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Dr John Munro The University of Melbourne Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
' Learning to Learn ' has become a popular concept over the last two decades, in a surprisingly broad range of domains. It is an essential part of the dialogue of industry, HR, education providers and communications and information technology. Its breadth shows the shared recognition and acceptance of learning across otherwise diverse contexts.
It has developed in parallel with related concepts, such as lifelong learning, the ' thinking curriculum ' , ' whole brain ' or ' right brain ' learning and multiple intelligences, the virtual classroom and the cyber work place.
This evolution over the 1970s and 1980s is reviewed by Smith (1990). This review identified aspects of learning that challenged conventional educational practice at the time, such as the influence of context and culture on learning and the relationship between personal power and control and learning. It shows links between domains that had previously been seen as separate.
The practice and implementation of ' learning to learn ' has not always supported the rhetoric. While educators were generally aware of the influences noted above, the pedagogy they implemented was less likely to reflect them. Schools that adopt a ' learning to learn ' policy are often unclear about what is relevant student activity or what is the most appropriate teaching.
Classroom teachers are also often unsure about what ' learning to learn ' means in practice. They are not sure of what ' learning to learn ' knowledge looks like, the most appropriate teaching procedures or what students would do when they are learning more about learning. For example, whether it will be learnt incidentally, as they talk about it or whether it is to do with investigations and project work. They are not sure how to tell if their students know more about it now than they did three months ago.
Some of the key questions this third Online Conference relate to the possibility of a common language for discussing learning, new knowledge about the science of learning in our classrooms and the implications for schools shifting their focus from teaching to learning. In this presentation, I would like to examine some of these issues further.
' Learning to learn ' is frequently talked about as if it were an independent entity or phenomenon that has a life of its own, and is an end in itself. However, to see it as decontextualised and separate may not always be valid. First, it may be domain specific. Anecdotally, individuals usually know more about how to learn in some content areas than in others.
Second, I would like to propose that ' learning to learn ' is not an end in itself but rather, a means to an end. The end or goal for me is enhanced knowledge. The issue of ' learning to learn ' being goal-oriented is frequently omitted from discussion.
Learning is about enhancing knowledge. I define knowledge as the totality of what one believes about the world and one ' s place it in. It includes a person ' s conceptual understanding, one ' s experiential experiences and beliefs and assumptions about the world, one ' s linked procedural knowledge, one ' s values and attitudinal knowledge and one ' s knowledge of how to learn and to think.
Knowledge enhancement can occur in any of these aspects. It can involve a changed tacit appreciation of art or music or enhanced tactics in a game. It can also involve being able to make sense of information by converting it to personal knowledge and to apply it, or transfer it, to novel contexts.
From a knowledge enhancement perspective, ' learning to learn ' involves learning how to improve what one knows. It includes:
It includes being able to use what one knows to ' read situations ' , in terms of the knowledge demands and to make opportunities for displaying what one knows.
When we look at infants learning, it is reasonable to ask why we need to talk about learning how to change what we know at all. Infants ' learning or knowledge change activity would seem to be triggered spontaneously or incidentally through interactions with a significant others in environments that support the learning. They display an intrinsic motivation or drive to learn.
When children begin formal education in groups, their learning and thinking activity become ' socialised ' . The focus or direction of the learning is not decided by them but by their culture. As well, they learn ' acceptable ways of thinking ' about the knowledge. The teaching information frequently requires them to learn in groups, to ' take in what the information says ' or, in other words, to ' be programmed externally ' .
The need for the socialised thinking can be justified on a number of grounds. Its efficiency as a means of enhancing culturally valued knowledge (such as communication conventions) is well recognised. What frequently happens in formal education, however, is that students see it as the dominant or most acceptable way of learning, rather than seeing learning as a balance between socialised thinking and personally motivated thinking.
For me, then, learning to learn is about learning to balance and to value socialised and personally motivated ways of thinking. It is also learning to link and to synthesise socialised and personally motivated knowledge. Students learn to link the new knowledge gained with what they already know. This knowledge, at any time, provides the ' lens ' through which the student sees the world and provides the foundation for learning to learn in the future. Indeed, a term more appropriate than learning to learn could be ' learning to enhance what one knows ' .
What might learning to learn, from a knowledge enhancement perspective, look like? For me, it is a knowledge of how one uses what one knows to learn further. For any learning event, it comprises three phases: (1) orienting or focusing one ' s learning activity; (2) learning in various ways and (3) consolidating or reviewing the learning outcomes (Munro, 2003a, 2003c).
Effective teaching stimulates and supports these learning interactions. In this section I have identified some types of learning interactions that teaching can foster.
Learning to orient or focus the learning activity includes improving one ' s ability to unpack the issue that stimulated the activity and to frame up, or define, the challenge (Lowenstein, 1994). The learner may visualise what the possible outcomes might look like, do, or achieve.
