Digital education HAS NOT changed . . .
. . . the great ideals of learning.
Making thinking visible: How to promote, engagements, understanding, and independence for all learners. By Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison. Foreword by David Perkins. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 2011. 294 pp. $29.95. softcover.
Online learning has changed education forever. Whether a class is synchronous, asynchronous, hybrid – in its various forms – or still face-to-face, how students think incorporates screen-time more than class-time. Research once done in carrells at libraries, books stacked around the cubicle, are largely absent. Lectures are often unpackaged video where professors largely teach as if they were in the lecture hall. Zoom® with white board and small group components is meant to replace a classroom setting. Textbooks often have a “E” preceding “book” or digitized copies of articles have now replaced time spent in front of a copy machine awaiting a paper product.
The above-mentioned items together with questions about the function of the university itself make the future of higher education uncertain. What has not changed, however, is the necessity of teaching itself. Teaching will continue. The form it takes is morphing as it has over centuries, over millennia. To be sure, however, the key components of teaching will never change. One of the reasons I describe myself as one of the academe’s “Perennialists” is because I believe in universal, transcendent standards which God has embedded in His world. I believe in the great ideas and ideals that have been passed from generation to generation. And I think there are certain ways of learning that will always be with us.
Many methods have universal application. Undergraduate and graduate professors may find such methods antithetic to what they do: delivery of content. The problem with the word “delivery” is getting the deliverables to the person(s) destination. “How?” is not the key for delivery. “Who?” is a better question. If someone has given time and treasure to learning, learning should be consequential, a permanent mark, a tattoo on the brain. Enter Making Learning Visible. Professors should help students make verbal-visual connections. The point is not just about power point. In fact, power point may inhibit lifelong connections. No, the foci of Richhart, Church, and Morrison is “broad applicability . . . across a range of subject areas” (xxii).
For the Christocentric professor the concept of biblical synthesis could not be any more obvious. We Christian educators believe in coherence (Col 1:17), world-wide study of God’s creation (Ps 111:2), pondering all God’s work in creation (Ps 65:5-8), and the leader’s responsibility to explain the God-centered view of life (1 Kings 4:29-34). By our study of Scripture, we have come to grasp the power of what animals can teach us (Isa 1:3; Jer 8:7), metaphorical word pictures (Isa 5), the need to connect the natural with the supernatural (2 Kings 6), and the essential idea that every epistemological field has its own taxonomy (Gen 2:19-20). Making Learning Visible borrows its capital from God’s created world; and we should not be surprised (Prov 8:12-31).
Each of eight chapters is brimming with insights and ideas immediately applicable to the classroom. Part One, chapters one and two, focus on “thinking” itself and how visibility serves the educational process. Part Two, chapters three through six, is the all-important connection to routines in learning. Exploration, organization, and question enter the discussion. Part Three, chapters seven and eight, focuses on what is often forgotten, the importance of place in learning. Example after example is given to demonstrate what we see impacts how we think. Documentation of resources should extend reflection (38).
All educators depend on “prior knowledge” but making the connection can be lost without a “bridge” (86). “CSI” takes on new meaning when associated with “color, symbol, image” (119). Moving from “abstract” to “concrete” thinking creates new methodological approaches (125-27). The “connect-extend-challenge” process is worth the price of the book for the professor who applies the principles (132-39). The “4 C’s” is useful for any subject of study dedicated to analysis and deduction (140-46). If we truly believe the power culture has on anything then we can model “the forces that shape culture” in our teaching, even varying our assessment processes (240-41). Method displays our belief in God-given intellect, the wholeness of the person, what Vygotsky calls growing “into the intellectual life around them” (220). How one learns is as important as what one learns.
If I could put this book in the hands of every professor in Christian universities, I would. Some will say, “But that’s for K-12 settings!” My response, “We apply elementary learning principles everywhere.” Others will contend, “But my discipline is scientifically detailed; mastery of detail is essential.” My response, “All the more reason to apply visual learning for better mental recall.” Still more will counter, “I don’t have time to add learning strategies.” My response, “If you don’t teach with a multiplicity of learning strategies, student learning will be stunted.” Making Learning Visual is brimming with so many ideas, all a professor need do is “plug and play” into any course content. Content is epistemological gold in any subject. But mining the ore for the gold is the artform. The job of every higher education instructor, indeed, the job of every instructor everywhere, is the intersection of content with communication of the content.
Recently, I was collaborating in a class with some of my public university colleagues online. After mentioning this book, all the members of that class purchased the book and could not get over the benefit those ideas held for their teaching. We should not be surprised that everyone everywhere resonates with true Truth wherever it is found. The Psalmist also declares, “The whole earth fears . . . and ponders what He has done” (Ps 64:9).
Review by Mark D. Eckel, President, The Comenius Institute, Indianapolis, IN; Professor of Leadership, Education and Discipleship, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, Lancaster, PA. [First published, February, 2019 in Christian Education Journal]