The lecture-based model for instruction forces you to do the hardest learning tasks when you are by yourself outside of class. In this model, a teacher dedicates in-class time to low-level learning tasks. Specifically, in the lecture-based model for instruction, a student gets their first exposure to course content during in-class meetings via a live lecture delivered by the teacher to a room full of students. Such lectures are usually given in a monolog-style speech where the vast majority of the speaking is done by the teacher to the students. By the end of the lecture, teachers have presented a long list of technical content to the students sitting in the room. After the in-class meetings end, students are expected to engage in higher-level learning activities like sense making, problem solving, and creative work. In a lecture-based classroom, the out-of-class activities typically involve deeper thinking and harder intellectual tasks. But, because in-class meetings are filled by the teacher talking at you, this leaves no time for collaborative group work to support deeper learning. Thus, in a lecture-based classroom, you are expected to do the hardest part of learning when you are alone outside of class, isolated from your peers, and away from the teacher.
In this post, we explore some of the problems with the lecture-based model for instruction. Identifying these issues is an important first step in creating learning routines that center deep learning and protect you against the harms caused by traditional lectures.
Tag: Deep learning
Schedule to Succeed: Draft Your Weekly Schedule
In this post, we create the first draft of your weekly schedule. We are not yet ready to finalize this draft nor to commit to a weekly study routine. The point of this draft is to help you assess your current time commitments. In fact, this first draft of your weekly schedule is designed to assess your current priorities and make scheduling decisions about your academic course load for the upcoming academic term. This work is part of our Schedule to Succeed series. Our major focus here is to help you think deeply about our learning principle that Learning takes more time than you think you need. If you can be mindful of this principle as you practice scheduling, you can free yourself up to be less stressed, more productive, and to have fun while achieving the grades you want.
Continue reading “Schedule to Succeed: Draft Your Weekly Schedule”The no-teacher-training-for-college-professors problem
College classrooms are supposed to be spaces where learning happens. However, far too often, neither college professors nor their students explore fundamental questions about the nature of teaching and learning in college, questions like:
- What is learning?
- How do people learn?
- What models for learning inform the design of my college classes?
- What types of instructional methods lead to significant learning experiences?
- How can teachers and students work together to create highly engaging learning environments?
That these questions frequently go unexamined in college courses relates to a series of problems within many U.S. higher education systems. In this post, we name and identify one such problem that results from the fact that most college professors have almost no training in the science of learning and have little experience with effective teaching practices.
Continue reading “The no-teacher-training-for-college-professors problem”To thrive in college, become a scapper
In many colleges in the United States, almost half of first-year college students do not make it to graduation. Stop and think about this for a minute. Our current US higher education system is designed in such a way that it kills the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of almost 50% of the students who enter through its gates. As you meditate on this reality, let’s run a related thought experiment. What would you say about an airline company that designs and flies planes that kill 50% of it’s passenger? Would you buy a ticket from that company? Would you support letting that company maintain the status quo?
To me, when I think about how our current policy choices fail to support so many students, I see a need for major reforms. I want to avoid blaming students and faculty for this failure. While I believe each of us has a moral responsibility to challenge current policies and advocate for reform, I also realize that no individual shoulders the entire weight of the injustices that are baked into our current system. Instead, I believe we should learn to focus our collective energies on policy changes to better support our local communities in creating significant learning experiences in college and beyond. Such policy changes will require decades (if not centuries) of sustain activism at the grass-roots level.
In the meantime, if you are part of the current generation of college students, our community here at The Learning Code wants to help you develop and refine system-navigation skills so that you can thrive in an environment that is designed to weed you out. As part of this effort, I want to help you develop a scrapper’s mindset, which is exactly what we explore in this post.
