Learning virtues: learning to learn philosophically

I trace my interest in secular virtues back to the influence of the 20th century novelist of the Australian outback, Xavier Herbert, who was adamant that three virtues - courage, kindness and awareness - are enough to live by. But it has been my work with philosophy in schools over the past six years that has led me to consider the role that virtues could play in transforming life in classrooms and schools.

The curriculum redesign outlined here is built on a set of seven selected learning virtues. The love of knowledge stands alone as the overarching virtue above the other six which are paired to emphasise how important it is to strike a balance between these complementary virtues.

• Love of knowledge
• Courage – Caution
• Generosity - Autonomy
• Investigation – Imagination

The learning virtues are translated into small and practical changes in each student’s approach to learning, and in classroom routines to assist all students expand their learning capacity. They provide a template for developing the intellectual character of learners to prepare them for living and working successfully in the knowledge era.

The implications for schooling of the transition to the knowledge era are emerging. In many economies, unskilled jobs are disappearing. The range of skills required in most employment is expanding and interpersonal and teamwork skills are increasing in importance. What used to be semi-skilled jobs are now highly skilled, particularly in relation to technology. The levels of knowledge, intellectual skills and learning required are increasing for most people in work now.

All students need to become effective learners to take their place in a very different world; the world where most work will be knowledge work.

Why learning virtues? What’s in it for teachers and students?

I have talked with teachers who have enthusiastically implemented numerous strategies to engage their students in learning but now ask: ‘What about the students’ responsibility for improving their own learning?’

The time is right to shift the focus to the learning end of the teaching-learning continuum.  

The learning virtues approach takes up Michael Fullan’s challenge: ‘What would happen if we treated the student as someone whose opinion mattered in the introduction and implementation of reform in schools?’ Teachers implementing the learning virtues project begin by asking students what they think it means to be a good learner. What the students think may be consistent with what is known from 20 years of research about learning-to-learn. Or it may not. There are still many students who think that good learning is having their heads filled up with information by their expert teacher/s. Whatever the response, the students’ views provide the starting line.

Teachers I have talked with about the changes they would like to see in their classrooms focus on the behaviours of their students, particularly regarding the quality of their learning and their social behaviour. Superficial slapdash work handed in, as if to only placate the teacher. Those low-level irritating disruptive behaviours, for example, being off-task, calling out, interfering with other kids’ stuff, or misuse of internet or mobile phones: ‘Settle down, miss. I’m just watching Osama’s latest video!’ Or lack of effort in learning, for example, making the same spelling mistakes, time after time, or presenting, as research items, cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia.

The learning virtues project is about creating a classroom climate conducive to thinking and learning how to learn well. We want the classroom to be a place where reasoning, respect for self and others, and the right of all to learn are valued. The learning virtues approach includes devising strategies that support students in taking responsibility for their own learning.

Learning virtues are not a quick fix or fad. In this project, learners and teachers construct their understanding of the virtues together over time and develop the classroom strategies to embed them in the culture of the classroom and the school.

The best way for a teacher to introduce the learning virtues is to work with others in a professional learning team with a project focus. In their PLT, teachers identify and share current practice which encourages the development of the learning virtues, select exemplars of the learning virtues in practice relevant to the students’ ages and interests, and evolve new strategies to strengthen the virtues, try them out, and report back on their usefulness at the next meeting. This process will follow action research methodology. Teachers will also devise student self and peer assessment instruments to encourage students to take responsibility for monitoring the growth of their learning capacity.

The learning virtues cannot be reduced to pre-packaged activities and worksheets. Instead, the design of this curriculum change is a flexible framework that incorporates what teachers already do to nurture the learning virtues and invites their own thought and creativity in working together to expand the life-long learning capacity of their students.

In the learning virtues approach, as much learning as possible takes place in a collaborative mode among the teacher and the members of his class using an inquiry model such as Socratic seminars or the Community of Inquiry. The teacher selects stimulus material that promotes philosophical question-framing by students that will guide the inquiry. The focus for the inquiry is introduced by the teacher in a dynamic manner to provoke curiosity, wonder or concern. He then coaches his students so that they make progress in dialogue by thinking together. They seek answers to the questions posed by using the thinking behaviours in which they have been systematically trained.

Teachers create a thinking classroom by respecting the ideas and opinions of students and leading them to use thinking behaviours, such as seeking greater understanding, depth and clarity, to think about concepts, for example, happiness, violence, fairness or freedom, that are common (already familiar to students), central (intrinsic to making meaning in the subject), contestable (multiple answers are possible), challenging (become meaningful through complex thought) and connected (relevant to everyone’s experience).

Mental models of teaching and learning- Are they fixed or can they be changed?

The learning virtues project is not about suggesting that there is one right way to learn or to teach. Commonsense and experience tell us that the ways we learn are various and constantly changing, depending on all sorts of things, such as what it is that we’re learning, our attitude to it, and whether or not we like the medium through which we are learning. Nevertheless, because the learning virtues provide a model of teaching and learning that may not be compatible with some teachers’ mental model/s of teaching and learning, we need to consider the extent to which mental models of teaching and learning can be changed.

