Classic Note Entries

Changing models of from teaching to learning

In the model of novice learning under the old "instructional paradigm" (before the learning paradigm), experts performed their thinking for students and then asked the novice learners to do "mini versions" of their work. The experts then graded the students accordingly and hoped that something would happen, that some students might "get it." The less-suited students would then disappear into another major, and the most-suited would continue. But three or four decades of research has taught us that a lot of meaningful activity - struggling, processing, sense-making - is going on in the intermediate space between novice and expert. In the learning paradigm, we are focusing not on the expert's products but, rather, on the expert's practice. That new endpoint changes what we should be attending to in the intermediate processes. It changes the role of instructional and emerging technologies, for example, which allow us to see, capture, harvest, and design for the intermediate learning processes.

Randy Bass - Disrupting Ourselves