Continue reading “To thrive in college, become a scapper”Progress Through the Five Stages of Deep Learning
In this article, we expand our previous discussion of the five stages of deep learning. Specifically, we explore techniques you can use to accelerate your progress through each stage of your learning. Moving from stage 0 into stage 1 requires different type of practice routines than moving from stage 1 into stage 2, and so on. With each bit of progress, the learning skills you employ need to adapt to your growing level of expertise. Here, we explore what you can do to propel your transition from your current stage of learning into the next stages of your development.
Continue reading “Progress Through the Five Stages of Deep Learning”Where our Story Begins – Be a Good Ancestor
When we receive our education while engaging in deep learning, we are interrupting 400 years of inequality. We are interrupting lies that have been told about who we are as 1st generation, international, black indigenous students of color. We are interrupting lies that others have told themselves about who they are. We are interrupting what stands in the way of our collective humanity and achieving the ideals of democracy. To do so, we must see ourselves not as victims but victors because we have to face who we are, what our dreams are, and think about how we are raised. The Learning Code, and all student-centered educators, are trying to interrupt the 400 years lie about what underrepresented, marginalized members of society are capable of learning and achieving. This country has shady receipts of when our civilization goes beyond 400 years too. America is very young. The legacy that lives within us humans of color, has cultures that go back from hundreds and thousands of years. So when we were dropped in our first school, where they suppressed our authenticity and creativity, that’s not where our story begins.
One of the most cowardly things a person can do is awaken the love of a partner without the intention to ever love them back. That’s what schools have done. Schools that sold off the narrative that to be educated you gotta pursue these credentials, it’s a path towards possibility. It awakened the imagination of international, 1st generation immigrants, black indigenous students of color, that if we just pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, school is gonna lead us to the path to freedom, not just a W-2 paycheck. The system of school awakened our love, they sold us to the institution that never loved us back. As students we have to realize, when we enrolled in classes, we signed into this… now we are an appendage of the system. We can either follow it along or we can forge it to where it should go by focusing on our stages of deep learning. We have the responsibility to push the system we’re part of to fulfill the promise of love, liberty, equity, and justice for all.
Loving back our original dreams and aspirations brought us curiosity into the world. We gave our schools curiosity, what did they give us back memorization and a few citations?
What are we teaching for, replication or activation?
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Are we learning for admiration or inspiration? Are they teaching us for toxic competition or liberation? propagation or salvation? Taxation without representation is a real thing y’all.
We came in with so much energy and hope to pursue something bigger than us, and they told us to sit down and take a test. I came here to have my world opened up and you said, what’s the standard? I came with the question of what the world is about, you gave me a rubric. So I keep bringing to you something bigger than my universe, and you keep bringing me back something that cannot quench my thirst for knowledge. Standards are so basic, real dreamers don’t have standards, we have pursuits. There’s no ceiling for pursuits. We came in with our shoulders back, and reached out for something bigger than the world, and you’re forcing us to bend over and take notes… all while not telling us how you truly learned these subjects. The only way to surpass this reality is each one of us has the responsibility to reveal that the bamboo ceiling is paper.
There is ‘nothing’ an initiative, a foundation, or a school is creating, that’s gonna save international, 1st gen, black, indigenous, students of color, that does not exist in the imaginations of the hearts and souls of those populations already. My work like brother Jeff and Steve’s, along with sister Katherines, and the respective villages that have empowered us to find our voice and engage in deep learning, is to uncover the structures of traditional schooling that have made it so that deep learning could not occur. More often than not institutions have created the normalizing of oppressive practices, such as the myth of meritocracy, grades, technical/theoretical/abstract lectures without any guidance on previewing or understanding such events, and standardized testing, through our institutions that are supposed to be the salvation. This salvation was marketed to us as “the American dream”. We want to highlight the hypocrisy of institution-centered curriculum, and the notion that education is a path towards emancipation, in a system that was founded on ensuring certain members of our population will never be fully actualized. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, come sit into my computer science courses.