Policy modeller, Jay W. Forrester argued that everyone has in their head mental images that they use to understand people and the world. He argued that all our decisions are taken on the basis of models. ‘The question is not to use or ignore models. The question is only a choice among alternative models.’ However, mental models are not permanently fixed on our minds. On the contrary, they are ‘fuzzy, incomplete and imprecisely stated . . . and change with time, even within the flow of a single conversation’.

If a model of teaching and learning is incompatible with a teacher’s current mental model, according to the research of Thomas Guskey, it is still possible for a teacher to implement it, if she is prepared to give it a go. Guskey’s research found that teachers only change their pedagogical mental models when they find a new approach improves an aspect of their students’ education - achievement, engagement or well-being. So if there is to be any significant change in practice ‘Try it before you believe it’ is an indispensable slogan. If you try it and it works with your students, then you will incorporate what you tried in your mental model of learning and teaching.

Where do the learning virtues fit in contemporary models of teaching and learning?

I found a table in Scaffolding Learning that sets out three models of teaching and learning: Curriculum-Centred, Student-Centred and Teaching/Learning Centred. Learning virtues fits closely the rubric for the Teaching/Learning-Centred model,except for the descriptor for ‘Who is responsible if a student does not progress?’ It reads:

The more capable others (i.e. teacher or parent): They have not observed the learner closely, problem-solved the learner’s difficulty, matched instruction to the learner, made ‘informed’ decisions, or helped the learner ‘get ready’.’

The learning virtues approach endorses teachers doing all of these things but it also recognises that learners need to also take responsibility for their own learning with support and coaching from their ‘more capable others’.

Where do the learning virtues come from?

Two areas of inquiry in philosophy, epistemology (the study of human knowledge and related epistemic goods) and moral psychology (the investigation of human functioning in moral contexts) guided the identification of the learning virtues. The focus is on the person of the learner and the question being answered is: ‘Which learning virtues, if nurtured at each stage of education from preparatory to postgraduate, would result in excellence in learning?’

Epistemologist, W. Jay Wood and moral psychologist, Robert C. Roberts collaborated to write ‘Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology’ (2007), which provides a conceptual framework that enables readers to come up with an answer that might suit their context. However, I prefer ‘learning’ rather than ‘intellectual’ virtues to suggest relevance to learning that is emotional, kinaesthetic, experiential, and artistic as well as intellectual.

Roberts’ and Wood’s intended audience includes educational leaders, teachers or curriculum builders who wish to know more about intellectual character, so as to ‘engineer’ the school, the classroom, his or her own pedagogical activities, or the curriculum for maximum educational benefit.

I have adapted and added to the framework created by Wood and Roberts for implementation in primary and secondary schools.

This project is not intended to be an add-on to our already crowded curriculum. Rather, it is a way of doing more with less by having the potential to align and simplify classroom, school and system needs, priorities and policies by focussing on enriching and extending the learner’s capacity to learn.

I accepted Roberts’ and Wood’s advice to start with what you know. There is one thing I know about lists of virtues. They need to be as short as possible if they are going to be useful. I learnt this from Xavier Herbert’s memorable list of three. In the learning virtues set, I retained five from the set of virtues constructed by Roberts and Wood and omitted three.

How do learning virtues use the ‘whole brain’?

Like numerous other educators, I was introduced to whole brain teaching and learning by Dr. Julia Atkin more than a decade ago. Since 2002, I have the opportunity to use the Neethling Brain Instrument to promote the whole brain approach in a number of schools so that teachers encourage  students to use those thinking processes they prefer less as well as those they enjoy using more.

I wanted to select a set of learning virtues that used thinking preferences from each of the four whole brain quadrants. From those I retained from Roberts’ and Wood’s set, the L1 quadrant was strongly represented in the love of knowledge virtue and the R2 quadrant was covered by the virtue of generosity. To represent the L2 quadrant, I added a virtue I decided to call investigation and for the R1, I chose imagination.

Introducing the learning virtues

For Roberts and Wood, the love of knowledge is the pre-eminent intellectual virtue. For that reason it stands alone at the top of the set of learning virtues. The others are paired, not as continua but as poles of learning. Courage is a virtue that needs to be qualified by caution. Generosity is about one’s relations with others, contributing our knowledge to their benefit. Autonomy is about taking responsibility for one’s own learning while remaining open to feedback from others. This pair of virtues underpins interpersonal learning and personal learning. Investigation is the thorough, step-by-step pursuit of facts. Its opposite pole is imagination where the thoughts are freed from such constraints. So these paired virtues are complementary opposites.

The learning virtues are an integrated set that enrich, balance, qualify and sustain each other. They provide a foundation for introspection and metacognition.

Love of knowledge

We use all our human faculties such as the senses, memory and reasoning to develop our beliefs about the universe we find ourselves in, but the will has a special place among the learning virtues. 

