Learning to Begin: Part 2

When I came back to school to study learning, I made a commitment to learning a new thing every semester. I’ve taken cooking classes, gotten scuba certified, completed hundreds of consecutive days of Spanish on Duolingo, learned to snow ski, (re)learned to roller skate, and learned how to play the flute, the clarinet, the saxophone, and the french horn, and dabbled in the bassoon. Obviously, these are not all things I do every day or even every week; they aren’t all hobbies. But with varying amounts of help from knowledgeable others, I’ve navigated the murky waters of beginerhood into the light of competency for each of these skills.

Experienced teachers know what beginning looks and feels like. For many, this understanding is built over years of working with beginners. Through trials, error, and feedback, the best teachers of beginners continually refine and update what they do with each new beginner they teach based on the successes and failures of past beginners. This is a tried and true method. For those aspiring to be excellent teachers of beginners, I suggest a complementary path: begin things often.

Beginning is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned and practiced over trials. Take up new skills that you have no experience with. The benefits are force multipliers for your teaching ability.

First, you will collect a battery of experiences as a beginner. The more time you spend as a beginner, the more opportunities you’ll have to explore beginnerhood from within. The process of beginning is characterized by inconsistency, but with experience, you’ll come to recognize what it’s like to see goals, fears, strategies, play, failure, feedback, and progress from the perspective of a learner. As an adult, you will never again know with perfect emic clarity what it is like to be 11-years-old. But you can begin things to better empathize with what beginners actually experience, not just how beginning looks from the outside.

Learning skills in various settings with different scaffolding available can also help you better situate the role of good instruction within learning. Aspiring teachers don’t always have a good idea of when to let students explore, when to give them directives/feedback, and when to design experiences that afford accountability. Beginning new skills helps you learn how various experiences effect change in your behavior as a learner.

To this end, I suggest aspiring teachers learn four new skills:

·       one that is self-taught

·       one with private instruction

·       one in a live class or group setting

·       and one in an online class

Self-taught

Obviously, self-teaching comes with a minimum of input from other humans during the performance of a task. Gathering information about a task is usually a starting place for someone hoping to teach themselves, but self-learning is characterized by exploration. Without having a knowledgeable other setting proximal goals, the landscape is wide for explorative play.

Through explorative play, self-taught individuals seek evidence of success or failure. They search for something to see, hear, or feel that informs them about failures. Importantly, they learn to associate and attribute errors to actions or thoughts. The perceived errors cue adaptations in behavior. This self-organization process likely encourages implicit learning, which is more impervious to stressors than an explanation by a knowledgeable other. When the going gets tough, implicitly learned behaviors get going.

This is not usually thought of as being an efficient path to expertise (Emile may have disagreed), but it encourages the learner to try new things and catalog data about certain behaviors with curiosity. Without someone telling you that each thing you do is a success or a failure, you are left to connect action with outcome. These learned connections are foundational in developing expertise.

Going through this process can give new teachers a better understanding of the value of letting students explore. Great learning habits are characterized by the curiosity and self-organization that can be cultivated through unassisted learning.

Private Instruction

Taking individual lessons in a new skill will give you a close-up view of the way learning works in highly curated settings. As the lone student, you get all the teacher’s attention and care. You will learn how it feels to have new goals crafted for each week of your learning. Over time, you can begin to appreciate the nuances of feedback from the teacher. You may find yourself desiring praise after particular activities and expecting negative feedback after others. You may also notice the value of individual unguided practice between lessons.

Skill development is not a straight line connecting beginnerhood and expertise. More accurately, it is fractal and trends toward expertise over years, sometimes many. What may appear like linear progress in a year changes with a higher resolution. A different lens focused more closely reveals chaotic angles, shards, turns, loops, towards and away from expertise: good days and bad days…good minutes and bad minutes.

The occasional angular nature of the path towards expertise can be hard for learners to navigate. Through carefully created goals, thoughtful feedback, well-sequenced activities, and human connection, a private teacher can help to smooth out the edges of that angularity, making learning more rewarding, more efficient, and more socially affirming than a self-taught process may afford.

Group Instruction

Taking group classes offers different challenges and surprises. You begin to notice the times that you’re not entirely sure what’s going on, but you look to your classmates for modeling or feedback. How long does it take you to figure out which classmates are having success? Once you recognize that a fellow student is better than you, how often do you watch or listen to them during classes? How helpful is it to have a peer that’s just a little better than you? Do you notice feelings of comparison between students or competition? This setting can give insight into some of the valuable social processes underpinning group learning.

Online Learning

Learning something online can show the important difference between delivering information and designing learning experiences. Massive open online courses (MOOC’s) have admirably democratized online information delivery. Entire subjects that once were relegated to the halls of academia are available to anyone with an internet connection. This is an undeniable advance in access to knowledge. But effective teaching is characterized by the design of experiences that lead the learner to do and think things differently.

Generative learning transcends the value of content alone. Learning successfully from an online course can give you a better sense of why applying the information that’s delivered involves more than simply watching, listening, and reading. Effective learning is optimally effortful and characterized by generative work. Taking information from an online source and generating something with that information is key to maximizing learning online.

An ancillary benefit of novice experience is that it can alleviate some of the fear that comes with beginning a teaching position. No one expects a new teacher to have the expertise of someone who has refined skills over years. But new teachers often expect greatness from their first outings. Relax, and begin. Play, fail, notice things, and learn. Being a beginner doesn’t have to be a source of shame. It can be a thrilling landscape to practice fearlessness, tenacity, and curiosity.