[sirspacey]

Framing education as lessons presumes that lessons are how people learn

Project based learning pioneers, Maria Montessori, and other education innovators like Tom Wagner @ Harvard have discovered that learning is a human experience

Dr. Feynman has a wonderful illustration of this in his book “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman” on how he transformed Brazil’s physics education curriculum. Instead of drilling mathematical models of curves, they build ramps, invented their own questions, learned how to measure outputs, and derived their own formulas under Dr. Feynman’s guidance.

From birth, we are naturally curious and learn.

The fundamental problems to solve in education are:

1. Poverty - children without healthy, stable environments with proper nutrition & sleep are significantly handicapped in their ability to learn

Psychological safety matters

2. Reframing learning as something a person does vs. a scaffolded theoretical learning journey they are supposed go on

3. Building lessons as experiences that the student then creates out of - using the creative arts like writing, film, products, etc. - similar to what you’ll see Olin College of Engineering do

There is no way to bring this approach to education into the education system as it is today, because the education system is not designed as an institution of learning but certification.

Instead, we must build new institutions. It takes about 60 to 100 years for new institutions to take root because their students & families go on to be successful then donate back to the school in dollars, time, and political influence.

There are people who understand how to do all the things you describe, but that is not the decision tree for today’s education content producers. The work of Dr. Katherine von Duyke might be something you consider as you explore.

Instructional Design courses may be worth investigating. Just be highly skeptical that measuring performance is measuring learning. Retention is an easy indicator as to whether students have internalized a new concept or simply passed a test.

[tdekken]

Thanks so much for your response @sirspacey!

> Framing education as lessons presumes that lessons are how people learn

To clarify, are you thinking of a lecture instead of a lesson? A lecture is "a speech read or delivered before an audience or class, especially for instruction or to set forth some subject" whereas a lesson is "a section into which a course of study is divided".

A lesson is a generic term agnostic to instructional style (e.g., explicit, discovery, project-based, etc.) Similar to how everything in software engineering is a "task" :).

[sirspacey]

Appreciate the follow up!

I do mean lesson. In this case I’m critiquing the idea that learning is a set of tasks.

Of course, we can apply lesson generically to any form of instruction, but I do think it’s meaningful to consider things like learning by hanging out, learning by imitation & experimentation, without a preconceived idea of what is being taught or in what order.

As an example, I’m a huge fan of unit-based studies, which explicitly enable a more free roaming, multi-disciplinary approach to learning with the topic as a jumping off point. The curiosity of the student drives the teacher’s response.

Lessons are of course useful. My observation is that we see lessons as the learning path, but I’ve seen students learn multiple things simultaneously without a designed path.

Another example here is instruction where students invent their own lessons. The tasks are subservient to the student’s learning journey instead of the arbiters of it.