Helping learners grow as learners

While learning is a natural innate human ability, becoming a good learner is not. In whatever context of learning, whether in a graduate studies classroom, university, or Sunday school class effective teachers understand that part of their job is to help students become good learners. Researcher William Perry has identified nine stages of a student’s development. He grouped these stages into four substages.

Received Knowledge

The earliest stages are characterized by either-or thinking (a dualistic taxonomy). At these stages the student will believe that there is a single answer, sees knowledge as a set of truths, and will perceive the teacher as authorities who have the “right answers.” For this student the teacher’s role is to give authoritative explanations. At this stage the student takes a dependent epistemological stance that gives preference to “received knowledge.” This student becomes uncomfortable when they are asked to think independently, draw their own conclusions, or share their own point of view. They can also feel unsure when persons they see as authorities disagree.

Subjective Knowledge

With more experience and challenge students move on to the next stages. As learners encounter more areas of disagreement among experts and authorities, compare different interpretations, and encounter issues that have no definitive answers they are able to revise their thinking. Knowledge no longer consists of right-or-wrong but a matter of informed opinions and positions of conviction. Typical of this stage all opinions may be seen as “equally valid.”

Procedural Knowledge

If students are exposed to teachers who challenge them in critical thinking (asking for evidence to support opinions) and as students are able to distinguish strong and valid arguments from weak and inappropriate they come to appreciate that knowledge is contextual and situational. In other words, what one “knows” is relative and influenced by one’s values, assumptions, prejudices, perspectives, and scope of experience. At this stage learners can accept that ambiguity is a part of life. Students at this stage can come to accept that their teachers and authorities may have expertise in certain areas, but not in everything. And they can accept a narrower role for the teacher—someone who can help them learn certain things in certain areas for certain ends.

Commitment in Relativism

In the final stage students can begin to take their own stands on issues on the basis of their own analysis. They can also appreciate that their interpretation of knowledge—their opinions and beliefs—are reflective of their values, experience and scope of knowledge. This level manifests a type of constructed knowledge that can integrate knowledge learned from others with knowledge learned from self-experience and self-reflection.

Can you see your own intellectual growth and development in that progression? To what degree? Was your development different? Do you have a different schema for intellectual or cognitive development as a learner?

Barbara Davis recommends these strategies for helping your learners grow as learners:

• Gear your teaching to appropriate phases of intellectual development
• Plan activities that will help your students move to higher levels of cognitive development
• Create assignments that entail the development of alternative perspectives
• Include real-world experiences in your courses
• Be sensitive to student’s struggles
• Give students a framework within which to fit new facts
• Remember that students’ previous knowledge exerts a powerful influence on what they will learn
• Stress concepts, not facts
• Provide opportunities for active learning.

SOURCES: W. G. Perry, Jr. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Barbara Gross Davis, Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993.