The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching

Front matter

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUCATION

The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching Connecting Sophisticated Thinking trom Early Childhood to PhD

E:

Preface

This book is about the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (or MELT for short), which fluidly connect to 100 years of educational research and 100,000 years of human learning and sophisticated thinking. The MELT are a family of models with an ancestry that shares common features and that necessarily evolve to fit new and emerging contexts. Because of their adaptability and shared features, the MELT have provided a way for teachers, academics, sessional and professional staff to bring together the years of education, from primary/elementary school education through to the middle years, high school, technical education, undergraduate, master’s and doctoral study. This connection was evident, for example, when teachers, academics and professional staff from these contexts shared their adaptations and uses of the MELT at the International MELT conference in 2017 and especially through informal conversations about learning. Context-specific examples of MELT use are found throughout the book and associated website. The MELT may provide you with a way to deepen your understanding of the crucial role that you play in students’ learning and where your work fits in the span of their educational experiences. Along with this insight, the MELT may also enable to you enhance the learning of students under your care.

These models, when used in concert, have helped teachers, academics, professional staff and especially students to make connections between different subjects and disciplines, from accounting to zoology, as well as transdisciplinary studies. Sophisticated thinking is not context-bound, but rather learned best in a variety of contexts, where connections between learning tasks may not be readily apparent but need to be made explicit not only to students but also to teachers in different contexts. The MELT also enable conversations between people with differing, sometimes polarised, educational philosophies—for example, between behaviourists employing Direct Instruction and social constructivists who employ discovery learning.

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Polarised perspectives about learning were evident in my visit to a Pacific Island village community a few weeks ago. But the polarised perspectives I saw did not represent a tension but rather different points on a learning continuum, different ways through which students engaged in learning. Below, I recount that experience in a story called Place Value, which is set in two very different learning environments that existed in the village. In the first environment, there was a sense of fun and freedom for young children playing in a tree. In the other environment, an indoor classroom, the simplicity of the mathematical concept being presented belied the sophisticated thinking needed for the young children to learn the concept. This story is symbolic of the potential and tensions across formal education, representing as it does extremes in terms of students determining their own learning through play and involved in a teacher-directed lesson. These same tensions and potential are played out across formal and informal education and so the story sets the scene for you to grasp the breadth of learning and the breadth of the MELT.

Whatever your educational responsibility, as you read Place Value, consider this premise: the skills that the children demonstrated under the village tree and in the classroom are the same skills your students need and use on a daily basis, whether they are in primary/elementary school or conducting doctoral research. Regardless of educational level or subject area, good teaching always facilitates sophisticated thinking, but educational understanding strongly influences how and when this thinking is facilitated. Therefore this story is used in Chap. 2, along with stories from high school and university, to introduce the core characteristics of the MELT and illuminate connections of the MELT across years and contexts.

Place Value

While I swam in the ocean at the end of the tropical day, the children caught my attention as they played unsupervised under the spreading tree down by the shoreline. Their ages ranged from three to six years old. One child played with shells, one laid out a mat as if proffering items to sell, two were in different branches of the tree, one shook the branches, one just hung on, and two more were hidden from my view but darted into sight occasionally. Each seemed to occupy a separate world of play and exploration, of choosing what to do and where to do it. But despite these separate activities, all the children were within a radius of 6 metres, whether horizontally or vertically, and chattered in their mother tongue.

When I left the water at twilight, the children of the village who were over seven years old played volleyball on the sand and shell court, with an eight-year old officiating and making sure they adhered strictly to international rules.

The next day, I attended the Year 1/2 class in the primary school of the village and saw three of the children who had been playing in and under the tree the day before.

Preface ix

The children’s play tree by the shore

A Pacific primary school in a village setting fe x Preface

The thirty-one children sat closely packed together on a Pacific Island i-TaliTali mat. The teacher began with some maths terminology and showed flash cards to the children.

Reading the card being held up by the teacher, Ms. Kristi, one child called out, “Plus value’.

All the children chanted, “Plus value, plus value’.

Ms. Kristi corrected ‘Place value’, and the children chanted, “place value, place value’.

