get a better sense of the implications of this number. They were trying to understand the big picture. Some students asked genuine questions. Some students offered information to help their fellow students understand what we were looking at. 

 

Another powerful aspect of this lesson is that it feeds the students’ natural curiosity (that is mostly beaten out of them by the time they arrive in high school). It causes them to consider a seemingly random number and want to look behind the curtain to find out what is really going on, especially once they realize the connection between that number and their own lives and educational opportunities. Hopefully, it causes them to approach the world in that way, that there is more than meets the eye, that we need to ask the questions and look behind the curtain to make sense of our reality or some specific aspect of it. 

 

It seems to me that this type of learning is what is largely missing in our systemic approach to educating children in the U.S. — maybe elsewhere too. We have gravitated more to approaches that are focused on teaching basic skills and facts. Our assessments really only test students’ skills and factual knowledge — probably because, as mentioned above, those are the easiest things to assess. Transformational learning, by nature, should be relevant to the students’ lives. As a result, learning experiences that aim to be transformational may helps students develop a greater understanding of why they are in school in the first place. I hope this lesson shedded some light on that. These kinds of experiences may make education more relevant to students, instead of them feeling like they are just being forced to learn things that will seemingly never matter in their lives because a bunch of people in the state capital decided on and approved state standards that guide each school district’s curriculum. 

 

Lessons like these are not possible to conceive of, plan, and implement on a regular basis. I think in the combined seven years I spent student teaching and teaching, I was able to pull it off twice: once as a student teacher (almost accidentally) and the one time described above while I was teaching. A better teacher could probably pull it off a couple times a year. But I think using approaches like this strategically can help establish a rapport with the students that the teacher is willing to talk about real things with the students — things that affect their lives. And doing so can help build context and engagement for the regular lessons and topics that the curricula require. It might help build trust that there is some hidden relevance to what the students are required to learn, and give a framework for discussions with the students about what they are required to learn and why. I hope that it is a recipe for engagement, if that is what engagement looks like. But I can only take that on faith.

 

I hope this was a good story.