Alternatively the learner may be interested in seeing where a set of ideas might ' end up ' ; there is interest and curiosity in moving along a pathway of ideas to see where it ' will lead ' (Locke & Latham, 1990).
Learning to orient the activity also involves collating what one already knows that is relevant to the subject of the learning. This includes knowing how to access relevant conceptual, experiential and procedural aspects of the topic (for example, Gardner, 1995, 1999; Paivio, 1991; Riding & Cheema, 1991).
Learners ' relevant attitudes and beliefs, and their history of learning related topics in their past, influence how they use this (for example, Nichols & Utesch, 1998; Pajares, 1996). Learners know how to map or transform their knowledge from one form to another and how to prioritise and integrate aspects to assemble their ' personal existing knowledge schemata ' of the topic.
From this, they can identify the relevant questions or issues that their existing knowledge doesn ' t answer and develop possible pathways or action plans that may lead them from their existing knowledge to the resolution of the challenge or problem. The ' unanswered questions ' at this point can be ' cognitive feelings ' that are not much more than hunches. Examples of these are when two ideas ' just don ' t feel right ' or when you ' smell a rat ' ' . It is obviously important that learners understand the values of these ' feelings about knowing ' and how to use them in self-managed and directed learning.
Learning to learn for knowledge enhancement has a strong planning component. Students can learn how to plan the content or information sources they will use, a possible pathway through this and the learning actions they will use. They can also plan how they might use their learning resources most effectively, for example, where, on the pathway, they will pause and consolidate what they have learnt, how they will manage the information load and how they will record key ideas and the links between them.
They can decide on what might be useful indicators of steps along the learning pathway and the steps they might take if they encounter barriers, developing an impression of the learning pathway bridges from the orienting phase to the learning phase.
The learning phase involves the building and exploration of novel ideas. There are several aspects of this: (1) learning the new ideas; (2) learning how to learn the ideas; and (3) learning to link value with the new ideas. Teaching that assists students to learn how to learn will target all three aspects.
Learners can tell themselves to explore the new ideas in specific contexts first and then gradually abstract or generalise them. They can learn how to use their thinking spaces to optimal advantage.
As well as using conventional learning strategies, such as questioning the topic and exploring new possibilities in a range of ways, it includes the learner being prepared to think intuitively and to knowing how to explicate for one ' s self one ' s tacit and ' knowing by feeling ' ideas. Examples of these are when ' you just know it will work ' without having the logical justification. It also includes learners knowing the value of visualising possible novel links between ideas and asking, ' What will they look like in practice? ' . Proactive reflective visualisation or acting out the links in particular contexts facilitate ' possibilistic ' thinking.
Having students both organise their knowledge gains and reflect on how they achieved these is important. Learners can consolidate the new ideas at various times during the learning activity, review them and align them with what they already knew and reshape their knowledge.
Learners are encouraged to evaluate ' what worked for them ' and decide when they might use these in the future (Munro, 1996a). They learn the language for talking about their thinking and learning activity in systematic ways. They can record these in a ground rules for learning ' list.
Having students explicate their thinking gives this activity an element of permanence that assists students in identifying how they might use it in the future in strategic, selective ways and how they might change and improve it. Students benefit here from sharing their learning actions with others and trying out the actions that others used to achieve similar outcomes.
As well as learning the new content and how they went about learning it, students can learn to ' invest positive value ' in the new knowledge. Students will be more motivated to engage in ' learning to learn ' activities in the future if they see that these activities:
By having students focus positive attention on these aspects, they are more likely to link positive emotion with both the knowledge being learnt and with the ' learning to learn ' activity. When the relevant knowledge is stimulated in the future, so will the positive emotion. This will ' tell ' the learners that the knowledge has positive values, is worth learning and will motivate the learning.
Having learnt the new ideas, students can monitor their learning progress, possibly in terms of the indicators they had identified earlier. They can look at the key or salient ' learning points ' on the pathway they have followed, what they learnt at each point, how they learnt it and how they felt about it. They can see how the actual pathway they followed differed from their intended pathway and how most learning activity, particularly when self-managed or directed, involves an element of randomness or ' chaos ' that may not have been anticipated but which contributes to the learning outcomes. This aspect bridges from the learning activity to the knowledge consolidation and review phase.
In addition to learning new knowledge, learners can take steps to retain it, to prepare it for later learning and to innovate it. We have already noted that students ' capacity to learn at any time is influenced by what they know at that time. This is their ' sense-making lens ' . They use their existing knowledge to interpret the world. As well, it is where the learning starts. Having learnt new ideas, learners may need to ' upgrade ' or modify their existing knowledge, by linking it with what they have learnt. They need to say how the new ideas relate to what they already knew, how they extend, support, modify or counter what they knew or believed earlier. They may visualise the new ideas in key experiences or episodes that can be used as prototypes. They may reflect on what they can do now that they couldn ' t have done earlier, the problems they can solve now and the decisions they can make now.
