The big picture of meaningful learning

Aims of teaching and learning

The purpose of learning is to become a person who recongnizes and asks questions, solves problems, creates knowledge, uses knowledge creatively, or be able to appreciate the creation and creative use of knowledge. The purpose of teaching is to help learners better achieve the above purpose of learning, via for example helping learners to learn how to learn.

Repetitive use of knowledge，which means to use knowledge in the ways and for the situations that it has been used before, is not the primary goal of teaching and learning.

Disciplnary big picture

Or a big picture of a discipline refers to the typical subjects of interest, the typical research questions, the typical ways of thinking, the typical methods of analysis of the discipline, and how the discipline serves the world and other disciplines.

Knowledge levels and knowledge generators

Knowledge is divided into four levels. The first level refers to the factual and procedural knowledge. The second level refers to the disciplinary concepts and the connection between concepts. The third level of knowledge refers to the disciplinary big picture, especially the typical ways of thinking of each disciplines. The fourth level refers to the general ways of thinking, for example, critical thinking and connected thinking, and methods of the teaching and learning based on these thinking. Among them, the second-level knowledge is called the generator of the first-level knowledge, also called “Shallow Knowledge Generator”; the third-level knowledge is called the generator of the second and first-level knowledge; the fourth level knowledge is called the third, second, and first-level knowledge generator; the latter two are called “Advanced Knowledge Generator”.

The network formed by clearly marking the up-down, left-right connections among all the knowledge of a discipline is called the knowledge network of the discipline. The combination of all the knowledge networks of the various disciplines, plus that of those knowledge that have not become any independent disciplines, is called the “human knowledge highway”.

Meaningful learning, seeing through the up-down and left-right connections

Meaningful learning refers to the way of teaching and learning that uses the connections between the upper and lower levels of knowledge or the left-right connections between knowledge at the same level. Conversely, the process of learning knowledge through repeated memorization and recall exercises without using the up-down and left-right connections between knowledge is called rote learning. Often, we also call the bottom-up process as induction or abstraction, and the top-down process as generation, deduction or application.

Deep teaching and learning

The levels of the targeted knowledge of a teaching and learning process determines the level of that teaching and learning. For example, goals of “first-level teaching and learning” is to acquire some first-level knowledge.

Shallow teaching and learning is defined as the process of teaching and learning all four levels of knowledge rotely and also the meaningful learning of the first-level knowledge. Halfway teaching and learning is defined as the meaningful learning of the second-level knowledge. Finally, deep teaching and learning refers to the meaningful learning of the third- and forth-level knowledge. Thus, deep teaching and learning is also the meaningful learning aimed at advanced knowledge generators。

Meaningful learning aimed at advanced knowledge generators over human knowledge highway

As you might have seen from above, the new model of education that we are researching and promoting is meaningful learning aimed at advanced knowledge generators over human knowledge highway. It is also called deep teaching and learning over human knowledge highway, or sometimes shorted as deep teaching and learning, or simply meaningful learning.

With this new model of education, from making use of the up-down and left-right connections, from learning torwards the advanced knowledge generators especially the displinary big pictures, we will be able to achieve “Teach Less, Learn More”, “The more advanced we learn, the less we need to memorize, the more connections we can see, and the lower the the learning cost”. Eventually, every learner can find, learn, design and become what they want to be, of course if necessary guided by teachers. Such teaching and learning should also be able to promote the creation of knowledge and the creative use of knowledge.

Of course, all those expectations of this new model of education will have to wait for concrete investigations to either validate or falisify it.

There is a slides version of this not-so-short introduction: An overview of IESS.