Teaching and Learning

I was recently at a retreat with a bunch of community college faculty from around the state of Washington. I find these sorts of meetings both exhilarating and exhausting. We stay up too late but have conversations about what learning might involve. As I listened to others, spoke my own mind, made a presentation, I saw something about learning that I don’t attend to often enough. Tom Drummond over at North Seattle Community College has been riffing on this theme for a while (maybe 20 years); I’ve been scribbling it in the margins of student papers for at least 10 years: SLOW DOWN!

I think that we all hope that teachers will come up with some magic strategy that makes learners see what they will need to know and do and how to comprehend and act. Anyone who has taught a while knows that the magic happens from time to time but rarely because a teacher “knows,” at least consciously. It happens because the teacher has slowed down a setting at a moment when a learner is ready to look again at what she or he is up to and to say, “Oh!” The knowledge is always already out there (the teacher learned it somewhere, and the Net makes what the teacher knows as close as a Tully’s). The skills are a matter of practicing substeps even if they are boring and hard. What is magic is the opportunity to look at what’s been said or tried and to own that look. Such an act requires the normal time-space flow to SLOW DOWN so that a learner can still see what’s happening but doesn’t have to do or learn the next thing just yet.

Why is such an act so rare, I wonder? As a writer, I can dig a poem out of my journal almost every time if I take time. Why don’t I do this very often? Other things to do? Not sure that this sort of reflection earns me much money (indeed, it may be costly)? Lack of confidence? Perhaps if we stop and look at what we have done in an effort to understand and complete that action or thought, we will discover that more effort is needed, that we will have to stop watching TV if we hope to achieve what we value. Were we to slow down, we might wonder whether we need an iPod or a mobile phone or whether we can really afford them.

Seem to be sounding a bit Wendell Berryish here. Not sure that’s a bad thing.