Referring to the concept of numeral position in a two-digit number, Ms. Kristi asked the students, ‘Is place value on your right or on your left?’

‘Left’, called some children.

Then eight children were selected to go to the front and each took a number from a box and held it to their chest for all to see. Numbers chosen were 9, 41, 11, 57, 5, 17, 20 and 29.

Ms. Kristi asked these eight children to arrange themselves in increasing numerical order. They began to shuffle, reorder, pause, look at each other’s numbers and shuffle some more until they stood in a straight line in the sequence ‘5, 9, 11, 41, 17, 20, 29, 57’. Guided by their teacher, who pointed to each number in turn, the children on the mat read the numbers in order from their right to left: ‘five, nine, eleven, fourteen...’.

Ms. Kristi paused at this number and began, ‘For...’ and one student completed ‘Forty-one’.

Ms. Kristi paused thoughtfully. Then she said, ‘Let’s move on’ and resumed pointing.

The children called out ‘Forty-one... seventeen... twenty... twenty-nine... fifty-seven’.

‘Is it correct or not?’ asked Ms. Kristi.

The children called in unison, ‘Not’, so Ms. Kristi asked, ‘which number is incorrect? Not in the proper place?’

One girl standing in the sequence and holding ‘5’ pointed to the fourth student and said, ‘forty-one’.

‘How do you know that forty-one should not stand here?’

The student did not answer. No student answered.

‘So this forty-one should go where?’

Many children pointed to the next position up, so the teacher prompted forty-one and seventeen to shuffle and change places.

“There. How do you know this forty-one should stand there?’

No answer.

Ms. Kristi continued, “Any other number is in the wrong place?’

‘Twenty-nine’, a student called out.

“Twenty-nine should go where?’

‘Besides seventeen’, one student called out, and the student with twenty-nine shuffled there, passing forty-one.

Preface xi

“Any other number?’

‘No’, called students in unison.

“Are you sure?’

‘Twenty!’ a boy called out.

‘Right. Where should it go?’

“Besides seventeen’.

“Very good. Let’s read the numbers together’.

‘Five... nine... eleven... seventeen... twenty... twenty-nine... forty-one... fifty-seven’.

“Very good’. The children, Ms. Kristi and I all clapped.

In Place Value we have three children learning in two vastly different ways in two very different spaces. Under, in and near the tree, they were unsupervised, chose what to do and had their own sense of place. Their learning through play was in keeping with various forms of discovery learning, and in tune with social constructivist thinking. In the classroom, they followed prescribed instructions with an activity that ultimately had right or wrong answers and was placed culturally and physically on the Pacific Island mat, made through the weaving process called i-Talitali. The mathematics learning was in keeping with Direct Instruction, where students are primarily acquiring the canon of maths, fitting in with objectivist thinking. In both activities, there was evidence of highly sophisticated learning: in the classroom where the learning objectives were pre-determined by the teacher; and near the tree, with curiosity-driven learning and no thought to objectives or outcomes. Which form of learning is more important, more relevant or more enabling?

Your own answer to that question will say a lot about your educational philosophy. As far as the MELT are concerned, the answer is that both are valuable, relevant and mutually enabling. I hope some readers of this book are oriented to Direct Instruction and didactic learning, some align with discovery learning, that some are somewhere between, and some see the whole thing as a continuum. That’s not to shift you from your position—I’m sure it is well considered and based on a good rationale. But when you talk to educators with other perspectives, you may find that the MELT enables you to have more sensible, more formative, more complementary conversations than you have had in the past, and that disconnected aspects of education may become more connected.

