CSML-050: Understanding Learning / Copyright 2007, 2008, 2009 - Rita M. Wirtz, M.A. All Rights Reserved

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Reading Champs Learning Connections # 050
TITLE: COACHES’ HANDBOOK: Understanding Learning
Catalog Index: CSML-050
Price (USD): $9.95

UNDERSTANDING LEARNING

"Communication is a process of sharing experience
with the goal that it becomes a common possession.
It modifies the disposition of both parties who partake in it."
(John Dewey, 1916)

In its classical concept, a school is a gathering of individuals together for the purpose of sharing knowledge. It is a place of “Education” where the interactive process of either the dictation or negotiation and construction of meanings take place. In the case of the latter, this means that within the relationship between the student and the educator there is constant negotiation of the meanings of both words and actions. Education occurs as the learner and the instructor assume common ownership of a concept and accept a common meaning for the words and activities which define that concept in specific environments. For the most part, this negotiation is controlled by the teacher. It is the teacher who defines the desired outcome of a lesson. But for learning to be accomplished it is necessary for the student to agree to, and accept, the definitions provided by the teacher. The IVE learning process recognizes all of these elements.

On another and more specific level, however, schools are where the best and brightest aspects of a society or culture are passed from the social core to those entering the social environment (either as children or as adults). But even more important is that “schooling” is the optimal means by which critical information is passed from one generation to the next; this is the way that cultures, societies, and civilizations continue over time. But schools also are, or at least should be, the formal means a modern society uses to pass and expand the knowledge of skills critical to the operation of the social structures—means of “making a living”. Again, it is the means of passing necessary living and working skills (as opposed to the philosophies and codes of acceptable behavior) from more mature participants to those who will perform them in the future.

A school is also a place where come of the most complex ideas on human development are applied, tested, and (hopefully) validated or discarded.