The lifeguard at the pool where I swim likes to write inspirational slogans on the whiteboard near the door. When I walked by the board last Friday, it offered these words of wisdom: “Whatever you practice, you are getting very good at!” It took all of my will power to refrain from picking up a red marker from the tray and adding: “Well, that depends on how you practice.”
That lifeguard was of course intending to inspire swimmers with the practice-makes-perfect axiom. We hear that phrase repeated endlessly in sports, music, and other contexts. In education, we see it in action when a faculty member assigns endless problem sets or exercises and expects students to master an intellectual skill through sheer repetition.
The limitations of this approach are a major target of the psychologist Ellen J. Langer’s book, The Power of Mindful Learning, one of those educational classics that finally floated up to the top of my reading stack last month. “One of the most cherished myths in education or training of any kind,” Langer writes, taking aim at the educational version of my lifeguard’s slogan, “is that in order to learn a skill one must practice it to the point of doing it without thinking.”
Like most myths, this one does contain a grain of truth. Our capacity for thinking is limited by the available room in our working memories. So if we are solving math problems, and we have to pause constantly to think about the times tables, we are using up cognitive space that could be devoted to higher-order intellectual tasks.
But Langer’s book, originally published in 1997, offers an important rebuttal to this myth: Practicing complex skills without reflection does not make perfection; it makes for rote exercises that can create bad habits and prevent learners from seeing how to apply their skills in multiple contexts. True learning, she argues, recognizes the importance of context and the value of uncertainty. Students who have frequent opportunities to pause and reflect on what they’re practicing will develop deeper understanding and more transferable skills. To that end, her book outlines a strategy she calls “mindful learning.” It has three characteristics: “the continuous creation of new categories; an openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.”
To illustrate how we might foster these qualities in students, Langer describes a fascinating experiment in which beginning piano students were taught basic scale exercises either through traditional repetition or through mindful-learning strategies. The mindful group was given these instructions: “We would like you to try to learn these fingering exercises without relying on rote memorization. Try to keep learning new things about your piano playing. Try to change your style every few minutes, and not lock into one particular pattern. While you practice, attend to the context, which may include subtle variations or any feelings, sensations, or thoughts you were having.”
The students heard those instructions twice, once before they began and again halfway through their practice time. A pair of experts then evaluated the playing skills of the two groups. The students who had been encouraged to keep changing their playing style were “rated as more competent and more creative and also expressed more enjoyment of the activity.” Note how simple the researchers’ strategy was: They spoke to the students about the nature of practice and learning, and gave them just a little bit of verbal guidance. That was all it took to make a difference.
Plenty of research in learning theory, including some featured most recently in Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, has demonstrated that we all fall easy prey to what are called “illusions of fluency,” or mistaken impressions of how much we know. Those false impressions are fueled by study strategies like rereading texts or notes again and again, which produces excellent short-term learning but terrible long-term retention.
Students come to college with those poor study strategies, and somehow we expect them magically to develop the skills they will need to succeed in a much more challenging environment.
Or, equally problematic, we professors shunt students off to some course or campus office devoted to teaching study skills, and expect others to do the work for us. But helping students develop better learning and study strategies doesn’t require an excessive amount of time and energy, as Langer’s piano experiment and other research like it demonstrate. Small nudges in the right direction can have a powerful impact.
At Northeastern University, an effort based, in part, on Langer’s ideas is under way to help students become more aware of their learning and study habits. Leading that effort is Susan Ambrose, senior vice provost of undergraduate education and experiential learning at the university, and one of the co-authors of How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Effective Teaching.
“I don’t believe in courses on learning how to learn,” she said in an interview about the effort. “I think reflections on learning need to be embedded in the disciplines—in [traditional] courses.” She added: “We should be continually asking students to reflect on what they already know, where they are having difficulties, potentially why, how they might address those learning difficulties, how they’ve done it in the past when they have faced a brick wall, etc. We are trying to develop a habit of the mind—to be cognizant of how you learn, to continually monitor, to adapt when necessary.”
The university’s well-established co-op program is the specific area Ambrose has targeted. For more than 100 years now, Northeastern students have been incorporating two or three semesters of full-time work into their traditional academic curricula, beginning in their sophomore year and continuing into their fourth or fifth years (depending upon how many co-ops they choose to complete). The university helps them locate co-op opportunities appropriate to their majors, assigns them co-op coordinators to guide them through their experiences, and prepares them for their work experiences with a one-credit preparatory course.
“When I came to Northeastern in 2012,” Ambrose explained to me, “I heard from everyone—students, faculty, alumni, employers—how much deeper students’ learning was as a result of co-op. I was inundated with anecdotes from everyone but didn’t see any real hard data. And when I explored the research on co-op, there is lots of great stuff on the development of professional skills, self-efficacy, increased confidence, etc., but much less on the intellectual development of students. So I wanted to know, specifically, how co-op deepened and broadened students’ knowledge.”
She commissioned a qualitative study in January 2013 that would interview seniors, with questions about the relationship between their classroom work and their experiential learning. An initial analysis of the results brought good news: Students expressed overwhelmingly positive views of the co-op experience and its ability to support and enhance their classroom learning.
But she saw room for improvement. Students felt positive about their co-op assignments but weren’t always aware of how the experience was helping them, or how they could connect their outside work to their courses. As a result, she has worked with her colleagues to create an enhanced curriculum. Students will be required to read selected chapters on effective learning strategies from the works of researchers like Langer, and then participate in a series of written assignments and discussions, guided by faculty members. The goal, she said, is to create more “self-directed learners” who can transfer and reinforce what they’ve learned from their classes to their co-op experiences, and back again.
I can’t imagine any faculty member not wanting to create self-directed learners in their courses. As we all know, when students are truly engaged in a discipline they set off on their own explorations of the material and leave us happily behind. But self-directed learning in advanced academic subjects does not come easily to many students, however much it feels like second-nature to those of us who have pursued advanced degrees.
I know a few excellent students who want me to step aside and let them blaze their own trails. I know many more who want me to guide them through the material by the nose. All of those students would benefit from a little reflection on their learning experiences and a better understanding of what will help them learn most effectively.
Ambrose’s initiative strikes me as especially innovative in that it folds reflections on learning into the university’s traditional curriculum, which in this case happens to include a co-op structure, but which could work equally well in almost any type of curriculum.
Around two years ago I began stapling a brief overview of the research on the perils of distracted learning to the back of my syllabus, in part, as a way of explaining my cellphone policy. I ask students to read the overview for the second class, and we discuss it briefly. It has helped me to focus their attention on learning tasks both in and outside of the classroom, and it takes up only a tiny fraction of my time and energy. Langer’s book and Ambrose’s initiative have convinced me that I can find room for a little bit more reading and discussion with my students on how they can learn most effectively in my courses.
You might fairly object that all of this constitutes one more thing to include on your already crowded course agenda; one more burden to bear in your already overburdened faculty role. I understand, and don’t have an easy answer. My own experience has suggested that I can find a little room to speak about learning with my students; your experience might be different. But if we don’t bear the responsibility for helping our students learn more effectively, who does?
“All of us,” Ambrose told me, “should focus on and reinforce students’ learning how to learn, because that’s the most important skill they can acquire that will take them through life. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
If you have suggestions for how to help students reflect on and improve their learning skills, please share them in the comments below.
James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. His most recent book is Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.
