1.3

Learning is the interaction of living organisms with their environment that results in a change in the organism, the environment, and/or how the organism interacts with the environment.

The first principle that was interesting to me was Principle 2: Learning is Inevitable, Essential, and Ubiquitous.  In other words, learning happens whether the learner wants it to happen or not.  Learning must happen for people to continue to survive.  Learning happens everywhere, all the time.  I find that we often limit learning to obvious occasions.  It is easy to discuss how learning is at work in a school or during a learning activity; however, learning occurs always and everywhere.  I am always amazed at how quickly my son learns, even when I do not want him to learn.  For example, he recently started sleeping in a toddler bed.  It took him a week and a half to learn that he could get himself up.  After that, he learned that he could get himself up ridiculously early in the morning.  At that point, I had to help him learn when it was an appropriate time to get up.  He is also learning that if he gets up really early on the weekend, he gets to watch a show in our bed.  At the same time, we are learning that we can get a few more minutes of sleep while he watches a show in our bed.  Learning is happening all the time, whether we want it to or not, and it happens everywhere.  We have to adapt to each new scenario to survive the toddler years.

Another interesting principle to me was Principle 3: Learning can be resisted.  This principle is saying that learning requires the participation of the learner.  Without engaging in the learning process, learning is inefficient or simply impossible.  I found this principle particularly interesting because in some ways it contradicted the previous principle.  How can learning be both inevitable and able to be resisted?  However, learning equals change and humans tend to be afraid of change.  I encountered this resistance this week at my elementary school while working with an intervention teacher.  This particular teacher had been taught a particular way to teach reading that had involved looking at all skills together without isolating individual processes.  Now she was being asked to use Evidence Based Interventions that target specific skill deficits and to keep data on how students were progressing in those isolated skills.  She expressed that she did not like the new way and wanted to work the way she was comfortable with working.  However, she may learn how to teach all skills better by having to learn how to isolate skills.  Her resistance is more to change, but is also a resistance to learning.

Principle 4: Learning may be disadvantageous or learning may not be viewed as valuable or help the learner in some way is another principle that stood out to me.  I was especially drawn to the examples of how learning certain behaviors or attitudes may be beneficial in some cultures and not others.  I was reminded of some of the learned behaviors and attitudes I encountered while being a practicum student in a downtown elementary school in Lexington last year.  Some of the students in this school could come across as aggressive, apathetic, and distracted.  However, most of these attitudes and behaviors were learned to insure survival in the surrounding neighborhood.  Things that they had learned in the neighborhood had been disadvantageous in the school setting.

I was also intrigued by Principle 7: Learning refers to both a process and a product.  This principle is saying that learning is not only the outcome that we can measure, but how we get there.  I was interested in how this principle applies to traditional school settings and the trend toward more testing and data.  Currently, to qualify a student as having a learning disability, we look at data as they work through varying degrees of intervention.  The data is usually looking at products of learning.  It is much more challenging to assess the process of learning.  However, to truly know whether students have learning disabilities, perhaps we should spend more time examining the process of learning.

Learning is different at different points in time was stood out to me.  In other words, learning is wholly dependent on our experiences up to a particular point in time which means that the same learning cannot occur in different points in time.  An example of this is graduate school and this class.  If I had taken this class at a different point in my graduate studies, I would not have the same experiences to draw from.  I also would not have had a toddler to think about learning in relation to or had taken classes about other cognitive processes.  Learning is dependent on everything we know and experience; therefore, what we learn is completely dependent on when we learn it.