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Encouraging Deep Learners
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WHAT IS LEARNING?
What is learning? How does it happen? What are the conditions to help effective learning?
• evolving
• find out and discover
• expression and communication
• skill and knowledge
• study and practice
• questioning and inquisition
• being analytical & critical, discipline and motivation
• Innate learning - from childhood observation, mimicing, subliminal, human nature,
• Learning through yourself
• A pathway to understanding
• gaining knowledge
• ambition
We are here to discover formal process, where we attempt to facilitate learning.
• effective communication or knowledge within a structured framework
• different practices and modules of teaching e.g planning, outcomes, evaluation, results, mentoring, working
towards clear aim and objectives, supporting and flexible to individual needs
• confidence, understanding, discipline, empathy, fun, exciting, inspiring, role model, nurturing pastoral, flexible, firm, insturction, giving clear boundaries, ethical, management, patient, learning with your students
• generous with your time
CONSTRUCTIVE LEARNING
• Building on what you have
• Bringing what you have already had from experience
BIGGS, JOHN
Building research, look at ways in which people develop understanding. Two distinct types of learning. People choose to approach either Surface or Deep Learning.
Deep learners - deep learners need to understand fully e.g engaging with process
Biggs researched into different categories of learning. He wanted people to take the "deep" approach rather than the "surface" approach.
The features of Deep and Surface approaches can be summarised thus:
| Deep | Surface |
| Focus is on “what is signified” | Focus is on the “signs” (or on the learning as a signifier of something else) |
| Relates previous knowledge to new knowledge | Focus on unrelated parts of the task |
| Relates knowledge from different courses | Information for assessment is simply memorised |
| Relates theoretical ideas to everyday experience | Facts and concepts are associated unreflectively |
| Relates and distinguishes evidence and argument | Principles are not distinguished from examples |
| Organises and structures content into coherent whole | Task is treated as an external imposition |
| Emphasis is internal, from within the student | Emphasis is external, from demands of assessment |
(based on Ramsden, 1988)
