Whitmore Lake Public Schools
Administrative Guidelines
 

2210D - PREMISES ABOUT LEARNING

In designing or revising any of the District's learning programs, recommended teaching and learning strategies should be based on the following convictions about learning and the instructional process.

___ All learning is self-generated. It cannot be given or received.

___ The only evidence of learning is the learner's demonstrating his/her ability to do something (mentally or physically) that s/he could either not do or do as well before instruction.

___ Learning comes in three forms:

Knowledge (facts, concepts, cause-effect principles)

Skills (result-producing actions which are improvable through practice)

Attitudes (mind-sets-for-action directed toward a referent)

___ Each form of learning requires the learner to use a different sequence of thinking and physical actions (knowledge is not learned in the same way as skills, etc.)

___ Knowledge is usually a prerequisite for learning attitudes and skills, knowledge and skills are prerequisites to learning attitudes.

___ Students learn some things without being aware of what they are learning (mannerisms, some habits, etc.)

___ Students generate conscious learning by using specific thinking skills to gather and process information.

___ Information consists of facts and inferences used to generate knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

___ Someone else's knowledge is only information to the learner. Such information can be given and received in three forms:

real (information containing all of the characteristics or dimensions the learner needs to acquire, e.g. a live, on-site demonstration of a procedure);

representational (information containing some but not all of the characteristics the learner needs to acquire, e.g. a video taped demonstration of a procedure);

symbolic (information containing none of the characteristics of what the learner needs to acquire, e.g. a written description of a procedure).

___ Information is meaningless unless the learner can relate it to personal experience. For a learner to develop knowledge about something, s/he must have personal experience with what the knowledge deals with.

___ Learning is useful only when the learner can apply it properly in new situations to achieve needed results.

___ The quality of learning is only as good as the quality of the result it produces. The quality of the result is only as good as the mental and physical actions that produce it.

___ Instruction is the process for generating learning and its application through the learner's use of appropriate thinking skills and physical actions to gather, retrieve, and process relevant information.

___ The quality of instruction is only as good as:

  1.the quality of defined learning it allows students to produce;
  2.the quality of the confirmation of the learning.

___ Instruction can produce intended learnings (means) or learning outcomes (applied learnings or ends). For instruction and learning to be effective, "means" learnings should build cumulatively toward learning outcomes.

___ Learning outcomes of an educational program should be durable, significant, and transferable.

Reprinted by NEOLA, Inc. with permission of the Institute for Curriculum and Instruction, copyright, 1978.