The shortcut to faster and better learning

Learning for your own reasons is vastly different from learning to satisfy someone else’s requirements.

If a student has been assigned a chapter to read (say, on the ancient civilization of Mohenjo-Daro), she will pursue this task fairly shallowly if she’s only out to prove to her teacher that she read it. She’ll go through the material, answer the questions, and move on.

On the other hand, if the student has her own reasons for wanting to learn about this topic, she will go far deeper. She will reread paragraphs that are unclear. She will seek additional resources on this topic beyond the three pages in her book. These days, that is supremely easy: YouTube, Wikipedia, and countless other resources are just a click away. She’ll watch documentaries, study maps, and find herself learning about the entire Indus Valley Civilization or even studying all of South Asian history.

She will ask questions on things she’s confused about. She’ll look up the meaning of words she doesn’t know. She’ll tell someone else about what she is learning in an effort to make it clear in her mind (or because she’s so excited about what she’s learning that she just wants to share it).

Because she’s paying attention to her own growth, she’s going to make the investment on her own to learn the material.

How do we help students get to this point?

There are a few different ways to move in that direction, although none are guaranteed.

We can make space. When there is too much work already, no one wants to do more.

We can share our own authentic excitement. This is how entire families become campers, hikers and mountain-bikers, novel readers, world travelers, surfers and swimmers.

We can meet them where they are. Kids are already interested in stuff on their own terms. We can roll our eyes at it, or we can embrace it and help them dig deeper.

Much of formal education is simply a place to park students and give them something to do until they take responsibility for their own education. It’s nice if they don’t have to wait until they’re midway through college for this to click. In the meantime, we can encourage behaviors that we see toward the ultimate goal of self-motivation — and we can model them ourselves.