How Models Can Guide Student Learning

Create First. Imitate to Refine Your Creation

This week I’m attending a weeklong workshop at the very innovative Nuvu studio. In the first day, when coaches (this is how they refer to teachers) were introducing us to their model of learning, they mentioned that if students were assigned a semester-long project of designing a house, they should design the house on the first day of school, even if students didn’t have the proper skill set.

Do what you have to do, even if you don’t know how. Sounds like bad advice, doesn’t it? The purpose is twofold. First, when students start the assignment and realize they need to learn something to complete a project, they immediately become more receptive to direct-instruction, thus rendering teaching and learning more effective. The second reason has to do with creative thinking and student’s personal interests. If you show models and give instruction before they have to work on the assignment, it’s likely that students will imitate models, or will start from the vantage point of the teacher rather than theirs. They’ll do something that is not interesting to them or even creative because they’ll be trying to please the instructor.

Models and examples should be used to refine student’s thinking, not initiate.

In The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum, John Dewey discusses how imitation hinders the development of the child.

As a general principle no activity should be originated by imitation. The start must come from the child; the model or copy may then be supplied in order to assist the child in imaging more definitely what it is that he really wants — in bringing him to consciousness. Its value is not as model to copy in action, but as guide to clearness and adequacy of conception. Unless the child can get away from it to his own imagery when it comes to execution, he is rendered servile and dependent, not developed. Imitation comes in to reinforce and help out, not to initiate.

The problem is not in providing models of good work for students to grow in understanding. The problem is to start from the models. Students should be allowed to creatively approach a problem or task, to express the direction he/she wants to take on a project. Only then, models should be provided to expand students original ideas.

We should also be careful not to interpret this as completely removing guidance from the learning process. Students need teachers to provide guidance and models where/when necessary. Dewey continues:

There is no ground for holding that the teacher should not suggest anything to the child until he has consciously expressed a want in that direction. A sympathetic teacher is quite likely to know more clearly than the child himself what his own instincts are and mean. But the suggestion must fit in with the dominant mode of growth in the child; it must serve simply as stimulus to bring forth more adequately what the child is already blindly striving to do. Only by watching the child and seeing the attitude that he assumes toward suggestions can we tell whether they are operating as factors in furthering the child’s growth, or whether they are external, arbitrary impositions interfering with normal growth.

As I reflect on both of these passages, I think about what it all means in the context of my classroom and my school. Am I comfortable with students running into learning dead ends while pursuing their interests or ideas? Am I providing enough space for students to experiment with learning? Do I value the creative growth of my students?

Learning in focus — I should provide models and guidance after students have expressed the direction they want to take with their projects. Start with their interests.