Questions Facilitate Learning

Exemplary learning tasks engage
curiosities and foster growth.

Learning tasks guided by open questions posed after extensive resource building do not have singular answers. Engaged learners are expected to reflect on the question and bring to bear a combination of their experiences, problem-solving and reasoning skills, and specific content knowledge, strategies, and tools. These learners must sort through the language of the open question to find the essence of the question from which to explore their available resources and build their responses.

Exemplary learning tasks or open questions do just that - allow learners to explore, experiment, and explain their decisions based on their newly acquired as well as long-term knowledge, skills, and abilities.

What learning tasks stimulated and nurtured

 your knowledge, skills, and abilities? 

Consumption is not enough

"You go outside without clothes, you get arrested," Karl stated emphatically. To clarify Karl's point, Jesse added, "Arrested for not following social norms."

These summary comments were delivered after a brief discussion about three key ideas posed in Douglas Rushkoff's book Present Shock (2013): restlessness with anything that isn't "right now," balancing between virtual and physical worlds simultaneously, and skimming surfaces to make inaccurate connections.

Our conversation continued with the idea that society has many expectations. Most recently, this expectation seems to include that all of us must be effective and efficient users of technology. 

The question: "Can you use a computer?" takes on a completely new meaning these days. Being a passive consumer, like checking email or reading online news, is no longer enough.

We are expected to be producers. On the one end, we must pull together other people's ideas and share it with our "social set." On the other end, we must actively seek out information, share it with others, and add new and original thought that, even if for only a moment, grabs and engages the attention of other people. 

What have you produced today that will engage my attention?

"Milkshake" Theory of Literacy

What role does adult literacy
education play in learners' lives?

Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus (2010) states that we shouldn't set up a media campaign to promote "milkshake" purchases by just focusing on the qualities of the milkshake - sweetness, coldness, etc. If we do, he says we will be misled.

Why? We'd be looking at the milkshake in isolation. Instead, we need to look at the bigger picture. What role does the milkshake fill for the people buying the milkshakes - alone at 8 AM, never consuming them in the store, or buying anything else.

Shirky suggests that these milkshakes are purchased as sources of sustenance and amusement for morning commutes. This insight produces an extremely different basis for any potential media campaign.

How does this idea of consumption of milkshakes play out in the delivery - or consumption - of adult literacy instruction? What role does literacy instruction play in our learners' lives? Is the role different depending on the time of day? What's the impact of the person's perceived support system (inside and outside of our center)?

What other questions should we be exploring to get a more complete picture?

What we do is what we learn?!?

If learners spend their time sounding out words, then learners learn how to sound out specific sets of words. If learners spend their time answering questions to specific stories, then learners learn the answers to the specific questions asked. But if learners spend their time learning a process for understanding text and then apply this process to examine other texts, learners gain a valuable skill for interpreting texts. This learning then sparks the beginning of developing a lifelong skill that can become a part of them and be used at any appropriate time.

This scenario strongly suggests that what learners do is what learners learn. Therefore, as teachers (and tutors), we are responsible for creating authentic communities in which learning is shared, supported, and cognitively challenged. In these communities, learners engage in activities that build knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Learners are invited to use creativity, analyses, syntheses, reflection, and argumentative discovery to construct meaning. Participation engrosses their cognitive, emotional, and physical beings. In other words, the learners are doing the "work" - the thinking, the talking, the manipulating of the ideas, both tangible and intangible.

In this learning environment, our role then is as guides. We watch, encourage, and sometimes prod as learners make inquiries. Learners explore, experiment, and even make mistakes. We help them sort out ways to learn from and re-direct their energies. And, we question and challenge learners' decisions and responses while seeking evidence of appropriate reasoning and conviction.

How do you weigh in on this view of learning?