What Did You Learn (At School) Today?

What did you learn at school today?  I heard a parent say this to her child the other day while walking in their direction.  The child said he learned 'Nothing', but his mother pushed him for an answer 'You had to have learned something!'.  I saw the contemplation on the child's face as I passed him and his mother, but never got to hear his response as I walked on.  Witnessing this event gave me flashbacks to my own school days when my parents, some aunt or uncle visiting, or indeed a neighbour would ask the same question.  It felt like talking about the weather, but laboured small talk between a grown up and a child.  In many instances (not all!), I never really felt the person cared if I genuinely tried to answer the question.  Hence, I would avoid the effort required to think, reflect on, and articulate what I had actually learned, and would retort 'Nothing'.

The question 'What did you learn at school today?' typically does conjure up the image of an older family member asking a child such a question.  Why is it that such a question does not immediately conjure up the image of a school teacher or that of a classmate asking a similar question?  Even if the 'at school' was removed from the question one may still not think of a teacher first.  An important way in which people learn is by reflecting on their experiences (Dewey, 1933). Hence, it would be expected that this is something that should occur very often in schools.   However,  many classes end with the bell ringing while the teacher is still in mid-sentence and/or the students are only a few minutes into a new activity.  Planned activities can go on longer than expected and a teacher may decide to just carry on from where they left off in the previous lesson.  In such instances, students have not been given the opportunity to consolidate new ideas covered in the lesson with their previous understanding.  However, such consolidation may be expected to be done as homework.  Homework can certainly play a role in encouraging student reflection, but the beginning of such reflection would be better started in the classroom.

Simply taking five minutes at the end of a lesson for reflection can very valuable.  The five minutes is not a recap in asking students generic questions about the content or activities, but involves asking students what they learned from today's lesson.  This is valuable to every student in that they can articulate what they have learned, but also see what they may have missed from their peers' responses.  Students could also ask each other in pairs or threes what they learned today and then contribute it to the rest of the class through a whole class discussion. Such activities would certainly prepare students to answer what they learned today or what they should have at least learned.

It is also good to ask students questions that they still have from the lesson and they should still have questions if the lesson has in any way been thought-provoking!  These questions are best not answered, but are left with the students as food for thought until the following lesson and in many ways can serve as the basis for much more meaningful homework than assigning questions from a workbook.  As Richard Feynman once said 'It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.'  Schools should develop an equal student appreciation of both answers and questions.  Maybe some day the question most associated with a parent talking to their child after school will not be what did you learn but 'What questions do you have after school today?'.

Reference:
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: D.C. Heath.