What Does Learning Look Like?

I played a lot of basketball with my friends. 

I’m tall, I’m the kind of person who regularly gets asked if they played basketball in high school, I did indeed spend a lot of time playing basketball on weekends, or at a friends house, or at parks around Lancaster County.  I was more of a soccer and tennis player, I was a basically a competent basketball player – it wasn’t necessarily favorite sport, but I was exactly good enough not to stand out in either direction, and when I was in 10th grade my friends put some pressure on me to actually play school basketball and because I didn’t have a great reason not to, I did.

To be clear, I had played a lot of basketball, but I hadn’t played any formal basketball.  I could dribble, I could shoot, I could box out, I understood the game the way that you understand a game if you just play it a lot. 

What I had never in my entire life done is: play in a gym with actual fans shouting the way they do. Or, participate in a full court press.  Or run a defense more complex than sort of standing around with my hands raised.

And I had certainly never, in my life, run an actual motion offense.

The performing arts gives us useful models for how “performance based assessment” works.

My friends told me to play, so I played.  Preseason was preseason.  It was two weeks of sprints and Mikan drills and reviewing plays and “running the offense”.  My friends had been playing the game this way for years; they had this intuition about the decisions you make during live play – “If the ball swings right, you cross over and set a pick and then pop out, but if it swings left you stay on the wing and watch the center, but if the center flashes up then you fill in…” – that seemed so stupefyingly obvious to them that I was afraid even to ask questions. In fact, I was so lost on the court that I wasn’t even sure what the first question would be that I would ask.  

But I was also good at faking it.  And I could fill out a piece of paper that diagrammed plays.  So at practice I made myself semi-invisible and loudly said things like: “Got it coach!” in a way that belied a level of understanding I absolutely did not have.  Coach told me the right things to do, I told him I would, I had no evidence whatsoever that I actually could.

And then: it happened.

About a quarter and a half into the first game of the season – a game that actually mattered – a player ahead of me got into early foul trouble, and Coach Cesarone subbed me me into the first formal basketball game I have ever played in.

I lasted less than 30 seconds.

What I remember is: the lights seemed different, and so did the noise.  I literally couldn’t believe how much faster my friends were playing than every other time we had played together.  And as soon as we went on offense, I couldn’t even figure out where I was supposed to be in order to start what was the most basic of motion offenses.  Was I subbed in as a 4 or a 5?  Why didn’t anyone tell me?  If it is the case that I am a 4 (or am I a 5?) where does the 4 stand so that I can look to see which direction my friend passed the ball and know what to do and also why hasn’t he passed the ball in this game the same predictable way he did at every other practice…

And...what is happening here?

Thirty seconds.  A fast hook.  A long and pretty tough walk back to the bench.

I could do it in practice.  But I couldn’t actually play the game when the game was being played.

***

How can field research better prepare our students for actual work in STEM fields?

Whenever I ask people in my life what learning looks like, I notice that I seem to get a certain kind of answer: “I know I’ve learned something when I can do it without help”.  “I know I’ve learned something when I can do it in front of other people.”  Or: “I know I’ve learned something when I can teach it to someone else.”  Or: “I know I’ve learned something when I can use that skill to make something new.”

We know we’ve learned something when we can do it in an “authentic” way, in an authentic context.

When it comes to basketball, I did in fact learn.  I learned by taking discrete skills that were being taught in practice, and applying them to increasingly complex – and increasingly authentic – situations.  I played JV, I played varsity, over the course of my high school basketball career I started a few games and played in playoff games and played (sparingly) in a league championship game that was more Hoosiers than can possibly be explained.

I was told what to do by a teacher — Coach Cesarone.  But it wasn’t repeating “what to do” back to him that was my evidence I had learned. My evidence was that, over time, I could apply what my teacher asked of me in increasingly complex and authentic situations.  

Which begs the question: if that is what learning looks like, should that be what school looks like?

For this week of Admissions Season, we are opening up a conversation about learning itself – what it looks like when it’s happening, how we know when we’ve done it, how we can design for it.  And we’re going to explore a conundrum — that learning how to play and being able to play are not the same thing — while also wondering how authentic experience can serve as the best way to measure depth of capture and transfer of learning.

But before we get to all of that, let me ask you a question. When was the last time you learned something?  Like really, deeply learned something?

What did it that learning like?

And: how did you know?

-Mike Simpson, Head of School

(You are always welcome to share learning stories with me at at simpsonm@stoneindependent.org)