Learning virtues are habits of the heart in which motivation originates in emotional responses such as concern, curiosity, puzzlement, or wonder. The will is the learner’s compass. It needs to point him towards an appetite for knowledge before the virtues can be useful as regulators of learning.  

Philosophers identify attraction as the first function of the will, it motivates and impels us towards the second function of the will, the action (execution) resulting from choice and effort.

What can we do in practice to nurture the will of our learners? We need to help them to work in the resourceful state where the will to learn flourishes. This is most likely when high expectations and challenge are combined with low anxiety and stress. They need to know about and, if possible, experience flow in some of their learning.

Neuroscientists know precisely where the will is located in the human brain from studying brain damaged patients who have lost their will’s functions of attraction, choice, effort and execution. Teachers’ work is less precise. We need to be alert to the signs that a student’s will is being cultivated. We listen for curiosity in the questions she asks, emotion in the concerns she investigates, the thinking behaviours she uses in exploring contestable concepts, or the imagination, creativity and clarity in her explanations of what she has learned. This is learning in the being mode, not the having mode. Our students need to be taught that by aiming for the internal epistemic goods (learning, knowledge) the will as internal motivation is strengthened and so is the capacity to learn. 

Courage – Caution

Courage is only a learning virtue when it involves overcoming fear (of failure, not understanding, looking foolish) for the sake of the love of knowledge. If it is overcoming fear out of vanity or self-importance it is not a virtue. Caution is a related virtue that is about being realistic with one’s intellectual goals and avoiding risks such as tackling learning beyond the learner’s grasp or undertaking learning for the external goods (imagined wealth or celebrity) in the absence of the will to aim for the internal goods.

Courageous learners know what to do when they don’t know what to do (a definition of intelligence attributed to Jean Piaget.). They know that it might take effort, time, and mistake-making to overcome uncertainty when faced with real-life learning problems, difficult texts, dilemmas in understanding the past or the confusing results from a scientific experiment. This virtue will be best taught by teachers who provide scaffolding for their students’ learning and teaching pitched at their students’ zone of proximal development while modelling the teacher virtues of empathy, gentleness, attentiveness, patience, humility as well as love of knowledge and courage.

Generosity – Autonomy

Professor David Loader expressed the essence of this pair of virtues in an article Clear the chalk dust, learn afresh in The Age newspaper (6/08/07): Today’s young need a more open culture that nurtures active, independent and purposeful learners working both individually and collaboratively.

The purposeful collaborative learning is located in the virtue of generosity and the purposeful individual learning is to be found in the virtue of autonomy.

Mostly, learning for human beings is a social matter. The will to contribute our knowledge to benefit the learning of others is nurtured by parents and teachers from the first experiences of playing with other infants, then in cooperative classroom learning, Community of Inquiry or Socratic seminar dialogues, and working in teams.

Autonomy is achieved over time as well. A goal of all teachers is to provide the scaffolding so that students increasingly take responsibility for their own learning. However, it is important to remember that we are seeking a balance between generosity and autonomy. It may help to remind ourselves that very few human beings ever reach a point where they do not rely on the encouragement of others to sustain their learning efforts.

Investigation – Imagination

The love of knowledge is at its highest level when the learner’s curiosity is piqued (attraction of the will). If the learner’s will proceeds to execution, it will often involve either or both of the virtues I have labelled investigation and imagination.

Although investigation appeals to me for its forensic and other real life associations, this virtue could be labelled inquiry, exploration, curiosity, experimentation, diagnosis or analysis.

Likewise, imagination is the label I chose for a virtue that could as well refer to thinking that is holistic, big picture, artistic, fantasy, visualising, integrating ideas, playful or speculative.

The discipline of the investigation virtue balances the freedom of the imagination virtue.

Concluding Comment

The learning virtues shift the focus to the mind and the intellectual character of the learners, whatever their age. Another shift is to inquiry and deep learning and away from mere work completion. The learning virtues are a rich source of personal and interpersonal learning.

The range of human experience and endeavour is available for us to mine for appropriately age-related examples of the virtues. We will explore the learning virtues in the worlds of science, history, philosophy, mathematics, literature, geography, myths and legends, sport, commerce, philosophy, and more. The learning virtues will be spoken of in everyday language across the school and its community. We will collect and share concrete examples of how students expand their capacity to learn by using the learning virtues. Leaders, teachers and students will use them as a focus for coaching. Teams of teachers will relate the virtues to curriculum across the learning areas. Student, peer and teacher assessment tools will track the progress made in cultivating the will and developing the learning virtues across the school.

Developing the learning virtues will equip students to become excellent knowledge workers and confident lifelong learners.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Ray Daniels a former school principal, is Coordinator of Professional Learning at Springvale Secondary College, in Victoria, Australia. Through his educational consultancy, he delivers workshops on the Learning Virtues, Philosophy in Schools, Learning Partners – peer, expert and leadership coaching and Whole Brain Teaching and Learning.

 

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