We want to give truth with our words and voice to the gaslighting, that is part and parcel of the system in education. We want to do all this by helping you create deep learning experiences within your academic pursuits. When we have pursuits, we have no limits, whereby the definition of standards there are limits. I want us as a collective community to realize we can have a focus on academic rigor concurrently with a focus on humanity. I want to help each other operate with the paradigm, to where we see students as scientists and mathematicians undiscovered. Our job is not to force them to learn the material in a one dimensional way from us, but to help us collectively ignite the fire that exists within us so they can learn deeply. My work is an extension of TLC when we speak to the mission of helping you all learn anything you want to learn to achieve your dreams, in the underbelly of the powers that be.
I am a reflection of all of your stories, rhetoric, and narratives. I do so through computer science, in humanities, through service and culture, through truth telling, but at the anchor of it all, I’m a peer educator, because you, are my peer connections.
How do we get folks to get their hearts right? How do we get people to stop enacting violence on us through curriculum or standards driven by the unconscious biases and flawed assumptions they hold about us. Be a good ancestor – find out your origin story.
Below are questions from the Common Application that I encourage all of us to reflect on.
- Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
- Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
- Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
- Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
- Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
- Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
Woke References:
Conversations and mentorship from Katherine Lee, Steve Silva, Jeff Anderson, Scott Lankford, Cynthia Rostankowski, Valerie Fong, Brian Cheung Dooley, Ellen Middaugh, Mark Felton, Sonya Bennett-Brandt, EOPS, MESA, College of Ed., OpenStax, Foothill, SJSU and many others…
Podcasts and other media by: Chris Emdin, Kimberly Crenshaw, Zaretta Hammond, Jennifer Gonzalez, Tara Yosso, and also many others…
To understand two key ideas I was building off of in this post here they are:
The five stages of deep learning
In this post, we develop a model for five stages of deep learning. Remember that we defined learning as a process that leads to change. The 5-phase model we explore in this article helps identify distinct stages in this process of deep learning. This model will help you figure out how to push your learning deeper and develop your expertise in any skill or knowledge that you want to master.
Continue reading “The five stages of deep learning”Why is deep learning so hard?
It is not easy to figure out how to learn deeply. In the early stages of developing your identity as a deep learner, one of the smoothest ways to engage in deep learning is to seek out skilled coaches who understand the principles behind deep learning. If the mentors you find are good coaches and have many years of practice in the art of teaching, they will likely have collected effective techniques to guide you in deep learning and effective repetition. Assuming these teachers are willing and able to act as your mentor, you can leverage their guidance simply by following their directions. In this scenario, all you have to do is give your best effort on pre-designed activities that specifically engage you in deep learning. Sadly, this “simple” solution of finding master coaches who are also content experts is out of reach for most novice learners. This is especially true in the context of the US higher education system. In this post, we explore some substantial barriers to seeking out expert coaching while earning your college degree.
Continue reading “Why is deep learning so hard?”What is deep learning?
Our mission at The Learning Code is to help you make your learning meaningful, achievable, and purposeful. We focus our energy on supporting students who want to earn a college degree in the United States. We do so by using three powerful tactics. First, we share with you research-based principles of learning. These principles are founded on cutting-edge cognitive science results to explain how learning works. Second, we feature student stories and battle-tested learning practices that show how to implement these learning principles in your college classes. The learning practices we share with you are designed to inspire you engage in deep learning and also to help you strategically navigate a college education system that is severely flawed. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we work to support you in developing effective help-seeking behaviors so that you can create your own learning teams to facilitate your success in each of your college classes. In this post, we define what it means to engage in deep learning. This post sets a foundation for a later work we will do to explore barriers to deep learning in the US higher education system. All of this will help us develop targeted strategies that you can use to thrive in your college classes. In other words, we are focused on empowering you to become a strategic deep learner and to successfully complete your college degree in spite of institutional barriers that get in the way of your learning.
Continue reading “What is deep learning?”
The Learning Code 