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?
