Monthly Archives

May 2019

The Rewards of Curiosity

by Terry Burton May 20, 2019

Let’s embark on a reward-seeking journey.

What do lifelong learners and the dedicatedly curious know? They know that learning feels good. If you can remember an “aha!” moment that you’ve had, didn’t it literally feel good? A flash of pleasure. “The pleasure of finding things out,” a la Richard Feynman. If you can’t remember a sweet “aha!” moment, we really need to work on that. Seriously. It’s too good to miss out on.

Neuroscience has a lot to say about the role of dopamine in both learning and motivation. An essential neurotransmitter, dopamine gives our nervous system a running account of how likely it is that a given situation will be rewarding. Research also points to dopamine’s role in whether or not we retain information that we’ve learned.

Here’s my question: What actually happens? We say that “learning feels good,” but why? What is it about that moment, “aha!” or otherwise, that gives us that feeling?

In his interesting book “Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It,” author Ian Leslie explores the mechanism of human curiosity. Why are we curious? What drives us to find things out?

According to Leslie, the work of psychologist George Lowenstein points to the answer: our curiosity is activated when we perceive a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”:

It’s not only the incongruity that evokes our desire to know; it’s the absence of information. Information gaps often come in the form of questions: What’s in the box? Why is that man crying? What’s a four-letter word meaning “suffering”? You have some incomplete information — there is a box, there is a man crying, there is a crossword puzzle clue — and you want to find the missing part.
Leslie, p. 34

When we notice this gap, it’s not because we don’t know anything about the subject, though. Lowenstein’s information-gap theory proposes that information “fuels curiosity by creating awareness of ignorance, which gives rise to a desire to know more.” To feel curiosity requires that we know enough to know that we don’t know. We tend not to be curious about things we know absolutely nothing about.

So, we’ve noticed a gap; and here’s where the dopamine reward system comes in. Remember that dopamine tells us how likely a given situation is to be rewarding? When we perceive that information gap, dopamine signals us that a good feeling could be right around the corner. “An information gap isn’t simply recognized rationally; its onset is like an itch that we have to scratch … The emotional force of curiosity is what impels us forward on our intellectual explorations even when there’s no pressing need to do so and keeps us inquiring even when we’re weary or confused. A curious person knows that she won’t feel emotionally fulfilled until she finds the information or the understanding she seeks. So she keeps reading or questioning until the gap is closed (Leslie, p. 41).”

Go deep into human evolution and this makes sense. We’ve been wired for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years to pay attention to puzzles and mysteries. Our minds are formidable pattern-recognition instruments, taking in observations and inputs and looking for the connections that will help us make sense of the world. This is a constant mental process that’s always running, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. We simply have to figure things out. It’s one of the hallmarks of our species.

And when we figure something out — when we make a connection, when we fill a gap — it feels good.

Brene Brown makes the same point in her book “Dare to Lead.” She writes about the dopamine reward system in a different context, but the basic mechanism is the same: “In the absence of data, we will always make up stories,” she writes (Brown, p. 258).

It’s how we’re wired. Meaning making is in our biology, and when we’re in struggle, our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense of what’s happening … our brains reward us with dopamine (that “aha!” moment) when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories are patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity.
Brown, p. 258

It’s all learning, though, isn’t it? Our finely-tuned social-emotional apparatus is learning every time we engage with other people. We are hyper-conscious of gaps because social functioning is so very critical to us humans.

Be curious about your curiosity. The learning and dopamine system operates subconsciously (I mean, who has time to consciously pay attention to all that?), but step into your curiosity every once in awhile and watch as you scratch that knowledge-gap itch. Didn’t that feel good?

Stay curious, my friends.

May 20, 2019 0 comment

learning

Why Do I Have to Learn This?

by Terry Burton May 13, 2019

written by Terry Burton

I so feel for school teachers when they get this question. And it seems to me that the question isn’t even so much why do I have to learn this? as “why should I put effort into this unknown thing that, on its surface, doesn’t feel interesting or relevant to me? Why should I work at cracking this nut? What’s in it for me?”

At least they’re asking why 🙂

Whether we teach in an informal education space or in a professional setting, whether we’re a trainer, consultant, facilitator, instructor, leader, manager, mentor — whatever your role, we should all consider the question “why do I have to learn this?” Adults may be less likely to raise their hands and actually ask that question, but you can be sure that they’re still thinking it.

Would you be ready for this question, just in case someone did raise their hand? Could you make a case for relevance and connect the material to the learner’s needs, in a way that satisfies the learner (and not just the curriculum)? What makes it worth learning?

Lory Hough, in her Harvard Graduate School of Education article “What’s Worth Learning in School?” explores the central ideas in David Perkins’ book Future Wise, which in turn examines the question of what he calls the lifeworthiness of what we learn.

“Knowledge is for going somewhere,” according to Perkins. There are short-term, local destinations for some learning, and because these are easier to identify it’s tempting to think, This is worth learning because completion of this module is required in quarter three. But this approach threatens to result in a teeth-grinding slog through information that will be forgotten as soon as the box is checked.

“What’s worth learning?” is such an interesting question, because obviously there’s no fixed, definitive answer. Which makes it all the more important to ask. Take the time to ask yourself the question every time you get ready to teach someone something (including yourself).

Begin your learning experience design with the end in mind, the goal, the purpose, the why, the lifeworthiness — not the content.

