EDU510: Blog 2

Why Teachers Should Encourage Students to ‘Play the Whole Game'

David Perkins' theory of teaching and learning offers instructors an art and science approach to how students should be learning.

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The public education system has been in existence for more than 150 years (Boyce, 2019). Although significant changes have occurred over the last 20 years to enhance the modern learning experience (such as digital learning technologies, collaboration and video tools, and digital media), much of it has stayed the same regarding teaching students the art and science of how to learn.

However, even before digital education changed the way people learn and think about education, author David Perkins introduced a theory of teaching and learning in 1992 that is distinctly different from traditional teaching methods. This article offers an overview of some key elements of his theory.

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Perkins' Whole Game Learning Approach

The challenge of designing instruction that enhances learning is omnipresent across all ages and within all learning environments, from academic and professional settings to employee work training and personal development endeavors. This is mainly because it’s difficult to explain consciousness in a scientific way related to learning. After all, so many of its aspects involve philosophical facets like metacognition, emotions, motivation, and self-awareness.

However, Perkins’ educational approach to teaching and learning challenges teachers and instructional designers to create an innovative curriculum and creative environment that keeps in mind strategies and activities that help learners to better understand the content, hold their interest and attention, and leverage cognitive skills like memory and association. In other words: teach content that will stick with the learner. As a result, teachers and learners will become more competent in their respective roles.

Perkins’ theory focuses on “playing the whole game” and “making learning whole,” relating to understanding the bigger picture of what is being taught versus only learning isolated pieces.

For example, using his theory, a science class would study not only how pollution affects their residential neighborhoods but all the environmental world, too. If students are cognitively not yet able to understand this larger concept, Perkins advocates for delivering a “junior version” to younger students. Using the same example, the lesson might discuss how a messy front yard and sidewalk could affect the local street.

Creating a “junior version” of learning makes a guess at students’ developmental levels and allows you to start with entry-level questions and scaffold your way up to larger, more abstract ideas and questions. For example, “Why do you think that?” and “How do you feel?” will later evolve into more critical thinking inquiries.

Perkins’ theory also strongly invites Piaget's constructivism theory into the “game,” which says students use their own experiences and reflections to construct understanding for themselves. This contrasts with the old-school way of a teacher spoon-feeding prefabricated ideas and telling learners what and how to think.

To understand Perkins’ theory and instructional approaches, one must be familiar with some of the earlier aspects of his learning theory and how they play into the game. These aspects are emotions, motivation, working on the hard parts, and cognition and metacognition.

EMOTIONS

Emotions either motivate or demotivate our lives. It’s important to understand what drives us to feel and do the things we do; to prosper or shrink, to self-actualize or self-degrade, to persevere or to resign. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that related to educational learning, emotions are a significant influence on a learner’s motivation and self-efficacy for learning something beyond their comfort zone.

Cambridge University Press shares that there is no aspect of learning that doesn’t involve emotions. By creating positive and encouraging emotions in the classroom, students will engage and feel more encouraged to participate and conquer challenging learning lessons.

Perkins (2009, p.30) believes that playing the whole game should involve learning that is not emotionally flat; it should include “curiosity, discovery, creativity, [and] camaraderie.” In other words, learning should not be routine and dull.

A few ideas on how to do this:

• Learning should require not only problem solving but problem finding to encourage learners to think larger.

• Students should be given a task (even while watching a video or listening to a lecture) because it “helps to keep them processing ideas actively” (Perkins, 2009, p.46).

• The right kind of music can evoke emotions that promote learning, openness, mindfulness, and creativity. For example, it has been said that Walt Whitman wrote his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass while listening to the opera, and Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the rap musical Hamilton because he loved hip-hop music (Proulx, 2018).

• Teachers should allow students wait time to think mindfully about their answer after being asked a question (Perkins, 2009).

• Self-reflection time allows learners to calibrate their ideas, beliefs, and understanding, instead of quickly responding without thought due to fear or discomfort. This becomes even more valuable in a learning environment.

Children can experience anxiety when learning for many reasons – like not raising their hand for fear of answering wrong, not feeling smart enough, worried about pleasing their parents or others, taking timed tests, etc. All emotions are useful because they help determine what makes us engage or disengage (Meulleur, 2021), but teachers and learners especially need to know how to stay conscious of what emotions are telling them at the moment.

