Throughout history schools have been the place to go to if you wanted access to information and learn from experts. Whether imparted by a teacher or assigned readings from classroom textbooks, schools have historically been the place to get access to information and to learn the “right” answer. Teachers and students have traditionally lived in a true-or-false, multiple-choice world where only one answer was the correct answer and where learning was assessed by the number of correct answers.
As Diana Laufenberg states in her TED.com video entitled “Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes,” educators have traditionally taught students that there is a right answer to every question.1 She argues that the focus on imparting information and requiring the “right-answers” is out-of-date and based on life models that our grandparents experienced – not the life models our children experience today. Laufenberg argues that the role of schools needs to move from providing expert knowledge to students to teaching students how to research, analyze, synthesize and process information that they actively gather from the vast resources available over the Internet. She believes that guided Experiential Learning, complete with its successes and failures, is the way to help students learn in today’s world.
How Students Gain Access To and Work with Information Today
In Laufenberg presentation she explains, through imagery and words, how access to information and the need to memorize and retain information has evolved over the years. She describes how her grandparents went to school to learn information from a school teacher because that was the primary way information was available to them. As Laufenberg was growing up, access to information started to expand beyond the classroom, in the form of a set of encyclopedias purchased by her parents for her home. Laufenberg, goes on to describe how students today access information through the Internet, developing less of a need to memorize and retain information because students can retrieve knowledge from the Internet at any time.
Guiding Students Experiential Learning and Reflection
So, she asks: Why come to school if students have access to information anywhere and anytime? Laufenberg believes that today, schools and classrooms need to help students figure out how to evaluate and determine what to do with the information they find. Students need to move beyond memorizing the facts; instead they need to learn how to research information, think critically, analyze, synthesize and evaluate the abundance of information they find.
Laufenberg identifies Experiential Learning as a method to teach students these skills and she identifies visual and auditory communication skills as a way to express what they think and what they have learned. Experiential Learning creates meaning through direct experience. Laufenberg believes that by guiding students to work through an idea or explore a problem, students may not always develop the right answers, but they will learn from the process in ways that are meaningful for today and tomorrow. It is important to emphasize the process, not the “correct answers.” She believes that the role of the teacher today is to empower students’ voices, exploration, visual expression and reflection. By doing this students will engage and learn. Through Experiential Learning students continue to learn as they present, review and evaluate their work and the work of their peers.
Learning to Use and Evaluate Visual Communication Forms
Being a strong believer myself in Experiential Learning and visual learning, I find Laufenberg’s use of an infographic as the deliverable for her students’ project an interesting choice. It provided a powerful tool to express their analysis and knowledge of the problem, and it also helped the students learn a valuable lesson about infographics and how to evaluate information in today’s world. Infographics and other visual forms of communication are only as good as the thinking, information and analysis that goes into creating them. Through Laufenberg’s project her students learned that they need to read, examine and evaluate visual materials for its content and not assume that because the material looks good that it is accurate or contains valuable information. They also learned that visual expression can be a powerful way to present information and sway opinion.
As teachers we tend to want to tell kids and students the information they need to know, but through personal experience and reflection students learn and internalize information in ways our words will never accomplish. So take a chance, as Laufenberg suggests and try Experiential Learning in your classroom if you haven’t already. You never know what learning will come out of it.
Thanks for stopping by! See you next week!
Mona Westhaver
President and Co-founder, Inspiration Software, Inc.
- “Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes | Video on TED.com.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. Web. 04 May 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html>. [↩]