We obviously can’t always know what’s important to learn today to equip ourselves to handle an unknown tomorrow. We still have to make best guesses about what learning is lifeworthy. Perkins points out that traditional formal education is grounded in a perspective that no longer holds: that young peoples’ lives will be much the same as their parents’. “Wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today,” he writes. “Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known.”

It’s not just kids. Depending on how long you’ve been in the professional world, you can see what I mean — the world is changing so rapidly, for all of us, kids and adults alike. This isn’t the professional life I would have imagined for myself ten years ago, for instance, much less thirty years ago when I took on my first professional position. Maybe more to the point, is this world what you imagined when you were in your early twenties?

It’s interesting to see that when we think about the kinds of learning that still have currency and a long shelf life, what we run into are skills, rather than content knowledge. Some examples of lifeworthy learning could include:

Reading
Writing
Verbal communication
21st century skills (including creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking)
Social-emotional skills and emotional intelligence

These are all skills, not specific bits of information, not content. They’re the skills we need to grapple with unfamiliar content, new ideas, and unknown and unguessed-at problems. As experts, we have an understandable blind spot when it comes to what we teach because the content, the “what,” is so ingrained in us that it’s easy to forget the nuances and grounding that helps make that content relevant — the why and the how.

That’s just one of the many reasons that a successful learning experience starts with the end in mind. Goal orientation is a must. How can we teach more “lifeworthy” material?

May 13, 2019 0 comment

learning

Is Knowledge Power?

by Terry Burton May 7, 2019

written by Terry Burton

Words matter; and because words matter, so do definitions. It’s useful to unpack meanings, especially when we’re learning. So let’s talk about what we mean by learning.

Right off the bat, I want to say that learning does not equal school. We learn everywhere, all the time. Good, that’s out of the way.

Second, think of learning not as a point in time (a fact memorized, for instance), but an experience. Learning is a journey, with a starting point and a path; perhaps headed for a fixed destination, but more often encountering a series of signposts that lead us farther along. For something simple — something you can Google — the journey can be a pretty straight line. But for really deep, delicious learning, we loop and circle, branch and diverge, sketching out a beautiful recursive spiral that can continue all our lives.

Okay, but how do we define learning?

Definitions abound. Many focus on acquisition — gathering facts or information, developing and improving skills. Some speak of process, which is cool, because it reinforces the idea that learning isn’t just a moment. The idea that I like best about learning, though, is that it’s a change in state. I like it because it encompasses a diverse range of experiences. It can mean that we’ve

Acquired new knowledge (facts, discrete bits of information)
Gained a new perspective (it’s changed the way we see or think about something)
Felt an emotion (this runs the gamut from awe to outright fury)
Made a connection (that beautiful “a-ha!” moment)
Felt empathy (feeling with, rather than feeling for)
Acquired or improved a particular skill

Not a complete list, by any means. Learning can also inspire us to change our behavior, or abandon an attitude; the point is, that when we think of learning as a change in state, we can see that what we’ve experienced has made us a different person.

Now for the unpacking. Learning, knowing, understanding — are they interchangeable?

Is knowledge power?

I want to make the case that when we’re talking about learning, understanding is the mountaintop. The sine non qua. The Colosseum, the Louvre Museum, the smile on the Mona Lisa. It’s all that.

I was very fortunate in my own learning journey to come across Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s work around understanding. It was a game-changer. Among other things, it made me realize that unpacking the differences between knowing and understanding is essential when we’re designing learning experiences.

Simply put, knowledge consists of factual information. I know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Understanding happens when we make personal meaning from knowledge. I understand that the Battle of Hastings led to momentous shifts in English society, disrupting the balance of power, bringing changes to language, culture, land ownership, etc. which still resonate over 950 years later.

Understanding is fundamentally different than knowing. We are overwhelmed like never before by the sheer volume of facts and information out there, and the amount just keeps getting more mind-boggling enormous every second. It’s bonkers, but I can take a five minute break from writing this and go pick up some knowledge about quantum computing, beer making, and the natural history of lemurs without leaving my computer. I can get an answer to practically any straightforward question by asking Google. But I have to make an effort to understand. It has to mean something to me personally (i.e. be relevant) so that I’m inspired and engaged enough to do the work. Understanding is different than knowing because:

To understand something, we have to ask questions. We ask, Why is this important? How does this connect to other ideas? What does this mean?

Knowing is about the “right” answer; understanding is being able to explain the answer.

Understanding gives us the ability to transfer what we’ve learned to a new situation. I was never able to transfer my knowledge about algebra to a different context because I just didn’t understand it. In their 2005 book Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe write “Transfer must be the aim of all teaching … because when we teach, we can address only a relatively small sample of the entire subject matter. Transfer is our great and difficult mission because we need to put students in a position to learn far more, on their own*, than they can ever learn from us (p. 44).”

Collecting facts and information won’t help us deal with this rapidly-changing world, but understanding will. When we understand something, we’re much better able to handle the ambiguous challenges that the real world throws at us — challenges that require so much more than a single response.

Striving for understanding is also a great cognitive workout because it requires us to exercise habits of mind such as critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity, as well as calling us to come at our learning with a growth mindset.

For learning that truly makes a difference, to ourselves and the world, understanding is the goal. When we understand, learning sticks. When we understand, we can transfer what we’ve learned to new situations — and isn’t that the magic of learning?

Understanding is power.

(If you’d like to learn more about understanding (!), Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design framework is an excellent resource. It’s a learning geek’s paradise.)

(*lifelong learning! My emphasis.)

May 7, 2019 0 comment

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