They may visualise themselves using or applying the ideas in future situations. This aspect targets making explicit links between new and existing knowledge.
To prepare the new knowledge for later learning, students need to ensure that it can be accessed and used as effectively as possible. This involves ' chunking ' or linking the new and existing knowledge so that one aspect easily stimulates other aspects. Rather than using the ideas in an attention demanding way, the goal is to ' automatise ' their use. Learners know how to do this in various ways, including practice using the ideas and time targeting, looking for ' cue words ' , learning the meaningful links between ideas and practising to recall the key ideas
Students can learn how to apply or to transfer their modified knowledge in a range of ways. This helps them to see the potential in the knowledge, possibilities and deeper links. They can suggest situations to which they can transfer or use the ideas and distinguish between situations in which the ideas could/ couldn ' t be used. They can investigate how far they can transfer them.
They can investigate how it can help them think flexibly about other ideas and think critically and analytically by suggesting new questions to ask and new perspectives. It can also help them to use their knowledge to solve open-ended problems and to think creatively and innovatively. Having automatised the key ideas, they can investigate options when aspects are combined in novel ways and create new episodes for the ideas. Learning to ask and answer higher-level Bloom-type question sequences, and to look at the new ideas from various angles, can assist in deepening the new knowledge.
Throughout the use of the ' learning to learn ' strategies, students show what they have learnt. Each aspect leads to particular aspects of knowledge enhancement. What students know about showing what they know is a key factor in effective learning and teaching (Munro, 1999).
So far in this discussion, the focus has been on individuals improving their knowledge of how they learn. Learning to learn can also be applied to a community of learners in which each learner is a member of a network (Munro, 2003b). Where the community has framed a shared or common goal for learning, concepts such as group knowledge and collaborative learning become relevant (Munro, 2002b).
Networks of learners need to learn how to consolidate and synthesise what has been learnt at any time, how to evaluate this and identify group knowledge, identify implications that lead to further learning and to pursue this. Models of learning to learn in networks need to examine how processes, such as the self-management and direction of the learning activity, metacognition, the network ' s thinking or learning space and the network ' s long term memory (or ' agreed network knowledge ' ), will be conceptualised.
Some of these issues have been explored in schools that have engaged in professional learning. In these contexts it is useful to identify various domains in which professional learning teams can learn simultaneously. Each team, as well as the organisation as a whole, can identify how it learns and the actions it can use to improve how it learns. Key processes, such collating group knowledge and reflecting on what this means for enhanced professional practice, are important here (Munro, 1999a, 1996b). Developing a professional ' learning to learn ' culture has been linked with both improved pedagogy and student achievement levels (Munro, 2004).
Learning how to learn in networks is not, of course, restricted to professional learning teams learning. A group of Year 7 students learning about a topic in history, using the collaborative learning techniques in the Jigsaw procedure, is an example of a network learning. The quality of student outcomes during cooperative learning has been shown to depend on the extent to which the learning interactions in the group are explicit; the higher the level of structure and the higher the level of achievement (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). This is consistent with greater learning effectiveness when the network knows how to learn. Gillies and Ashman (1996) propose that when students work cooperatively together they become aware intuitively of the learning needs of others needs and provide scaffolding or cueing assistance when they perceive it to be required.
Learning to learn means learning to become an autonomous learner. Learners can use learning strategies, either spontaneously or when cued. Learners who use them mainly when instructed are more dependent and externally managed learners. Learners who use them autonomously and spontaneously, in a strategic, selective way, are more self-managing and directing learners (Boekarets, 1997; Pintrich, 1995). A key concept in contemporary theories of learning is that of the autonomous self-directing learner.
Learners learn gradually to be autonomously self-managing and directing (Ablard & Lipschultz, 1998). They learn to use the learning strategies in the balanced way noted earlier for particular domains of knowledge initially and then gradually learn to transfer and generalise them. As noted earlier, learners may be more autonomous and self-managing in some areas of knowledge than in others. They also learn to apply them to increasingly complex information.
In terms of the key questions investigated by the third Online Conference, the perspective in this paper is towards a shared and common language when discussing learning. It recommends this dialogue come from the domain of knowledge enhancement. It believes that such a focus facilitates optimal use of new knowledge about the science of learning in classrooms. The framework for implementing ' learning to learn ' has been implemented in classrooms and indicates how a shift in the focus from teaching to learning guidance and facilitation can be achieved.
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Dr John Munro is Head of Studies of Exceptional Learning and Gifted Education in the Faculty of Education, at The University of Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia.
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