The MELT rationale is that all enduring educational theories and practices usefully inform education and when they connect as a complementary set, this will provide a richer learning environment for students. In Place Value, for example, the teacher was guiding the students towards specific, correct answers about numbers in a sequence. However, she did this in a Socratic fashion and elicited many responses and thoughts from students, some of whom were demonstrably constructing ideas individually or socially. Was the teacher correct to provide an approach which required students to engage in the construction of ‘right-or-wrong’ knowledge? From a purist theoretical perspective, this approach maybe counterproductive because of the clash between a constructivist paradigm and an objectivist one. For instance, from an objectivist perspective, if students constructed an incorrect xii Preface understanding of place value, this would have negative implications for their enduring engagement with maths. From a constructivist perspective, if students were corrected on an answer that they volunteered in good faith, this could be counterproductive to their ongoing confidence and willingness to engage in learning. But from the pragmatic perspective of the MELT, a ‘bricolage’, a blending of what works, is not only possible, but desirable, providing that teachers understand what they are trying to achieve, how they will achieve it and especially know why this is their goal.

Learning that is structured in order to help students acquire mandated knowledge is not, by default, powerful, but neither is learning through play. One could argue that without guided teaching, students involved in play (such as the children in the tree) may merely be reproducing their cultural setting and knowledge, not learning to be critical thinkers. This would suggest that play can be more reproductive and less conceptually free than it appears on the surface. But Direct Instruction and learning through play can be powerful, and in the context of the MELT, the combination of these and other modes of learning provides a powerful incentive for students to learn to think in sophisticated ways.

Learning and teaching are complex, and individuals, groups and systems will see the same things differently through the MELT, as each will inhabit different social and cultural worlds. I offer the MELT as a way in which our educational worlds can become a little less polarised, and a little more connected and fluid across the years and contexts in order to improve student learning.

Adelaide, Australia John Willison November 2019

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my daughter Nadia, an intrepid learner.

The cartoons that comprise the chapter title pages are drawn by Aaron Humphry.

All materials are under 4.0 Creative Commons licence to be shared, adapted and re-shared with attribution.

Joe Miller edited my often convoluted writing and proof read with his eagle eye.

All the photos in the book were taken by the author, except the Fronticepiece Gold drop, which is from Shutterstock.com, under a non-exclusive right to use, modify and reproduce worldwide.

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Contents

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Analyse & Synthesise

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Chapter 1 Ni Chapter 1 A) What Is Our Purpose? cenet

1.1 Purpose

There are a lot of hidden similarities in education. Differences are often emphasised, and similarities hidden, by the articulation of context-specific terminology and techniques. These include differences associated with ways of learning and teaching, such as pedagogy versus andragogy; epistemological perspectives including objectivism versus constructivism; pedagogical approaches, for example, Direct Instruction versus discovery learning; disciplinary ways of speaking and doing such as counting and accounting versus zoo visits and zoology; and ways of researching, as evident in qualitative versus quantitative methods.

Between all of these perspectives and approaches are genuine differences that are good and helpful, for they mirror ways of learning, teaching and researching in a variety of contexts. Such differences in perspective and approach mirror the differences between the communities to which they belong. However, these perspectives and approaches also share quite a few similarities.

This book is about the similarities. The similarities are important because they can be the connective elements across formal education, for teachers, principals, academics, communities, education systems, parents and especially for learners. Frequently, education comes across to students one learning activity, one assignment, one subject at a time. But all those integrally involved aim for education to become a forest of learning for students, rather than a sequence of individual trees. That forest is a complex ecosystem of interactions, involving all year levels, all subjects and all educational concepts growing in health and harmony. Where all the individual parts join together into a complex whole is the location that students develop 21st century skills, becoming critical thinkers and problem solvers who are research-minded and information-savvy.

In order to connect the similarities so that students learn more effectively to solve complex problems, think critically, research and make evidence-based decisions, this book introduces and explains the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (MELT). The MELT provide an understanding of the connections between diverse

© The Author(s) 2020 1 J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_1 educational contexts, approaches, ideas and activities, and so enable a variety of different perspectives, practices and energies to work together. The MELT illuminate a way for educators and learners to participate in the development of sophisticated thinking skills, where the individual trees are more clearly connected in a forest of learning.

The purpose of this book, then, is to connect disparate energies and ideas of education through the MELT in order to facilitate students’ development of sophisticated thinking. Educational theory and practice has tended towards conflict, creating uncertainties, distrust and wasted effort. With projections that Earth will reach a population of 8 billion people in 2023 [1], we need a new, more complementary style of education for the billion human brains that will be born from 2023 to 2030 [1], for they will become the leaders of the planet from 2040. Many of the problems they grapple with as leaders will be human-generated.

