Learning How to Learn Boot Camp

In Fall 2019, I get to start doing something I've wanted to do for a long time – teach a course to students solely focused on learning how to learn. The class is entitled “Learning How to Learn Boot Camp,” [a.k.a. LHtL Boot Camp]! I will be co-teaching this course with Dr. Debra S. Korte, Teaching Assistant Professor in the Agricultural Education Program. Debra and I have worked together on a number of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research projects and now we have the opportunity to work together to develop and teach the LHtL Boot Camp course!

For some time now, I have incorporated a number of learning how to learn strategies in the introductory food science and human nutrition course (FSHN 101) I teach, with an overall goal of helping first semester freshman get their college careers off to a running start. I plan to keep doing this, as many students over the years have told me how helpful these learning how to learn strategies have been for them, in my course as well as in the other courses they are taking. But I feel like there is so much more that needs to be done and so many more students that need to learn how to learn! Thus, we are very eager to make the LHtL Boot Camp course a reality, because we believe this course has the potential to transform students into life-long learners, if the students will put what they are learning about learning into practice. The “if” part of this statement is actually very, very important and is the focus of the middle part of this editorial.

In this editorial, I would like to share with you some of the influencers that have come together to make launching this course a reality, the critical importance of noncognitive skills1 when it comes to students putting what they are learning about learning into practice, and some starter recommendations of what all teachers can do to help their students more effectively and efficiently learn the course content they are teaching them.

As I have shared in some of my JFSE editorials, my view of educating students has slowly but radically changed over the more than 30 years that I have been a teacher. For many of those years, I believed the weight of both teaching and student learning rested squarely on my shoulders (Schmidt, 2014). In my mind, I was responsible for both teaching AND learning. Then something happened; an encounter that changed my thinking forever. While discussing teaching over coffee one day, a visiting professor from a developing country shared an observation with me: “Students in the U.S. have everything they need to learn, yet they don't seem eager to learn; while students in my country have minimal resources, yet they have a very strong desire to learn. Why is this?”, he asked. Though I have interacted with many U.S. students that were eager to learn, I knew there was a strong element of truth in his statement that I could not deny. We finished our conversation and went our separate ways, but for many days to come, his words caused me to think long and hard. Something was awry. After much soul-searching, reading, discussing, and writing, I have now come to view teaching as a partnership between teacher and students. This partnership contains an inherent division of labor or responsibility. Teachers can only craft conditions to provide the opportunity for students to learn. Teachers cannot learn for their students; students must learn for themselves. As expressed by Simon (as quoted in Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010), “Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.” The job of the student is to learn. The job of the teacher is to positively and engagingly influence what the student does to learn. Teachers can teach students the subject matter, but they can also teach students how to learn that subject matter.

The second influencer leading us to begin intentionally and directly teaching students how to learn is the changing landscape of the working world. It used to be that students went to school to learn the knowledge and skills that they would use in their chosen careers for years to come. However, this is no longer the case. Nowadays, knowledge is but a fingertip away from nearly every student, and the careers students will pursue, as well as the associated skills, might not even exist yet (Elmore & McPeak, 2017). How can we prepare our students for careers and skills that don't even exist? In this day and age of rapid change, the best thing we can do is start teaching our students how to learn and adapt quickly, so they are ready to embrace and manage the change that awaits them. We must prepare our students to become effective and efficient life-long learners—it may be the most important thing we do for them. As articulated by Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel (2014), p. 200): “No matter what you may set your sights on doing or becoming, if you want to be a contender, it's mastering the ability to learn that will get you in the game and keep you there.” Thus, to help our students be successful in school and beyond, we need to teach students to be master learners!

The third influencer is the recent focus on many campuses on undergraduate student retention and success. According to the new The Chronicle of Higher Education report (2019), student success has become an institutional priority. How can we help the students who enter college to graduate and be successful in their careers? Though this is a complex question that has neither a simple nor one-size- fits-all answer, I think we can all agree that a key aspect of the solution should include teaching students how to learn.

The old saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink”2 seems rather apropos when it comes to the gap that we, and others, have discovered via our previous SoTL research on the use of exam wrappers (Gezer-Templeton, Mayhew, Korte, & Schmidt, 2017). Though a number of students reported a positive effect on both their study habits and their exam scores as a result of engaging in the exam wrapper assignment, there were also students that reported knowing what to do (for example, “I know I should study throughout the section and not just a few days before the exam…”), but sometimes have trouble actually doing it (“…but, I just can't seem to figure out how to get the time in my schedule to do it”). Thus, in our LHtL Boot Camp course, we are going to teach students the best learning practices AND help them develop the noncognitive skills to DO what they know is best to do. Both knowing and doing must be in sync for students to be successful!

The objective behind including these example lists from varied sources was not so that we could do a compare and contrast exercise (the lists overlap and each contain some pretty impactful success skills); rather, the purposes were: 1) to provide examples of some specific noncognitive factors to put “flesh on the bones” of the term noncognitive, and, moreover, 2) to draw attention to the emerging recognition of the critical importance of these noncognitive factors to students’ long-term success and the new challenge this raises for teachers seeking to prepare their students for college, as well as those students already in college (Farrington et al., 2012). Because of the growing evidence surrounding the critical importance of noncognitive skills to academic success, we will not only teach students evidence-based learning strategies in our LHtL Boot Camp course, using resources like Teach Yourself How to Learn by McGuire and McGuire (2018), but we must also focus on helping them develop the vital noncognitive skills, using resources such as The Art of Self-Leadership Habitudes by Elmore (2010) and Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Duckworth (2016).

I hope there are some ideas herein that strike a chord with you and somehow become useful in your teaching and learning pedagogy. As a teacher, there is no greater joy than helping students learn, except, of course, helping them become life-long learners!