What is the greatest hope an educator can have for a student? While the hope that the student absorbs the content of a course and can demonstrate a high level of mastery though performance is certainly a worthy goal, when educators share their deepest hope, it is that their students are motivated to not only engage in actively learning content, but seek to move beyond the confines and constraints of the classroom, a specific instructor, and any given term or semester…that students demonstrate a desire to learn ever more, becoming adept at seeking out and mastering new knowledge on their own. To see a student move from accepting information and using it to actively and intentionally seeking it out and becoming ever more capable of learning on his or her own is an amazing and deeply affirming experience for any educator.

Pacific Crest developed the Levels of Learner Performance as a way to explain and understand the continuum between those who have developed a specific knowledge base, with specific skills, for a specific context (Trained Individuals) and those who continually develop their own skills, are able to mentor their own growth, and seek to improve their ability to learn, regardless of content or context (Self-Growers).

Learning Skills and Self-Growth

We probably all agree that we want ourselves and our students to be Self-Growers. But how does someone progress towards being a Self-Grower? There are several characteristics that all Self-Growers share, but one of the most critical is the ability to improve one’s own ability to learn. It can be difficult to appreciate the difference between the learning of content and learning how to learn, as the act of learning always involves content of some kind. Knowing how to calculate the half-life of a given sample of radioactive isotope, how to solve a quadratic equation, or how to correctly annotate a research paper are all skills, and all require content-based learning whether in chemistry, mathematics, or composition/writing. But each of these specific competencies also involves shared skills that are not content or context-specific: defining a problem, controlling errors, interpreting, and validating, to name a few. These broad-based skills are called Learning Skills. Improvement in any given learning skill, such as defining a problem, leads to improved performance in any situation that requires the ability to define a problem, (and what situation does not?), which is a net improvement in the ability to learn, regardless of content. Learning skills and the ability to acquire, use, and improve them are therefore inextricably linked to improvement in performance across contexts.

This does not mean that learning content is not critically important; this is most assuredly not a case of “either/or”: either students learn course content or they learn how to learn. This is a false dichotomy, as the improvement of learning skills – learning how to learn more effectively – can only improve students’ ability to absorb, master, and apply specific course content.

Transfer and Generalization

While it’s really not possible to help students learn how to learn (improve their ability to learn) without a specific context (such as course content), it is all too easy to focus only upon course content, with little regard for students’ ability to do more than become Trained Individuals, able to perform well only within a specific context. When that mode of teaching predominates, students react by compartmentalizing, narrowing their focus to specific information, striving for competency with that information. This is not a bad thing, by any means – students are, after all, achieving content-based competency. But it is an impoverished and limited approach because students will not be able to extend the learning they have done across new situations or content – each piece of information is seen as discrete and not connected to anything else. Math skills, such as solving for a variable, are forever seen as belonging to a specific math course, applicable to only certain types of math problems. The more broad-based skills of problem-solving, which is what they are doing, to some degree, are not developed and learners are thus unable to generalize any learning they have done. When they encounter a similar challenge, in another context or course, they often fail to recognize that the same kind of problem-solving skills that they have already used are still valid and, more importantly, can be applied in this new context.

This is depressing to witness and can lead educators to speculate that little learning occurred in a previous course, even by students who achieved a high grade, thus ostensibly demonstrating some level of mastery of the subject matter. This is often not true; what happened is simply that the focus of that class was almost exclusively on content with little regard for encouraging the use and growth of learning skills that would have enabled students to transfer their learning across contexts

Classifying Learning Skills

Improving students’ ability to learn is at the heart of Process Education and informs everything we do. We developed the Classification of Learning Skills, building on the work of Benjamin Bloom (Taxonomy of Educational Objectives). Initial work on The Classification of Learning Skills focused on the cognitive domain, looking primarily at critical thinking and problem solving skills. Efforts to build the social domain coincided with research projects such as the SCANS Report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills), which pointed out the need to help students develop communication, teamwork, and management skills. Daniel Goleman’s seminal work on emotional intelligence profoundly informed the work on the affective domain learning skills.

Learning skills are woven throughout our student curricula, with each activity specifically targeting at least three learning skills. In addition, one of the central goals of our faculty development program is to help faculty understand and appreciate the utility of learning skills, empowering them to create curricula and learning situations where learning skills are targeted and reinforced by their own work in the classroom.

Teaching informed by learning skills is a win-win: Student performance increases in any specific context, as well as across contexts and students become more empowered learners, increasingly able to improve their own ability to learn, placing them firmly on the path of self-growth.