From Dewey in 1904/1974 [2] to Bundy in 2004 [3], 100 years of education research produced a set of understanding of learning as diverse as human learning and sophisticated thinking over the past 100,000 years. From MELT’s perspective, this diversity is necessary, insightful and if not complete, then well-rounded, for informing education. As we move into an era where e-learning blended with face-to-face is the norm in schools, and in many technical education and university programmes, what do we need to know about human learning 100 Millennia ago, and how does it connect to the twenty-first Century?

The first 4 billion anatomically modern Homo sapiens born, from around 200 millennia ago [4, 5] to 100 millennia Before Present (BP) [6, 7] have a fossil record that demonstrates just a little innovation [8, 9]. Our large-brained ancestors primarily survived in the environments in which they were raised, or adapted to the new environments into which they moved.

The flurry of innovation shown in the archaeological record from around 100 millennia ago [8] onwards marks a transition to modern human behaviours. This set of behaviour is manifested in the development of diverse technologies, including hunting tools, fire control and chemical modifications, and abstract representations such as artworks. From this time, Homo sapiens are clearly apes with sophisticated thinking enabled by adaptive learning. Humans were not merely wandering into new environments from this time, but taking more calculated risks to get to new places, as evidenced by transport technologies such as simple canoes.

This flurry of innovation was self-perpetuating. One reason for this was that development compounded: one tool led to the development of another tool, and when both were used together, this enabled further development [9]. Another reason was that humans could now observe others’ intentional adaptation of things, so that the idea of innovation became apparent. At some point in human history, someone first coined a word for the idea of intentional change, and humans armed with such a word may have caused the concept of innovation to reproduce like a meme [10], further accelerating innovative practice.

The innovation flurry was also driven by the fact that many of our innovative solutions became problems themselves. Enhanced hunting technologies at times led to the extinction of the prey on which humans depended. Domestication of herd

1.1 Purpose 3 animals provided a breeding ground for many killer diseases that resulted in large-scale human and animal suffering. Wide adoption of crops led to the extreme use of herbicides and insecticides, and the clearing of natural habitats. And technologies that closed the distance between people through online social engagement across the globe enabled cyber-abuse to enter people’s bedrooms and addictive behaviours to control the tempo of modern relationships. Solutions produced fresh problems, each of which required increasingly sophisticated solutions of their own. Thus, we became the problem-solving ape [11], in part because we had to learn to solve the problems we made for ourselves and for the whole planet. As a species, we have a knack of solving problems with solutions that create new, more complex problems.

The MELT provide a way to gather together and connect educational ideas and energies in a way that may help us to break out of the vicious circle of our solutions that cause more problems. This is possible because, as noted, the MELT connect to 100,000 years of human learning and 100 years of educational research; with this diverse set of otherwise conflicting set of understanding, the MELT can enable an education that is broadly savvy of the influences on education. The MELT intentionally draw together and represent disparate views of education theory and practice, so as to capture the broad sweep of learning and teaching, including Direct Instruction to discovery learning; objectivist perspectives on learning through to social constructivist thought; primary/elementary school to Ph.D. studies; and accounting to zoology and interdisciplinary notions; The MELT then can be used as a conceptual set to connect those with different roles such as caregivers, lab managers, learning advisors, learning designers, lecturers, librarians, principals, professors, parents, programme coordinators, sessional staff, supervisors of higher degree by research, teachers, vice chancellors and, crucially, students from primary/elementary school to Ph.D.

MELT is frequently put into action to help students understand their own sophisticated thinking and see more clearly the purpose for their own education that necessarily revolves around the further development of that thinking. It is not easy for teachers to have or develop a sense of purpose for students that goes beyond the immediacy of daily lessons to the big picture. For both students and teachers, MELT may be used as a thinking routine [12] that becomes habitual (but not mundane) and which, through repeated exposure, prompts growth in sophisticated thinking, not only about what to do and how to do it, but also metacognitive awareness.