For example, a 30-year veteran of stage comedy once told me he still feels anxious before every show, and he’s glad for this feeling. His anxiety is indicative that he cares about his craft and prevents him from becoming lax in his attention and efforts. Likewise, when I get the jitters before a big work event, I hunker down in preparation even harder, thankful for the tell-tale emotions that keep me on my toes.

Emotions play an essential role in learning because the brain functions better when positive emotions are present. Neuroscience revealed that to “encode learning, the brain needs to feel surprised” or have something to trigger emotions (Meulleur, 2019).

It is suitable, then, to recall author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou’s words, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Learning will stick if teachers can evoke positive emotions in their students.

MOTIVATION

Knowing what drives us (or someone else) can help us to help ourselves (or them) to get motivated (Cherry, 2022) – or do something different than will lead to motivation.

There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it feels fun or exciting or is personally rewarding to you.

Extrinsic motivation is when you do something because of outside influence, and you want to earn something (like a reward or recognition) or avoid punishment. For example, if an employee aspires to learn a new software program at work because she enjoys computers, her motivation is intrinsic. However, if she completes a required training course because she doesn’t want to lose her job, there is extrinsic motivation at play. An interesting twist is that if the training course makes her better at her job, it can enhance intrinsic motivation, perpetuating more interest in learning. When people feel accomplished, they are more likely to want to learn more (Li, 2022).

WORKING ON THE HARD PARTS

According to Perkins (2009), to get good at something, you must work on the “hard parts.” Doing this takes deliberate practice. Therefore, teachers must look for, embrace, and challenge the hard parts in lessons that they anticipate learners will find struggling. Perhaps more importantly, it’s not just about students “fixing” their mistakes but strengthening their understanding in an area that gives them trouble.

Feedback from teachers, classmates, peers, and students’ self-reflective assessment can help identify problem areas and offer strategies for possible solutions.

However, Perkins (2009) also tells teachers that they shouldn’t wait until learners stumble onto the hard parts because there are commonly known types of “troublesome knowledge” that get tricky for people.

A few of these troublesome learning areas are:

RITUAL KNOWLEDGE

This knowledge often satisfies immediate demands because it checks the box on what’s needed at the moment.

For example, I struggled with my college Quantitative Analysis (math) course. Still, I got an A because of my good studying skills, not because I understood the material enough to retain it after the class ended. A solution could have been if I’d found a relevant association to using the math equations in my real life, then the learning would have stuck. Also, a hands-on experiment would have helped cement the learning had it not been an online course. Another example of ritual knowledge is a grade school assignment I had in the 70s when we needed to memorize the latitudes and longitudes of foreign countries.

INERT KNOWLEDGE

This is forgotten information stored away in our minds until something triggers the need for it. While walking down a street in a vacation town with my son, I wondered out loud why there were spikes along all the building windowsills. He said they were to prevent birds from landing on (thus soiling) the windowsills. Amazed that he knew this, I asked where he learned this tidbit, but he couldn’t recall. This is an excellent example of inert knowledge.

FOREIGN KNOWLEDGE

This kind of knowledge is vital to connect current situations or events with entirely different situations or something from the past. For example, if I had said above that my grade school in the 70s asked us to report on the growing number of internet students over a six-month period, who would believe me? Because, of course, the Internet was not around the 70s, and one would need to know this to know I was fibbing. Perkins (2009) calls this disconnect of understanding presentism.

SKILLED KNOWLEDGE

Skilled knowledge requires a habitual application. This type of knowledge relies on practice to stay cognitively intact. For example, many years ago, I learned how to use Photoshop because I was interested (intrinsically motivated) in graphic design. But because my job didn’t need it, the Internet was still a baby, and I had no areas in my life to apply or practice Photoshop, I’ve lost this skill over the years.

Therefore, a teacher can help students learn the “hard parts” by understanding their learning styles, either through observation or outright asking them their preferences. They can also purposefully challenge students throughout all lessons by asking, “Where can this apply to your life?”

It’s also essential to make a lesson worth learning. In other words, make it exciting for students. When I needed to do a book report 30 years ago, it required a visit to my local library. Today, there are so many online resources to correlate and connect to assignments more than ever before. For example, students can video-meet and use VR to visit students and places across the world.

