Freedom to Learn

"They might have a much broader understanding of the way that this book has influenced teaching. The reason I have it on my list is because it’s influenced the way that I think about testing. Because even though the book is about learning, assessment is part of the way that we currently teach students. So you have teachers who obviously are teaching and hoping students learn, but are also part of a system of accountability and so we have assessments. This book, more than any other book that I have come across, articulates the importance of the social and the emotional variables that are important to consider not only when children are learning, but also when they’re being assessed. So for example, one of the great things about this book is that it involves issues of trust. As instructors, as teachers, are we trusted by our students? Are we trusted by them to have their best interests at heart? Are we trusted by them to help them when they make mistakes, to help them express themselves? Because trust is important if we are then going to give them feedback about where they need to improve and the methods by which they should improve. “Part of really feeling free to learn is that you feel supported in your entirety as a learner, not just cognitively but emotionally and socially.” And all of this is taking place within a social environment, with other children. Are those other children part of the learning process in a positive way? Is there empathy in that classroom? All these aspects, ultimately, all these variables, are important to consider at the end of the semester when children are completing their assessments or their final exams. Has a culture of learning truly been created in the classroom, or any kind of learning environment, that is supportive of learning, which then an assessment is designed to measure? I don’t think assessments can measure learning in isolation, although we try to. But it is really a social and collective process. Children don’t learn in isolation, certainly they are not isolated in classrooms, and we’re testing them in classrooms. This is an important part to consider. My understanding is that freedom to learn is the freedom to express yourself, and the freedom to make mistakes. Learning is a messy process. There are going to be ups and downs. So part of really feeling free to learn is that you feel supported in your entirety as a learner, not just cognitively but emotionally and socially. Children learn in different ways. Do we give all children the freedom to learn in their own way? Well, of course in classrooms it’s not possible to tailor instructions to each individual student, but is there at least recognition that there is not a one-size-fits-all and that we try and take steps to accommodate children who learn differently? We have to be careful with that. We don’t want to give children mixed messages. It’s very dangerous not to give children clear messages about where they are at, especially academically. Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with saying, ‘That answer is not correct. But let’s find out how you came up with that answer, and let’s see where you might have gone astray.’ Furthermore, if a student and a teacher have a trusting relationship, then there is room to be supportive but honest. The reason I became interested in educational testing is because my psychological research was focused on measuring logical reasoning. So my PhD research and also my post-doctoral research were all focused on uncovering why it was that in the 1960s and 1970s psychologists were using a certain task called the ‘Wason’ task to evaluate the level of logical reasoning competence that undergraduates had. One of the things that I found most intriguing with this research was that I considered the task to be very biased in the way it was prompting students to produce their responses. It assumed that these students who were responding to the task had a certain level of knowledge in the area of what is called ‘deductive logic.’ So I began to scrutinise and really think more deeply about the way that we assess knowledge and skills in the population. We think about these items and tasks, even in psychology, as things that are fairly direct measures. In fact, they’re anything but direct measures—especially when we are trying to measure things that are unobservable, like reasoning process, problem solving, evaluation, analysis, creativity. These are all unobservable constructs."