When considering the last 100 years of educational research, our understandings of learning and teaching can seem more disparate than ever, and theory has not connected well with practice. For example, it is common for teachers to omit the explicit use of theoretical frameworks for their lesson planning and when leading other teachers [13]. However, we are also at a point of knowing an amazing amount about the complexities of teaching and learning. The MELT were formulated not to be theoretically pure, but through a consideration of major aspects of educational research and simultaneous reflection on classroom practice [14], as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4. The models provide a conceptual framework for action, not a theory or set of theories. A ‘conceptual framework’ pertains here to a structure that guides thinking, that sets the parameters for considering learning and teaching.

The MELT provide a practical philosophy, then, connecting theories with theories and practices with practices, and especially connecting theory with practice. The MELT makes the skills associated with sophisticated thinking explicit, with the intention of encouraging coherent, explicit and cyclic development of such thinking across students’ education.

This book spans early childhood education (ECE) to postgraduate study and contains examples across those contexts. But why would an early childhood teacher care about Master’s level study, or undergraduate or high school? Why would a Ph.D. supervisor care about primary school learning? I suggest a reason is that the MELT can help with the connections across education, ultimately improving learning and teaching in ECE, primary and secondary school, technical education, undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D. and employment contexts. Another reason is that all students use and teachers value the skills and attitudes associated with the MELT, because the models encapsulate what we do when we engage in sophisticated thinking [14].

A brief history of MELT

Beginning in 2004, my colleague Kerry O’ Regan and I synthesised disparate literature and reflections on classroom practice, culminating in the first fully-developed version of the MELT, called the Research Skill Development (RSD) framework [15]. The RSD was employed in two national studies [15-17], which were designed to determine its efficacy in higher education contexts. However, the word ‘research’ did not always connect to people’s practice. For example, Sue Bandaranaike coordinated student placements in industry called Work Integrated Learning or Cooperative Education and knew that ‘research’ did not fit her context. In 2009, Sue re-articulated the sophisticated thinking expressed in the RSD in terminology that was true to employment contexts, producing the Work Skill Development (WSD) framework [18]. Then, in quick succession, colleagues in Oral Health developed the Clinical Reflection Framework in 2012 [19], student-tutors developed a pentagon-shaped version for engineering, called the Optimising Problem-Solving pentagon [20] and an early childhood music teacher developed a song version called ‘Research Mountain’ [21], both in 2014. Colleagues from the University of the South Pacific developed a process-based version [22], using the metaphor of weaving a Pacific Island mat, the italitali mat that students were sitting on in Place Value. In 2018 Monash University developed the Digital Skills Development (DSD) framework [23] and in 2019 the Blended and Engaged Learning Zones (BELZ) [24] was devised for the design and evaluation of modes that are explicitly blended with e-learning. (Note that ‘learning’ is used preferentially to ‘e-learning’ in this book because modern learning is so often bound up with, or mediated fully by, the electronic that it is often not helpful to differentiate [25]).

By 2016, the number of RSD-based models had grown to such an extent that one name was chosen to be emblematic of the characteristics and purpose of all of them: the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching [15]. It took from 2004 to 2016 to determine the core characteristics of these models, and to find a name that could connect them conceptually. The MELT evolved over time to become a set of related, but context-specific, representations of how sophisticated thinking could be taught

1.1 Purpose 5 and learned, in keeping with Homo sapiens’ history [9] and contemporary learning environments [14, 15].

Contemporary issues

By unpacking the MELT, this book will address four perennial, yet contemporary, issues:

e How educators may effectively help students think in sophisticated ways, including understanding their own thinking processes. Sophisticated thinking takes many forms, and includes researching, problem-solving, evidence-based practice, clinical reasoning, ethical reasoning, critical thinking, discovering, inquiring and understanding concepts, as well as metacognition.

e How to connect different aspects of education so that they mutually reinforce and complement each other:

— Across students’ education, from early childhood through to school completion, technical and further education, undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. level, onto employment and continuing professional development.