COGNITION + METACOGNITION

Attention and memory also influence the hard parts of learning lessons by understanding how cognition and metacognition work.

According to a Difference Between article (Admin, 2021), cognition involves mental processes and abilities used daily to learn, solve problems, make decisions, and create new knowledge. On the other hand, metacognition requires higher thinking. It’s often referred to as “thinking about thinking.”

Metacognition involves the “self-” in a big way regarding awareness, reflection, questioning, monitoring, and evaluation.

Metacognition helps guide three mental processes:

• Person: Understanding how you work

• Task: Your knowledge of the task at hand

• Strategy: Your knowledge of knowing when to use techniques or methods

By encouraging students to understand constructs like these as applied to their own learning (and working) style, teachers will be helping learners to experiment and discover what works best for them. They will be creating a transformative experience via active experimentation of “doing” and reflective observation of “thinking” (Cherry, 2020), which leans into “playing the whole game.”

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PERSONAL REFLECTION

Over the past two weeks, my biggest takeaways have been on a personal level.

While I learned new aspects and strategies of Perkins’ Learning Theory, as demonstrated by my classwork and blog posts, the “sticky parts” of what I’ve learned are due to how I see this learning applied to my life.

First, learning that attention and memory can be improved through metacognition offered me validation that the strategies I have been using for myself are normal. I realize that I do not work well under pressure (time restraints, remembering detailed conversations, etc.). I used to deem the tools I have employed to keep myself successful (proactive planning, tedious project management, copious notetaking) as a weakness. Now, I recognize that my self-awareness has been an excellent example of my metacognition at use!

Second, people question my desire to self-actualize; I’ve been taking college courses for seven years straight and sporadically over many more years. It used to trouble me not to be able to identify a solid motivational carrot to share because there are several. I learned that it’s all right (and expected) to have both kinds of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) for the same activity. My brain needs definitive answers, and because I hadn’t been able to find one, this now feels reassuring.

Third, I learned that creativity and personal enjoyment are huge motivators and play terrific parts in someone’s ability to STAY in the game. In other words, even if someone is motivated and interested enough to learn something, it doesn’t indicate that they will want to stick with it. If it doesn’t remain exciting or challenging enough, a learner will likely lose interest. This resonates with me, as there are things that I have become good at but no longer interest me. I used to feel cognitive dissonance thinking what I’m good at must be what I should be doing, even though I did not enjoy the tasks. Understanding that the challenge has become too low and my ability too high gives me permission to step into new learning and let go of the ones that no longer serve me.

Lastly, I enjoyed understanding what conceptual learning means because the process of ‘Uncovering’ my pre-existing ideas (from old learnings) and ‘Transferring’ them (into new associated learning), I know, will be good for me in the future. In other words, understanding the concept of looking for previous correlations and patterns in anything new that I take on is, well, priceless to my success.

While my recent take-aways may appear ‘selfish’ as they seem to serve only me (vs. future students or employee L&D training), I’d argue that I needed to first learn these things for myself. After all, to teach a man to fish, you must first know how to do it yourself.

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References

Admin. (2021, January 14). Difference Between Cognition and Metacognition. https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-cognition-and-vs-metacognition

Boyce, P. (2019, August 18). Schools Are Outdated. It's Time For Reform. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/schools-are-outdated-its-time-for-reform

Cherry, K. (2020, May 15). The Experiential Learning Theory of David Kolb. https://www.verywellmind.com/experiential-learning-2795154

Cherry, K. (2022, May 23). Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: What’s the Difference? https://www.verywellmind.com/differences-between-extrinsic-and-intrinsic-motivation-2795384

Li, P. (2022, March 2). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation – Differences & Examples. Parenting For Brain. https://www.parentingforbrain.com/difference-between-intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation

Meulleur, C. (2021, May 3). [IN DEPTH ANALYSIS] The importance of emotions in learning. KnowledgeOne. https://knowledgeone.ca/in-depth-analysis-the-importance-of-emotions-in-learning

Perkins, D. (2009). Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. Jossey-Bass.

Proulx, N. (2018, May 11). Nine Teaching Ideas for Using Music to Inspire Student Writing. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/learning/lesson-plans/nine-teaching-ideas-for-using-music-to-inspire-student-writing.html

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