Learning to Learn to Learn

My first Substack post : )

What am I doing here?

Hi I’m Chris :) This is my first substack post and also the first in a series about learning.

I'm a full-time PhD researcher in New Testament.

That means I don't have an official title or position right now other than "student" (read: I am effectively unemployed). And in the absence of something else to put on my business card, I consider myself a professional learner. That's what research is, right?

Right now, I'm in a course called "Pedagogical Experience." The point of the course is to shadow a teacher and learn from them how to teach. We also are reading a few books dealing the nature of teaching and learning (pedagogy). Recently, we read Dee Fink's classic Creating Significant Learning Experiences.

The book is interesting, and I'll be highlighting some of his best points in future posts, but for now I just want to point out one key claim. Fink argues that the highest level of learning is the meta level: learning how to learn. That may sound simple—or like a liberal-arts college slogan—but I think it's actually profound for a few reasons.

Learning from Fink

First and foremost, his point is unnerving because it prompts the immediate evaluative question: how much of my education was focused on learning how to learn? Where/when did I learn how to learn? ... Have I learned how to learn?

Think about it. What percentage of your time in school was listening to someone talk about what they know? Was that teaching you how to learn? (that's not a rhetorical question, I think some lectures can accomplish this).

Second, it's profound because it actually happens. We do learn to learn, whether or not we are conscious of it. Learning to learn is something we can do. It's something we have already done. You've learned things. Where did you learn how to do that? If you wanted to learn something new, where would you start? Where did that intuitive answer come from?

But I think the most interesting thing about Fink's point is that its recursive. I builds on itself. When you truly, deeply, learn, you learn to learn, and that prompts more learning.

This is where it gets spooky: right now, I'm in a class about learning how to teach, and the main point is that you want to teach people to learn. So we are learning how to teach people to learn. And the highest level of learning how to teach people to learn is learning how to learn how to teach people to learn.

At some point the words lose their meaning (and I start to question what exactly I'm doing with my career). But, this perspective represents a fundamental shift from how we typically think about education. Rather than seeing teaching as a one-way transfer of knowledge, this approach views it as catalyzing a transformative relationship with learning itself. This is a significantly different understanding of education from the one we typically swim around in.

Transformed by Truth: Two Approaches to Learning

Generally, we think learning is important because knowing what is true is important. So, we tend to emphasize the moment of revelatory insight. And that makes sense. It's better to know the truth than believe falsehoods. So, having a teacher who tells you the truth can be life-changing. But that kind of life-change is a sort of one-off event, like getting glasses that correct bad vision. Now you can see reality as it is! Before people were blobs, now you see faces. Before leaves were smudges of color, now you see their veins and the insects crawling on them.

But imagine if you got these new glasses, saw the details of a human face, the legs of a spider, and never asked new questions. I think it's fair to say that would be a kind of failure of education. Not a failure with respect to the accuracy of what you've been taught (you are seeing the truth), but a failure with respect to the purpose of education (you aren't a learner). New insight has to spur new inquiry. So, a teacher who helped you see rightly but didn't give you the tools to learn about what you see would be doing maybe half of their job. Arguably even less.

I think Fink's insight would push us to say that real education makes us into learners. So, teachers who tell facts but don't equip students to relate to the world as inquirers have fallen significantly short.

But let's not get hung up on the negative. What if a teacher fixed your glasses AND taught you how to learn? Now you're wondering about the movement of human faces and the subtle differences in emotional expression; now you're studying botany. Now you relate to the world as a learner--as one seeking after more and deeper truths. And the answers you find will lead to new questions--new insights, new inquiries.

This kind of life-change isn't one-off, it's recursive.

Here's the point: great teachers teach people (how) to take charge of their own ongoing transformation. In other words, a great teacher can set your life on an exponentially different trajectory. They don't just tell you the truth, they facilitate a process that changes you into a person who relates to the truth differently.

Just one final sidebar: do you see how the difference between learner 1 (the failed learner) and learner 2 (the successful learner) is more than just the volume of knowledge gained? Obviously learner 2 knows way more than learner 1. But that conclusion misses the point. The point is that learner 2 relates to the world completely differently. For example, there are some facts they both know, but learner 2 relates to those facts with questions, wonder, and desire to know more deeply.

At the risk of putting it sickly-sweetly, learner 1 knows truths, learner 2 knows truth. For those familiar with spanish, you might say learner 1 sabe verdades, learner two conoce la verdad.

From Theory to Practice: Learning to Learn

There's a story that illustrates this in chapter 5 of the Gospel of John. Jesus heals a paralyzed man who has been immobile for 38 years. Imagine that! For the first time in his adult life, he can run. But after this very brief scene, the man disappears from the narrative. He's never mentioned again in the story or in other stories of the early church. I wonder how long his new-found mobility even lasted. 30 more years? 50? One commentator summarizes by saying, "This is a sad story in which a man is merely healed." Imagine if God-in-flesh visited you and all you got was a one-off healing.

Compare this story to the healing of the blind man in John 9 or the resurrection of Lazarus in ch. 11 and you see the commentator's point. Mere, one-off healing is not the desired end for an encounter with the One who claims to be the Truth. We can hope for better.

If our encounters with truth have merely corrected our vision, then our education is, ultimately, a sad story. On the other hand, in the process of learning how to learn, we can become people who relate to truth differently, and there's no telling what kind of transformations that kind of catalytic encounter could lead to.

All of this is a kind of long-winded introduction. Over the next handful of posts, I'm going to be writing about learning and learning to learn. And I hope the above introduction provides a bit of a justification for all the words I'll write. Simply put, I think learning to learn is probably the most important skill a person can learn. And all the above has also helped refine what I mean by "learning to learn." So here's a preliminary definition: learning to learn is entering a life-long relationship with truth characterized by wonder.

Over the next few posts, I'll share some insights from other authors about how we learn, how we change our minds, what a relationship to truth can look like, and some concrete tools for learning.

My hope is that writing these pieces will help me clarify my thinking and encourage you in your own process of ongoing transformation.

Peace, Chris