— Across subjects and disciplines from counting and accounting to zoo visits and zoology, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning.

— Between sometimes competing paradigms, theories and teaching practices.

e How to deepen educators’ understanding of the dimensions and practicalities of student autonomy in learning. This understanding will illuminate connections between disparate discourses around student-centred learning, Direct Instruction, Cognitive Load Theory, Threshold Concepts, discovery learning and networked learning, as well as student cultural, language and learning diversity.

e How educators can effectively engage with educational theory in ways that offer practical value for teaching and learning environments.

The book introduces the MELT as a way to conceptualise how such enabling, connecting, deepening and engaging may take place.

This chapter details the purpose and features of the book and of its namesake subject, the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching. Section 1.2 outlines the MELT’s six facets of sophisticated thinking, elaborated along a continuum of learning autonomy. Section 1.3, called Parachute, comprises a story about two students, Shelly and Katie, each engaged in an individual short project in the first year of high school. As well as covering some of the types of learning that are common across formal education and in many different disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, this story is true to the sophisticated learning that humans have engaged in for 100,000 years. In Sect. 1.4, 100 billion brains, humans are contrasted with beavers, who were the premier engineers of the past 20 million years, but who were stuck in their mode of learning. Unlike beavers, humans have developed multiple ways of learning, suggesting that a multiplicity of teaching strategies are not just possible but desirable. Section 1.5, One billion brains more, outlines the absolute need to develop sophisticated thinking in order to address educational and planet-wide problems, requiring a conceptualisation like MELT to connect different teaching approaches and ideas.

Section 1.6 provides the structure of this book, where each chapter’s title is one of the seven questions that are central to each MELT facet and to learning autonomy. The chapter concludes with Sect. 1.7, Student learning that resonates. For the MELT, recognising and fostering a diverse range of teaching and learning strategies is absolutely central to effective education. Therefore, this book explicitly articulates the connections between disparate educational ideas, placing them all on the same learning autonomy continuum of the MELT, in the hope that these ideas will be taken together as a set and become more mutually supportive.

1.2 MELT Components

The MELT comprise the six facets of sophisticated thinking elaborated along a continuum of learning autonomy.

1.2.1 MELT Facets

The facets of the MELT concern the ‘what’ of learning and teaching. Content varies subject-by-subject, lesson-by-lesson and in the MELT focus, the ‘what’ concerns the skills and attitudes of sophisticated thinking as applied to, and mediated by, the content.

Figure 1.1 shows a version of the MELT that was inspired by engineering students who tutored in a large first year course. The student/tutors adapted MELT and devised a version that they called the Optimising Problem-Solving (OPS) pentagon. That version stripped out a lot of detail, resulting in a representation that is student friendly and focuses on the facets, rather than explicating learning autonomy directly to the students. Context-specific adaptations of MELT, portrayed in the pentagon configuration, are used, with students from Year 4 of primary school to master’s level, and in introductions of MELT to educators in schools and universities.

Complex learning from ECE to Ph.D. always requires something akin to the six MELT facets. In many ways, these facets are clear and uncontroversial in nature if not in name, and commonly made explicit in education. Each MELT facet comprises a name made of verb couplets, an associated affective adjective, and a corresponding question, as shown in Table 1.1 (as well as a description, provided in Chap. 2).

The facets of MELT are quintessential processes whose descriptions act as triggers and connectors. As quintessential processes, the MELT facets can’t independently capture the meaning for every context. They are fully dependent on the educators who adopt them, each of whom knows or is coming to know, what needs to happen in any learning situation that they are facilitating, and how to articulate the processes they are facilitating.

Each facet of the MELT is designed to ‘trigger’ words and phrases that better describe the facet’s concepts in a particular context. These words and phrases then

1.2 MELT Components & oz Fluid Thinking l

Models of Engaged Learning & Teaching (MELT) pentagon

‘When in doubt, return to the centre’

Communjcate & Apply How do we relate?

Constructive

Find & Generate What do we Embark & Clarify \ \ ==" f What is our purpose?

Analyse & Synthesise What does it mean?