“When was the last time you learned something completely new?”
That’s how a reading specialist I spoke with recently begins training new reading tutors: by asking them to go back in time and think about what it felt like not to know how to do things that feel automatic, like drive a car, cook dinner—or read. Understanding what it feels like to be an absolute beginner, she said, is important to keep in mind when teaching new readers. It helps tutors remember how basic the building blocks of reading sometimes need to be in order for students to build a solid foundation.
It’s an important but often overlooked point: most students don’t come to school already possessing a lot of academic knowledge—how to divide fractions, the battles of the War of 1812 or the foundations of chemistry. They are beginning learners, novices. Research has shown that novices not only know less and take longer to solve problems than experts; they approach material differently. “Our prior knowledge determines the quality of our problem solving,” write researchers Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick in How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. “What you know determines what you see.”
I’ve been thinking about the novice concept since my youngest was in the fourth grade a few years ago, and I watched him struggle to write a three-paragraph opinion essay on “Manifest Destiny.” Not only did he not fully grasp the abstract political idea (much less have an opinion on it), he had never been shown exactly how to construct sentences and paragraphs. A well-intentioned curriculum and teacher had given him a task that was too big, and he didn’t possess the knowledge or the skill to complete it successfully at home on his own, leaving him lost and feeling like a failure. It was an a-ha moment for me, and got me thinking about how often parents, teachers and schools think romantically of students as mini-experts on the verge of a big discovery. Maybe you’ve heard this idea before, maybe your student has been asked to think like a historian or think like a mathematician. Or maybe they’ve been asked to “put on their critical thinking hats” to solve a knotty problem, as evidence that their education is rigorous, that they are doing deep thinking.
But the reality is historians and mathematicians once started at the very beginning, as novices who didn’t know much. Why don’t we start students off in the same way?
For the first Bell Ringer monthly issue, coming in April, I’m going to explore the idea of the novice learner—what research says, interviews with experts and teachers, and how a misunderstanding of how beginners learn can stop academic progress in its tracks.
I hope you’ll consider becoming a paying subscriber to get access to The Novice Issue, and the monthly issues after that. Monthly issues will take some of the biggest ideas in the science of learning and produce three or four stories bundled together around a theme—something that, for a variety of good reasons, I’m unable to do in traditional news publications. But here at The Bell Ringer, I can let it rip.
Access to the monthly issues will be available for $6 a month, or at a discount if you subscribe for the entire year at once—$66 for the year. I’d love for you to join me for the special issues and the discussions that follow—I’m hoping they will be helpful and informative.
Here’s a taste of the first issue arriving next month, and what readers will get behind the paywall:
The Novice Issue: Nurturing beginners
The Novice Issue explores the ways beginners learn, investigating how learning might look different and perhaps be more successful if schools paid more attention to this key stage of development.
* Embracing the Rookie
In sports and music, there are clear designations for those who are brand-new to the discipline, and dedicated time to develop as beginners. But academic learning often takes a different approach—schools want to skip students’ metaphorical “rookie year” and rush them to expert status. This introductory story asks why beginning learners need to learn in a different way from experts, taking a look at the research on what it means to be a beginner, how teaching and learning look different for novices, and how schools often undermine beginner status and a strong foundation.
* Civics for Beginners
In reading and math, history and science, an idea has taken hold in schools that classrooms are less for imparting information and knowledge, and more like laboratories for students to think deeply and solve critical issues like climate change. No subject has suffered more from this idea than civics—and a recent civics revival in many ways has assumed students’ expertise in government and community, focusing a lot of its energy on encouraging students to take action and get involved in the democratic process without first understanding it.
This story argues that employing the principles of cognitive science might make civics education more useful and more effective, by focusing first on background knowledge and the basics of citizenship before attempting to solve the world’s knottiest problems. Through exploring research and talking with teachers, this story asks, how would civics look different if we treated students as citizens-in-training instead of community experts? And how might the change make a stronger democracy?
* How to get to Carnegie Hall
From writing essays to dividing fractions, getting good at school’s foundational skills often comes down to lots of practice. But as some of my recent reporting suggests, for a variety of reasons kids often don’t get enough at school. Why? Practice gets praised when learning to play football or the cello, but is often either demonized in schools as “rote” learning or “drill and kill,” or simply not made a priority built into classroom time. This story explains the reasons practice time doesn’t get enough respect, and talks with teachers and experts on how to successfully build it back into the school day, and why it matters.